Phucking Phillies
If there's a "guy" gene that drives men to memorize stats, root for the local team and talk trash about the skills of overpaid players, I didn't inherit it. I find the social and economic influence of professional sports to be disappointing at best, and offensive at worst. With the exception of the occasional football game, I avoid televised sports like the mutant, radioactive, heart-exploding plague.
It's not like I can escape at least a background knowledge of sports. I listen to news radio and NPR, and they waste precious seconds every hour talking about the outcome of games, the results of trades and the gossip about what drug which player is injecting into his shriveled testicles. Hell, if they took out all of the sports coverage and lumped that time together, I bet they'd have room for another valuable perspective on how Mel Gibson's batshit insanity is confounding Hollywood.
However, I'm still culturally aware enough that I can be affected by the undercurrent of excitement when the Philly home teams are doing well. When the Eagles made the Superbowl two years ago, I was hopeful; I didn't exactly climb onto the bandwagon waving a flag and drooling, but I stopped in the electronics section of Target to watch the last few minutes of the NFC championship on the gigantic TVs. It was heartening to see the city pull together, even if it was obvious to the rest of the nation that their hopes were doomed from the start. And kudos to us for not burning anything down when the team lost.
Because this is the level of my involvement with sports, I loathe the end of the baseball season. From my (admittedly detached) perspective, it seems like regular season baseball always follows the same script. The Phillies will struggle most of the season. Sometime around early August, the stats-minders will notice that the Phils, who've been out of contention for a division title since May, are nonetheless only a few games behind in the Wild Card race. They'll slowly inch up in the standings, sometimes getting to within a half game of the leader, and then they'll suddenly collapse. By the last week in September, the starting lineup will be wandering through the final games of season, while their wives air out their Florida vacation homes in preparation for another relaxing October at the beach.
Even for a guy who equates televised baseball with growing mold on the "really boring stuff" scale, it's infuriating. I can feel the fans getting their collective hopes up, only to have them shattered like a trick picture window in a cheesy action movie. Seriously, if you're going to suck, just suck. Don't pretend that you might have some talent, and then revert back to your usual suckitude when it actually matters. I appreciate consistency, but consistent disappointment is just cruel.
Maybe the city should repossess your fancy new ballpark, and make you play in an overgrown field next to I-95. You can have some hilarious and heartwarming adventures trying to get your ball back from the big, nasty dog who live on the other side of the outfield fence, and learn a valuable lesson about how baseball is all about heart, passion and love of the game. Oh, and metric craploads of money, especially if you're the Yankees. You can get your stadium back for your next playoff game.