April Is The Cruelest Month, Baseball Edition

This baseball season is not progressing as I thought. While my White Sox are playing above expectations, the New York Mets seem to have been cursed by the baseball gods. Seth Lugo and Stephen Matz were quickly out of the rotation due to injury, and today it appears that the might Thor, Noah Syndergaard may soon be out too. In our arrogance so many Met fans scoffed at the earlier injuries, bragging about the depth of Mets pitching talent. Now that overconfidence has been broken on the wheel of the ever-capricious wheel of the pitching arm.

On top of that, the mighty Yoenis Cespedes is also injured, along with fellow slugger Lucas Duda. The team that I thought was poised to compete for a title just dropped six straight games at home in embarrassing fashion. Any hopes for contention seem to be dashed, but there's still five months of games to come that I will have to suffer through.

Oh, I have rooted for many a losing team before, to be sure. After all, I am a Mets and White Sox fan. However, when teams I root for have been crappy in the past, I pretty much expected it. Much worse is the cruelty of having your hopes up, only to have them dashed. That happened last year when the Mets lost their one game playoff, but at least I could be happy that my team battled injury to sneak into the playoffs. This year every game I watch will likely be tainted by the excruciating thought of what could have been. The White Sox have actually done this to me before many times in the past, like the time they signed Adam Dunn and he promptly had one of the worst seasons by a player ever.

It would also be easier to take if I already hadn't experienced a similar cruel crushing of hopes in the election last November. So in that sense the dull pain I feel on a daily basis in regards to the state of the country should prepare me for a similar pain when it comes to baseball.

For in baseball everything, including the pain, is daily. Your football team may suck, but its suckiness will only torture you one day out of the week. When it comes to baseball, the reminders are constant. On top of that, your team will win some games here and there, meaning that your expectations never truly fall to where they should be. Also, if you root for an epically bad football team, you can take a sheepish delight in the occasional win. In baseball even the worst team will win sixty games, so winning one does not bring the same feeling of release. It only serves to fool you that tomorrow will be a brighter day. In that sense baseball's illusions mirror life's.