Mid-Summer Doldrums

August is the hardest month for a baseball fan. Either your team is doing a stand-up job, and you're just bursting with excitement but dying of boredom waiting for the post-season. Or your team is in a heated battle for the penant race and suffering the fatigue of a long season in the heat of the August summer.

As for me? I'm consoling myself by being a drama queen.

The Dodgers suffered yet another loss Monday night, making them 3 games below .500 since the All-Star Break. When Casey Blake was 5 feet away from a homerun in the ninth inning which would have tied the game, in dramatic fashion I collapsed on my living room floor and mumbled to the carpet, "That's it. Let the Rockies have it. It's theirs to take."

Before going to bed I remember asking myself, why have I spent the last four months distressingly obsessed with a game that covers the entire emotional spectrum? Why have I allowed myself to become horribly enveloped with a team that was so exciting and wonderful to watch in April, May, and June, and is now breaking my heart in August?

With the buzz of football around the corner, it made me realize that it's almost September, which means post-season for the MLB is not too far away. And then comes the holidays, which means no baseball at all- only talks of trade rumors and contract deals. At that point, I thought, I'd rather go through the rigorous highs and lows of baseball, rather than to have no baseball at all. I'd rather watch a Giants game on television because I live in the San Francisco media market, rather than to watch no baseball at all. I'd rather fall in love and have my team break my heart time and time again, than to have never felt the harmonious dichotomy of quiet peace and unrelenting hunger while sitting in a baseball park.

August is the hardest month for a baseball fan. But come the end of October, the celebrating will begin for the team that took it to the end. And for the ones that didn't? Spring is only five months away.

It breaks your heart. It is designed to break your heart. The game begins in spring, when everything else begins again, and it blossoms in the summer, filling the afternoons and evenings, and then as soon as the chill rains come, it stops and leaves you to face the fall alone. ~A. Bartlett Giamatti, "The Green Fields of the Mind," Yale Alumni Magazine, November 1977