What Stage Are You On?

My dad sent this to me over a year ago, and despite the year listed, it's still pretty damn pertinent. It's funny what a (bad) baseball team can do to you. You live and breathe stats, radio programs, and at bats for six months. You eagerly search for news in the off season, you follow spring training religiously. But over it all you hope that tomorrow will be better. That you can't possibly get lower than you already are, that it has to get better after all of this.

There's been so many bad years, I don't know what it's like to have a team that's good. I never followed the team through the better years. I was too young to care, and came two years shy of savoring the miracle run of 2003. I would love to proclaim loyalty to another team, just for a day, to see how it feels. But I don't have the heart for it.

I guess if I had to compare this to something in my own personal life it would be the win-loss record of my high school marching band while I was there. We were undefeated my freshman year, and then quickly went to sucking the next two years. Senior year was rough, and there were only about 18 of us that knew what it was like to be part of a winning team. But we managed to get everyone together, and we made finals at Bands Of America (a feat that we weren't supposed to accomplish). Maybe the Royals are just getting into the rough part of their ballclub history. Maybe next year we'll turn the corner (what a slogan that will be: Royals were Great in 2008!) or maybe we're going to manage .400 baseball this year. Maybe, just maybe, we'll pull it together.

Now that I've rambled on for long enough, what stage are you at? If you're not a big Royals fan, feel free to apply it to another team. I've flown through them pretty quickly. Anger came after our first few 'games we weren't supposed to lose' games. That was quickly followed by bargaining (I'll dye my hair blue if you just manage to get 3 games in a row, I swear!!!) and depression. I'm floating somewhere between depression and acceptance right now; part of me is so distraught from tonight's painful loss that I don't know whether I should laugh or cry. As someone on Royals Review stated, good teams don't give home runs away to Neifi Perez. It just doesn't happen. We didn't even show up offensively until the 8th. Does one, as a fan of a bad team, soak up the depression and hold back from admitting that this year is down the tubes? Or do you just let it go, try to have fun with the season but not get your hopes up?