Bleacher Nation Posts
http://www.fangraphs...ng-of-the-game/
Notable bits:
97% of all baseball teams will fail. Yet we stagger along; our unfulfilled desire for glory, reflected in the men who wear our colors, causes us pain. There’s always waiting for next year, but sometimes the hardest part is waiting out the rest of this year first...
From a baseball standpoint, the option is still there: you can just quit, give up baseball for a while and get back into painting miniatures or writing string quartet ensembles or leveling up your Blood Elf shaman or whatever it is you choose to do with your free time.
There are other alternatives, of course. You can throw your fandom behind the progression of The Kids, assuming your franchise has a youth movement to cherish... You can also spontaneously molt, shed your teal jersey and pronounce yourself a citizen of the world... Alternatively, there are those who can refine their love of baseball toward the atomic level, paring everything down to Giancarlo Stanton’s swing, Mike Trout’s everything, and Jose Valverde’s save face. All of these are perfectly acceptable, natural reactions. In fact, I envy the people who can do it so well.
But Schopenhauer wouldn’t be on board with any of these things. It’s death, pain, then death. That’s it; no seasons, no cycles, no restarts. An existence or a fandom that you can erase and recreate at will is no existence at all. Besides, he was never the kind of guy who would run away from suffering. He exalted it. So do I, in a way.
Sobering stuff. It definitely hits home for me.
