Subtraction

You can call me a fair weather fan, but when the home team is behind, I don’t think I’m constitutionally suited to watching baseball. This is the situation I find myself in this evening, watching the Yankees struggle against the Red Sox in the seventh and deciding game of the American League Championship Series.

The winner moves on to the World Series, and the loser spends the winter in ignominy — this kind of drama is the definition of good ball, but I find it’s a sort of drama both too excruciating and too superfluous for me to watch. That is, I am endlessly fascinated by the game but I find these moments of extreme competitive consequence to be too much, too engrossing and too demanding of my emotional energy. What’s more, I find something subliminally complicit in watching, as if I’m somehow partaking in my team’s progressive defeat. This is all completely irrational, I know… but with everything else going on in my life, I’d just as soon not watch these pivotal matches and thereby save myself the exhaustion. Anyway, go Yankees!