Baseball is back
I care way too much about baseball. That's the first thing you really need to know about me. I live and die with each game when my team is bad and I live and die with each game when my team is good. It's much easier early in the season, when there's still hope for nearly everyone and there's still a chance I won't have to watch the teams I hate compete for a World Series berth instead of the team I love. By the playoffs I'm usually rooting against the team I hate most instead of a team I'm a genuine fan of, but right now things are pretty good, because baseball is back.
Even though the world is burning down all around us, six days out of the week, if I chose, I can have a distraction for two and a half to three hours, because baseball is back. And my team, the Giants, is actually doing well enough in the early going here (in spite of all the extremely low expectations) that Monday night's game was the only one I was really disgusted by so far. That's an extremely wonderful sign, because I spent the back half of last season and all of the offseason trying to convince myself that I would not care about the Giants this year. That I would not live and die with games, and that I would not get tricked into false hope of any sort; not even if, say, the Giants had the best record in Spring Training and then put together a longer winning streak in their first 10 games than they did in all of 2024.
But now they've gone and done those things, and I, the world's premier idiot, am right back in there, spending my April full of false hope and unreal expectations, while waiting for the other shoe to drop. By June, they'll probably look like the team we expected (somewhere between a 78-win team and an 84-win team, most likely). But I don't have to worry about that until June, probably. For now, I can just be excited and grateful that baseball is back.
I love baseball more than I like most things in life, and I often wish I hadn't given up on baseball after my last season in Triple A Little League. I wish I'd accepted my placement on a Pony League team that next year and then maybe stuck it out through high school, instead of trying to fool myself into thinking I could play football for a few weeks before my sophomore year before realizing I hated it. Of course, I likely wouldn't have been any good at baseball in my teen years, as I wasn't really any good at it in Little League. But my gap of a few years of loving baseball a little less came at the most inopportune time, and when my love of baseball came back, it came back hard. It's my favorite thing about the time of year where I like the weather the least, and the All-Star Game is usually around my birthday, so that's cool.
Yes, I'm the fool who still loves the All-Star Game. And the Home Run Derby. Give me all the baseball. It's for me. I'll take it.
I'm loving the early starts from the Padres and the Phillies. I'm loving the Angels mirage, which is even less believable than the Giants'. I'm loving the Braves starting the season off on the most pathetic run known to man – and that's before their major offseason acquisition got popped for PEDs. I'm loving the Blue Jays putting their money where their money is and locking up Vladito for the next fourteen years. I'm loving it all. What's not to love? Baseball is back.
