Are you like me? I think you might be.
During the winter months you count the days until pitchers and catchers report in February, as true a sign of spring as robins arriving from the south or tulips pushing through recently thawed earth. You monitor exhibition box scores, searching for order in the chaos of non-roster invitees and recently drafted farmhands. You worry about veterans recovering from off-season surgery, you buzz over highly touted rookies, you rue the inevitable front office mistakes.
And soon enough it is April and hope springs eternal. Thirty teams sit tied for first place, gathered like horses at the post, favorites rubbing shoulders with long shots. As April's flashes flicker and die in the growing heat of late spring and summer, you either marvel at your team's success or curse its early demise, all while keeping one eye focused firmly on next year.
Put simply, you are fan. And if you really are like me, that means the past six months have brought you here. A 162-game schedule filled with 6-4-3 double plays, day-night double headers, walk-off home runs, and trips to the disabled list. You don't check the standings from time to time, you check the score from inning to inning. You don't hope things will get better, you experiment with lineups that will make a difference. You don't think the games are too long or too many, but just right, and you're insulted by the idea that some think this isn't the national pastime. And through it all, even as you obsess over esoterica like pitch counts and on base percentage, you never lose sight of the ultimate destination as each turn of the calendar brings you closer either to the reward of October or the renewal of spring, the only two signposts that matter.
Muslims have their Ramadan, Catholics have Lent, and Jews repair their souls during Yom Kippur's days of atonement, but if baseball is your religion, these next four weeks are your Days of Reckoning -- twenty-seven days that will reduce the previous months to nothing more than a prelude to what comes next.
And so if you are really like me, that means that your life is about to change in ways that are difficult to justify to those who think October is just the space between September and November.
A few examples. When you stepped into your classroom on the first day of school and noted that Back to School Night was inexplicably scheduled for the first Tuesday of October, you cringed, knowing that you'd have to miss game one. Two months ago when your wife mentioned that an old neighbor -- a neighbor that you don't particularly miss -- would be visiting and wanted to go out to dinner on October 5th of all days, your very first thought was that it would conflict with game three. As you scan your family's schedule, you can't help but notice a soccer practice and a birthday party that pose additional threats, and you say a silent prayer of thanks to the God of TiVo.
And these are just the things you know about, the things you can prepare for. In the back of your mind, somewhere near the space that worries about Alex Rodríguez's mental well being and Johnny Damon's slump, you know that you will be tested in the coming days. You know there will be a day when your attention will be so focused on the evening's game that your job performance will suffer. You'll be driving home thinking about nothing except that night's starting pitcher and the lineup he'll face and you can't wait to drop four hours of your life into the offering plate.
And then it will happen. Worlds will collide as one of the "normal people" will dash your plans. Your wife will ask if you want to go to Costco, friends will ask if you want to take the kids to play at the park, or maybe your in-laws will invite you to dinner, and faster than you can say Melky Cabrera, all bets are off. It's not that they don't know about the playoffs -- because you've told them, told every one of them -- but since they don't live in a world in which Ruth, Mantle, and DiMaggio are the father, the son, and the holy spirit, they've forgotten.
For a moment you are torn between a loyalty forged by the past six months -- heck, by the past thirty years -- and an envy of people who can actually walk around without knowing that the first pitch will be at 5:18 PM. For a moment you wonder what it would be like to have that kind of freedom, to be able to think about monkey bars instead of starting rotations, for example, and somewhere a small thought begins to question the whole thing. Why can't you be like them, it asks. Why can't you just read about this game in tomorrow's paper?
This momentary doubt is fleeting. Like Gary Sheffield turning on an inside fastball, you crush this thought without mercy, sending it deep into the October sky. This is October, you tell yourself, and this is still America. There is no way you will miss these games. No way at all.
And so you pick up the remote, set the TiVo, and go to the park. Twenty-seven days to go.
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