Patience wears thin
Its a marathon, not a sprint.
That's what I keep telling myself, but losing these games in such devestating and embarassing fashion night after night makes me want to go ahead and run right off a cliff here at the proverbial 18-mile marker.
Maybe its just that this particular team is skilled at losing in spectacular fashion. They went through a stretch earlier this summer where they lost a lot of games where they would fall behind and subsequently be unable to put together any offense. The new script for late-summer sweeps features total disasters for the home town team on a nightly basis. As a particularly gut-wrenching counterpoint, the Yankees seem to have scored well over 750 runs over the course of their current 26-game win streak.
Unlike my father, I don't get angry during these streaks. Maybe its because I'm younger, or maybe its because my mother probably would have moved out of the house if both he and I reacted that way to summer Sox swoons. In an effort to complement his external outbursts, I cultivated a more introverted, throbbing frustration that sits on my shoulders like the burden that it is. These traditional August West Coast trips, which are almost always disasterous, tend to team with the paralyzing humidity to make me completely useless for the better part of at least a week. And that's where I am right now.
Perhaps we should take some solace in the fact that we did in fact take two of three in Seattle? Or that our next five series leading to a climactic end-of-summer showdown with the Pinstripes are with Baltimore - Tampa Bay - Los Angeles - Tampa Bay - Chicago? Or that, even if we choke on the rest of tonight's game and lose tomorrow by 15 runs, we'll still wake up on Thursday with the best record in major league baseball?
No, I don't have the optimism in me right now. This type of loss, in this type of weather, has taken the fight out of me. The Yankees will be within five when we wake up, and its completely possible they could overtake us by the time we visit the Bronx.
I hope they wake up before then. I'll be counting down the days until September.
1 comment:
Okay. I can't believe I'm going to be the voice of reason here, but can everyone please get a grip. Pitching is the key. We have the better pitching. We always knew that the $200 million "Best Team Money Can Buy" would eventually put up an obscene number of runs and bludgeon their way to a winning streak. You didn't actually think we would win by double digits did you? Face the facts. The two of the top four teams in baseball are in the AL East. And we happen to be playing one of the other two best teams in the Angels. The Yanks move back to playing major league teams this weekend and will probably lose a few games. We get our shot at the Tampa BAy's and White Sox's of the world and will put together a streak. Wily Mo is quickly playing himself our of here (I'm convinced that Tito continues to play him until Theo finally dumps him out of abject embarassment). The Yanks hitting will come and go. The Sox pitching will be consistently good (give or take a few clunkers from Wake). As I have said, keeping the race close is the best thing that can happen in the long run. Don't panic. We'll be fine.
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