The Boys of Bummer

It’s here. The season of the score crawl, the focused read, the set position, the early exit.

Most people call it the baseball season. I call it personal hell.

To people who know the sport, all I need say is, “I’m a longtime Pittsburgh Pirates fan.” To those who track the standings each year, that simple statement is shorthand for self-inflicted despair. It’s another way of saying, “I hit myself in the head with a hammer from April through September.” Only, were I actually doing that, I’d presumably feel better once I laid the hammer down and the pounding headache subsided. For me, October is a culminating pain, as the playoffs begin and my guys go home, having been statistically pared from the postseason hunt in early September but realistically eliminated before spring training games ended.

It all started in 1970. I had not particularly followed baseball until the previous fall, when the “Miracle” New York Mets had shocked the American sports world by winning the 1969 World Series after having been so abysmal for most of their previous seven seasons in the National League that they had inspired a plaintive, now-legendary quote from their first manager, Casey Stengel: “Can’t anybody here play this game?” In the summer of 1969, when magic coincidentally was happening at Woodstock elsewhere in New York state, suddenly the Mets could indeed play the game, and play it well.

They surged to the National League East title in that very first season of division play, leaving the collapsing Chicago Cubs in their wake, swept the West Division-winning Atlanta Braves in the league playoffs, then, most improbably of all, bested the powerful Baltimore Orioles 4 games to 1 in the Fall Classic.

I was in the sixth grade in northern New Jersey that autumn, and I remember my elementary school as a sea of transistor radios. It seemed that every kid was following the Series, whose games were played during the day back then. All was blue and orange, the Mets’ colors. For that week, the rock stars weren’t the Stones and the Beatles, but guys with names like Tom Seaver, Jerry Grote, Tommie Agee, Cleon Jones. For that moment in time, there were no cliques in the classrooms. We all were in this together.

Except me, of course. Then as now, I hated nothing so much as The Thing That Was Wildly Popular, that Everybody Was Doing. In the space of those few days I went from giving not a hoot about baseball to following along with every pitch (within school-day logistics). Not so that I could meld into the cult-like frenzy, but in a desperate attempt to counteract that mania and send the Mets to defeat by the awesome power of my own bad vibes.

Not that I was overt about it. As a pudgy, somewhat dyspeptic 11-year-old kid who wore a hook, I wasn’t exactly Mr Popular as it was. I was disagreeable but not suicidal. I wasn’t about to shout the words I muttered to myself, such as “Seaver sucks!” and “What the hell kind of name is ‘Cleon,’ anyway?” No way. Although my fury rose as the Mets kept winning—my barbs having all the seeming impact of Nerf balls—I didn’t show it. When the Series was won and the schoolyard cheering reached a collective crescendo, I was merely lip-syncing.

Rather, I bided my time, determining that if I couldn’t join them, I’d beat them. When the 1970 baseball season began in the spring, I was there at the starting line as a full-fledged fan of a rival team in the Mets’ division: The Pittsburgh Pirates.

Why the Pirates? Well, I was peripherally aware that they didn’t stink (then). So it struck me that they might have a chance of overtaking the Mets. But as much as I’d like to say that I’d crunched numbers, or read up on the club’s history, or picked them in awed homage to such Pirates as future Hall of Famers Roberto Clemente and Willie Stargell, the plain fact of the matter was that I thought the name “Pirates” and the team’s snarling buccaneer logo were cool. If I’d found equally awesome the image of a young bear I might have pledged fealty to another contending team—those same Chicago Cubs whose epic nosedive months before had set in motion my baseball awakening.

So, Pittsburgh it was. And once I was in, I was in all the way. In fact, by mid-summer I was beginning to concern my mom with radical OCD manifestations of rabid and irrational fan-dom. She would come down to the rec room of our suburban split-level to find me pacing the floor in precise, repetitive and painstaking patterns during televised Mets-Pirates games, utterly convinced that my geometric devotion had a direct impact, for good or ill, on events on the ball field and the contest’s ultimate outcome. Where my worried mother saw a kid who was taking this whole baseball thing Far Too Seriously, I felt a kinship to Peanuts’ Linus, who knew the Great Pumpkin would shower him with blessings if only his pumpkin patch was deemed sincere enough. If my behaviors, I felt similarly, were physically unwavering, and my mental concentration laser-like, the Baseball Gods might smile upon me and lead the Pirates to victory.

And if they didn’t, it was probably because my well-meaning but clueless mom had broken my concentration by walking in on me and inquiring whether I was crazy, or what.

Anyway, as it turned out, the Pirates did beat the Mets for the National League Eastern Division title that 1970 season. But by that clinching day in late September, the Bucs were so much more to me than some swashbuckling vehicle for Mets heresy. They truly were My Team. Their wins and losses affected my daily moods. Sometimes even my appetite, though it would be another 15 years and the adoption of running as an exercise outlet before I’d finally, truly de-pudge.

When they were swept in the divisional playoffs that year by the Cincinnati Reds, I was devastated. And my dysfunction would only get worse before it would get (marginally) better. In the 1970s, the Pirates had good players and smart management, and the sport’s economics were not yet such that so-called “small-market” teams such as Pittsburgh found themselves at a competitive disadvantage. The team actually won the World Series in 1971 and 1979, and played decent baseball most of the seasons in between. But I was far too nervous to watch the decisive game sevens of the ’71 or ’79 series on TV. Rather, each time I checked in periodically by radio, celebrating only when I could see the champagne-soaked players doing likewise on TV.

As it happens, 1979 was the Pirates’ last true hurrah to date. They won a couple of division titles in the early ‘90s, but last won more games than they lost an astounding 19 years ago—an American pro sports record for consecutive losing seasons. Their unrelenting standard over those years of on-field mediocrity, front-office incompetence and hope-draining budgetary miserliness would set a Guinness Book standard were Cumulative Haplessness a quantifiable and measurable thing.

A lot has changed since that last Pirates World Series victory way back during the Carter administration. The Soviet Union has ceased to exist, the Cold War has ended, China has emerged as an economic juggernaut. Environmentally, the whole world’s warming. Personally, I’ve married and settled into a happy home life and stable career. But what hasn’t quite changed, for me, is the anxiety and painfulness of the baseball season. (Nor, I might add, my scornful rejection of most things that are wildly popular: Facebook, the New York Yankees, the Boston Red Sox, “apps”-laden telephonery, viral videos, Lady Gaga, American Idol, Glee, etc.)

Well, I can say the baseball season isn’t, in fact, quite “hell” for me anymore. It’s more like “extreme heck.” My existence is so charmed in many ways—home, job, family, friends—that not even my baseball sickness can completely drown me in misery. Still, there are the lingering manifestations with which I opened this post: the score crawl, the focused read, the set position, the early exit.

The score crawl is what I do on Yahoo! Baseball when a Pirates game is in progress. I slowly and with great trepidation scroll down to the score, until I can first see how many runs the opposing team has (if it’s a Pirates home game) or the Bucs have (if it’s a road game). I’ll then try to guess what the other run total is (before scrolling down to it), what inning the game likely is in, and what all this portends for the contest’s ultimate outcome. Finally, I hold my breath, resume scrolling, and get the whole story. At that point I’ll see a replica of a baseball diamond that will tell me which team is batting, which bases are currently occupied and how many outs there are. I may be thrilled, appalled, cautiously optimistic or mostly pessimistic about this news. I may check back several times a game. What I see will, to some extent, color my mood that evening or afternoon.

The focused read and the set position bespeak my “maturity” in the years since I paced the floor in precise patterns like a crazy person in some mystical attempt to give my team the edge. Now I superstitiously do things like pick a random newspaper story or Internet item and read it in full, or sit with my legs and arms in a predetermined position or stance, before checking the game score.

Finally, there’s the early exit. This lingering symptom of my baseball pathology bothers me the most. It’s when I’m at a Washington Nationals game in DC (I’m a partial season ticket holder), ostensibly to enjoy live baseball, yet I can’t stop myself from obsessing about the Pirates’ score on the stadium’s out-of-town scoreboard. I am emotionally and economically chagrined to admit that I’ve sometimes exited Nationals games before their completion because the Pirates were losing badly or had lost and I felt so disgusted with the entire game of baseball that I had to literally distance myself from the stupid sport. (This also can apply when I’m watching a Nationals or Orioles game on TV and feel compelled by Pirates results to change the channel to something less depressing—like, say, Hoarders, or a look at the Blitzkrieg on the History Channel. But at least then I’m not wasting part of my ticket price.)

I haven’t yet faced a potential early-exit situation this young season at Nationals Park. But I am not fooled by the Pirates record at this writing of 4 wins versus 3 losses. There is every reason to believe the club will again reach season’s end with far more losses than wins, and that I’ll many times be sitting in the stands at Nationals Park, stealing dejected glances at a hostile out-of-town scoreboard. But my goal this year will be to remain seated through the last pitch, cheering on the home team and exiting afterward along with all the other fans, happy either that the Nats won or, if they didn’t, that I’d just spent three hours out in the fresh air with 25,000 other people, watching an entertaining game, drinking beer and eating deliciously unhealthy food.

If I can do that, I figure, it might be a start, however incremental, on the road to perspective and better mental health. Just as Rome wasn’t built in a day, decades of Mad Fan Disease won’t be undone in a single season. If I can resist all urges this year to bolt Nationals Park when the Pirates’ game goes south, maybe next season I can let go of some of the OCD stuff. From there, perhaps at some point I lose the compulsion to do the score crawl. Maybe—who knows?—at some point in the indefinite future, the games, win or lose, will become just that to me—games. I have to start somewhere.

I don’t, however, see any reason ever to stop loathing the Mets. Or to watch Glee, for that matter.