If you were listening closely Sunday, you may have heard the far-off crack of a baseball hitting a bat: the last hit of the Major League Baseball regular season. I’ve perceived almost every hit of 2010 like this, from some incalculable distance on the other side of the horizon.
It was somewhere between Kendry Morales fracturing his left leg during a walk-off grand slam celebration and Jim Joyce denying Armando Galarraga his perfect game that I found myself no longer interested in baseball this season.
It wasn’t always that way, though. Like any good American, I was eager for the season to start back in March.
The Brewers did what they could to improve a ghastly starting rotation in 2009, but the combination of Doug Davis, Jeff Suppan and Chris Narveson was as awe-inspiring as a dead goldfish floating in a toilet bowl.
LaTroy Hawkins and Trevor Hoffman, both of whom probably qualify for AARP benefits, also struggled to keep runners from crossing the plate in the season’s first months.
By May 19, a nine-game losing streak already put Milwaukee 10 games under .500. The Brewers hovered around that mark for the rest of the season and played like they had sat through a two-hour biology lecture before every game with the lifeless — and now jobless — Ken Macha running the projector.
And it wasn’t just the Brewers that turned me off of this baseball season.
The Cubs losing is usually as entertaining as the Brewers winning, but like anything else, that amusement loses its luster when it’s an every day occurrence. Not even Lou Pineilla, who managed Tampa Bay when it was still the most hellacious franchise in the majors, could love these losers.
But the source of my baseball ambivalence goes beyond the absence of the not-so-friendly banter between the Chicago and Milwaukee fan bases.
I’m not even excited for the postseason that Fox and TBS are about to shove down the collective throat of the American public for the next month. Aside from the annoyance of network executives picking the refrain of one song to play incessantly during games, the reason I won’t be watching is that none of the teams involved are endearing.
I’m tired of the Phillies always being the best team in the National League. I want Braves manager Bobby Cox to eject himself from the game and enjoy his well-deserved retirement already.
The only interesting things about the Reds and Giants are hair-related. I’ll tune in only if Tim Lincecum shaves his head bald and if Bronson Arroyo breaks out the cornrows like he did with the Red Sox in 2004.
The American League is even worse.
Like every other year, the Yankees are the odds-on favorites, both to win the World Series and to be the team booed most heartily at opposing stadiums.
Tampa Bay is the team I’d be most likely to latch on to under normal circumstances, but it’s hard for fans nationwide to get behind a small-budget, historically down-on-its-luck team like the Rays when people in Tampa can’t find their way to Tropicana Field.
Even bottom-feeding teams in bad economies like Detroit and Milwaukee had better attendance than the Rays, a team that almost won 100 games this year. Embarrassing.
The Minnesota Twins were appealing on the surface until I realized that the same people cheering for Jim Thome’s moon shots and Joe Mauer’s gappers are the same people cheering for Jared Allen’s stupid cattle-roping celebration.
That leaves the Texas Rangers as the least of the eight postseason evils. It’s hard not to pull for former cocaine addict Josh Hamilton. Cliff Lee is one of the best pitchers in the game when he’s not getting hit in the back of the head with a chunk of a broken bat. They finally broke the monopoly the Angels held on the division. Nolan Ryan is in charge. They even have a former Brewer farmhand in right fielder Nelson Cruz.
I suppose I could do worse than pull for the Rangers this postseason, but one thing’s for sure: This baseball season could’ve done me far better than it did.
