The Opening Day Neurotic
Photo by Onetwo1 released under GFDL
For neurotic people like me, baseball is the perfect pastime. If you’re the obsessive type, you can easily lose yourself in the minute details of statistics young and old. If you’re the creative type, you can find contentment in the game’s relaxing pace and predictable ebb and flow. For most people, the start of baseball is also a signal to break loose from the shackles of winter. No matter where you are on Opening Day, and no matter what the weather is like there, the knowledge that your team is enjoying warm, sunny weather somewhere is enough to make you cast off your peacoat and scarf for a simple polo. Or, in the more extreme climes, trade your warmer knit stocking cap for a less insulated fitted baseball hat.
Of course, for people like me this change of mindset is also a celebration of the retreat of winter seasonal depression. For an entire week as the Opening Glow fades, my worn psyche cannot be touched by the everyday stresses of girls, classes, school, classes, and girls, in that order. Instead, Opening Week is a period of transition as the determinant of my happiness swings wildly from those aforementioned external and trite concerns to the very real and meaningful result at the bottom of yesterday’s box score. Fortunately, given the nature of my team, this does not usually result in what I can only imagine would be a terrifying shift from fairly uniform depression to utter, unbearable happiness.
You see, my team is the Colorado Rockies, the franchise whose greatest achievement was losing the 2007 World Series to the Red Sox while I was in Boston. When your team is as historically bad as the Rockies, it’s easy to be a pessimist, to lazily speak of the harsh realities of mid market payrolls and just let yourself enjoy the game. For me, that would be far too easy. No, I completely reverse my opinion of the universe in general and become an eternal optimist when it comes to the Rockies. To justify that ridiculous stance, I believe, faithfully in the religious sense, that Rockies games are not, as they at first appear to be, completely unrelated to my life.
Indeed, over the course of the season the neurotic Rockies fan will realize that the result of any given game depends almost entirely on what he was doing when the game was played. College students like me no longer watch games on televisions, but the internet has provided ample room for superstition. In fact, due to known memory leaks in almost all of the major web browsers, the outcome of each at-bat is wholly dependent on variables such as which websites are open behind the MLB.TV popup window, in which order their tabs are arranged, and, the ratio of baseball to non-baseball related tweets currently on your Twitter timeline.
Fortunately, I am not alone in my optimism or superstition. Though I wouldn’t dare lend my voice to those suffering masses out of modesty and general contempt of all mankind, there are those among us who truly believe that they are just a key press or two away from solving the tantalizing puzzle that is the correct number of characters in an off day comment to tease two hits out of Clint Barmes the next day. Along these same lines, much development was made towards the end of last season in determining the proper combination of open email messages, youtube videos and spanish translation sites to entice a 6+ inning, less than 4 runs given up start from Jorge De La Rosa. I’m looking forward to seeing more progress in JDLR combinatorials this year.
But none of these pursuits can compare to the joy that is a gathering of Rockies optimists sitting high in the bleachers above Coors Field reliving the golden days when expectations were so low that relative success and therefore happiness was slightly easier to measure. What starts with an innocent text message of “Rockies = 09 WS Champs” often culminates in nostalgic reminiscing about “that time when a guy yelled ‘come on Dustin Mohr, you’re on my fantasy team!’ from the far reaches of the third level.”
For three hours during such convocations, you can almost forget that your seating position, frequency of trips to the bathroom and concessions, and number of times yelling a now irrelevant “Chhhhhoooooooo” are all having dramatic affects on the play on the field. If the Rockies win, praise be to the glorious baseball Gods! If they lose, you are directly responsible.
Given that in matters of girls, classes, grades, school and especially girls, I have almost no control over my life, Opening Day thus takes on great significance. In fact, I pity fans of teams who have found more than accidental success. For them, though disappointment is surely just as bitter, the talent of their team overwhelms the universe’s weaker causal forces, and they must be falsely convinced that they have a modicum of control over their lives. This is why douchebag Mets fans always have a catty, but attractive girlfriend accompanying them to Coors Field.
For me, however, Opening Day is much more than just the greatest of all American holidays. It is an idea; a wonderful, sunny reminder that in a life full of seemingly endless and causeless troubles during the dark winter months, there is, in summers filled with Rockies baseball, at least some amount of cause and effect holding this chaotic excuse for a Universe together.
One Response
I got shivers when I got to “Chhhhhoooooooo.”
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