“Baseball Armageddon”

Readers, you may have noticed that there has been a marked drop-off in the number of baseball related posts here at MM (like, from several a week to…uh, zero). That may or may not be directly proportional to the suckiness rate of my beloved Cincinnati Reds this season. Well, I’m no sore loser or anything: you have to remember how long its been since the Reds were anything but a second-rate embarrassment—in fact, you’d have to go way back to 1995, when the Reds won the Central Division pennant (I was there, by the way, readers), and it was five years before that in 1990 the last time the Reds won the World Series, and way back in 1975 when the above picture was taken of the last Cincinnati club worthy of a nickname: The Big Red Machine. So you could say I’m used to Loser-ville by now.

I mention this because the other day I read a particularly whiny article in the New York Times by A. G. Sulzberger entitled Met’s Fans Have Choice of Two Evils in World Series. Its all about how hard it is this year to be a Mets fan; how to choose the team to root for when you actively hate both, which team to hate less, how long its been since you got to celebrate a pennant win, blah blah blah boo-hoo-hoo. So the Mets haven’t been any good for a few seasons, and it’s been since 1986 since they won the Series—so what? The Reds haven’t been good since that year in 1995…like at all. At least Mets fans had hope recently, like when in 2006 they came thisclose to winning their division—the Reds usually keep a close eye on third place until around the All Star break, then it’s head first into the crapper for the rest of the season. And what about Pittsburgh fans? The Pirates are usually solid cellar dwellers by the 3rd week of the season—they haven’t won a World Series since 1979. Washington D.C. just got their team a few seasons ago and it’s been nothing but a shameful bloodbath for the Nationals thus far. The Royals, the Padres, the Mariners, the Orioles—all bottom-feeding fodder for teams like the Yankees, the Red Sox and the Dodgers to humiliate with their top-dollar talent season after season.

Popular Mets blogger John Coppinger (Musings and Prophecies of Metstradamus) is calling for Mets fans to boycott this year’s Series, calling it, dramatically, “baseball Armageddon.” Sheesh, simmer down, crybaby—the rest of us middle American die-hards have been dealing with our own squads of AAA losers for decades, so join the club. But of course it’s not just Mets fans who get a bruised ego and have self-righteous hissy fits after a disappointing season—Cubs fans are downright scary when the subject of entitlement comes up. And don’t they still burn Kenesaw Mountain Landis effigies on Chicago’s Southside every October? Nobody holds a grudge like a real baseball fan.

So, not to sound bitter or anything, but I really can’t spare the pity for the fella from Queens who ends Sulzberger’s article by emoting: “I’m having a real tough time right now. They tell me the longer I wait, the sweeter it’s going to be. But I was 3 years old in 1986, so I don’t really remember. I want to know what it feels like to win.” Well, I’m sure there are thousands of other fans of other teams who feel the same way every year the Yankees’ newest permutation of ever-larger-muscled baseball millionaires buy their way to the top. There’s a lot of disenfranchised fans out there who want to know what it feels like, just once, to be able to look down their noses at them and say “better luck next year, ya bums!” In fact, that popular sentiment demonstrates a real need that isn’t currently being met in the consumer market that tends towards the ESPN demographic: sports therapy. Maybe I’ll open my couch for business…

(Go Phillies!)