Baseball Happens

Baseball is the only sport I miss when it's gone. I'm excited when football returns in the fall, but I never pine for it between the Super Bowl and Week One. I'm happy when I'm reminded--usually on a monthly basis--that Premier League soccer is a thing, even if I'm destined to quit focusing at the end of the weekend. Only baseball carries any consistent twangs of nostalgia for me.

It features none of the apocalyptic melodrama that football embarrassingly thrusts at the viewer every week. It doesn't require the energy commitments that an American soccer fan has to make just to keep up. Baseball doesn't pressure the fan; the fan pressures herself. A fan doesn't have to apportion time and energy for baseball, though she's more than welcome to. And the fan don't have to dig through the weeds of history and statistics to understand the game, though that effort is often its own significant reward

Baseball happens. At a slow, comforting pace in the middle of summer, it is punctuated by fleeting moments of genuine excitement that refuse to be predicted or promised.

It's my opinion that Opening Day--less than a week away--is one of our greatest national holidays. Because I am a Cubs fan. And Opening Day is all I have.

This year can't be a lot worse than last: 61-101, the first 100-loss Cubs team since the mid-1960s. Hopeful Cubs fans (read: older generations that weren't raised on years of teasingly competitive teams) will point out that that debacle preceded the fabled 1969 team. With respect to the poetic, cyclical nature of the sport, once does not establish a pattern. And, anyway, things didn't exactly end well for that '69 squad*. But things are looking up. The Cubs have good, promising talent in Starlin Castro, Anthony Rizzo, and Jorge Soler. The only remaining bloated contract is Soriano's; he might be good for a veteran presence in the clubhouse, anyway. Overall, Epstein's doing a generally respectable job in the front office and the future is bright not bleak. But this is not the year. Maybe 2014.

So who do I like?

• NL East: Washington
• NL Central: Pittsburgh (sure, what the hell?)
• NL West: Los Angeles 
• NL Wild Cards: Atlanta, San Francisco 
• AL East: Toronto 
• AL Central: Detroit 
• AL West: Anaheim 
• AL Wild Cards: Tampa, Baltimore 
• World Series: Anaheim over Washington 

Sorry to disappoint, Nats fans. You know who to blame.

*The fact that many Cubs fans still hold an ultimately heartbreaking season forty years gone as a high bar is as much a cause of the problem as it is a symptom.