St. Monday and the Ignorants

The Cubs-Red Sox series is almost over and I wanted to post on it before it was a foregone conclusion. These are my favorite teams: two of mlb's oldest franchises, as well as two of the most dramatic (in terms of drama, which as we know consists of comedy and tragedy). I could not spend six years in Boston and not become a Red Sox fan; it seeps into your blood like whatever that stuff in the Charles is, and whether you like it or not everything tastes different afterward. I originally decided to like the Cubs before I knew I'd be in Chicago, but that was a more rational decision: I needed a sure-fire, reliable club to balance the mercurial nature of the Sox. Simply put, I could always count upon the Cubs to lose. We all know how well that decision panned out from 2003 to the present.

My wife seems to think that rooting for two teams is incoherent. (I should mention that she is a die-hard Cubs fan.) You must invest your baseball energies in one team, she preaches; anything else is hedging your bets. I don't have much of a response to this other than the pragmatic observation that the Cubs and Red Sox are in two different leages -- with the exception of this weekend's series, they haven't played each other since 1918. Rooting for the Cubs and Sox is like rooting for a hockey team and a football team: there's just no overlap. But that's all rationalizing anyhow. I like both teams because I like both teams, and I will follow them both until the next player's strike turns my stomach.

That said, I've been enjoying this series immensely. I can honestly say that I really don't care who wins (although I'd like to see the Sox win today to preserve some sort of balance). Both teams need the wins, as they are both clustered in the wild-card chase in either league, but for me it has just been fun to watch every single at-bat. I simultaneously cheer on both pitcher and batter. It's a wonderful kind of schizophrenia.

Yes, I enjoy baseball. I enjoy it because it demands energy and refuses to recognize the priority of the capitalist work schedule. Sure, any slob can be a weekend warrior and attend football games on his Sundays off, but it takes real, absurdist persistence to follow your baseball team throughout their night games on the West coast that don't end until one in the morning. While the culture industry has certainly been able to glean a little something off of brand marketing, the practice of baseball simply disallows conformity to a routine that would only allow amusement to become a kind of recharge for the next week's work. A baseball fan comes into work the next day and produces poor, inconsistent work, just as she should.

Go RCeudbSsox!