“[Baseball] breaks your heart. It is designed to break your heart. The game begins in the spring, when everything else begins again, and it blossoms in the summer, filling the afternoons and evenings, and then as soon as the chill rains come, it stops and leaves you to face the fall all alone. You count on it, rely on it to buffer the passage of time, to keep the memory of sunshine and high skies alive, and then just when the days are all twilight, when you need it most, it stops.”
― A. Bartlett Giamatti
Here at GCBB, I’ve decided to keep an offseason journal of sorts. The denial, withdrawal, bargaining, anger, more withdrawal, and whatever other steps are involved in transitioning from the end of the season into the offseason are familiar to most of us who are hardcore fans of the game we love. I’ll be posting these “journal entries” in addition to my other postings, throughout the course of the offseason. I expect they will be shorter and much more frequent than “regular” blog posts.
As a tribute to Tony LaRussa, who is up for HOF induction next July, these journal entries will be scheduled to post at 10 (CST) in the morning. Hope you enjoy them!
Day 7: Starting to realize the gravity of the situation.
It’s been a full week since I’ve seen a live baseball game on TV, though it feels like much, much longer than that. I don’t want to start watching the random regular season games I DVR’ed over the summer just yet–I need to ration those to get me through the rest of the winter.
Sunday night was especially tough, as 7:00pm rolled around, and it really started to sink in–this is going to take some getting used to.
Yesterday, I scoured twitter for news about qualifying offers, and it helped me feel a little better when I found some. Today, MLB’s Facebook page was posting about the upcoming awards for ROY, MOY, CY, and MVP. This will hopefully be something I can hold on to for a few days, looking forward to these awards being announced.
I’m sure I’ll survive the offseason. It happens every year, and we all find a way to get through it somehow. As a Cardinals fan, I suppose I should be glad that I’m only a week into the offseason, not 5 weeks into it, like some folks.
