John Miller, player/coach of the Brussels Kangaroos and a reporter for a major American newspaper, is back chronicling his team’s 2009 season in his weekly column that will appear every Monday on mister-baseball.com.
It’s October, time for sitting down with a cheeseburger and a beer and watching athletic freaks an ocean away play baseball on TV. It’s already getting dark around 7pm here, so you feel all snug and warm when you see the first pitch of the first playoff game under a bright afternoon sun on the East Coast.
The month always skips along that way, from series to series, until the end, a week of sleeplessness that culminates in the last out of the World Series and you walk outside and it’s November in northern Europe, and you know you’re facing a solid four months of rain and darkness.
Speaking of depression, I root for the Baltimore Orioles. Since said club has not made it to the post-season since 1997, every fall, I survey the other 29 Major League teams and adopt a surrogate favorite team.
Don’t get me wrong. I abhor bandwagon fans: the kids wearing Yankees hats in the Brussels subway, the girls in college who went to the games for the “social part”, the Boston residents who discovered they loved baseball in 2004. I give a pass to my Belgian friends who fell in love with the Braves in 1990s. They had to root for somebody, and anybody who had 17 theories about why Atlanta spent 15 years choking in October is legit.
The playoffs are an exception to the monogamy of the baseball season. Your faithful dumps you and you are single again. I confess to having fallen most in love with the 1993 Phillies (Dykstra!), the 2001 Mariners (Ichiro!), the 2002 Giants (Bonds!) and the 2003 Marlins (Kill the Yankees!).
The process of adopting a team doesn’t happen in a few innings. I watch a few games, read up on the players, check my sense of narrative and listen to some post-game interviews, looking for excellence in character and humor.
This year, the Twins have a head start. (I’m writing this on Sunday afternoon, so Minnesota might get knocked out tonight). I watched them beat the Royals on Saturday. Orlando Cabrera is a favorite. He is oddly from Colombia, and was, I think, the most underrated yet essential piece of the Red Sox’s World Series victory in 2004. Joe Mauer is a god to any lifelong catcher. The Twins also embody the virtues of their state: humility, competence, grit in the depths of winter. It’s also their last season in the Metrodome.
Who else will I pull for? In the following order: anybody playing the Yankees, Tigers, Cards, Rockies, Angels, Dodgers, Phillies, Sox and, if hell freezes over, the Yankees.
Send thoughts on the ethics of fandom to oldworldpastime@gmail.com
I know your pain I am a Mariners fan, so I to have to get a mistress come Oct.
And congrats on beating Gent. See ya in the spring.