Dare I care?
Not to gloat, but the Yankees are under .500 again. And my hero-turned-traitor Randy Johnson has taken much of the blame for the Evil Empire's terrible season. My curse is working.Okay, I'm gloating. But when Johnson left the Diamondbacks for the Yankees, it pretty much ended my love of baseball. No exaggeration there. It butchered my happiest baseball memory, that of the 2001 World Series, when Johnson and Curt Schilling won a joint MVP Award for their decimation of the Yankees' lineup. To me, Randy Johnson had always epitomized a quiet integrity, so different from the pompous prima donnas from the Bronx.
(Hmm, maybe that's why he doesn't pitch well in pinstripes: deep down he knows he doesn't belong there.)
I disowned the sport to the point where I didn't care that my childhood dream of a Washington baseball franchise had come true. In my mind, baseball was a fictional story that had a happy ending in the Red Sox 2004 World Series victory; anything else was a non-canonical sequel. Only the Orioles' unlikely success and the Yankees' continued mediocrity has coaxed me back, tentatively, to the sports page.
Maybe it's temporary. Maybe I'm a fool to love again. Maybe the Yankees' $200 million payroll will give Steinbrenner a return on his investment, and the myriad injuries the O's have taken to their lineup will finally hobble their march to the playoffs. Life will return to normal, and baseball will bring me pain once again, all the sharper for having once broken the addiction.
Or maybe the forces of good in this world are starting to wake up.
