Cheering for baseball

It’s been a long time, maybe 25 years, to be honest, since I cared this much about baseball, since I followed every single game of one team. Why else would I listen to an afternoon game on a transistor radio in my office on the Friday before Labor Day for a sub-.500 team 12½ games out of first place?

Why else would making a pilgrimage to a stadium make me as giddy as a 10-year-old (and as disappointed as a petulant child when an earlier trip was canceled)?

It’s baseball.

The Mets pennant may be over, but that hardly diminishes my enthusiasm for my adopted team. Perhaps it’s the relative newness of following a National League club. Perhaps it’s still the early stages of a love affair, where everything bad is viewed through rose-colored glasses and notice only the good. Either way, I’m going to be sad when the Mets season ends in a month.

(Originally published at The Icepick Cometh)

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