Picking My Four Years

Last week, I asked you a question that took me something like 900 words. Here, I’ll summarize in a sentence: As a baseball fan, would you prefer your team have a stretch of success without a championship, or a championship surrounded by a few years of disappointment? This is the post, with the poll at the end. As my stand-in teams, I used the recent Detroit Tigers and the recent Boston Red Sox. More than 3,500 of you responded. The results were interesting; no matter what, the results were always going to be interesting. Roughly 2,000 of you took the Red Sox. Roughly 1,500 of you took the Tigers. Things weren’t split right down the middle, but they were in the vicinity, with people showing a slight preference for the trophy.

I figured I’d write a short post outlining my thoughts. Because this is based on opinion and emotion, this is necessarily self-centered, and you can consider yourself invited to close this window if you don’t give a hoot what I think. I don’t know why you would. But I started it, so I might as well weigh in at some point. And a number of people asked where I stood in last Friday’s chat.

I’ve thought about it — I’ve thought about it for years — and I know where I am. Before I proceed, though, I want to embed two more polls. These are polls I wish I would’ve initially included. The polls are the same as before, but they’re selective: One is just for fans who’ve witnessed a championship. The other is for the others. I can’t make you vote honestly, but I don’t know what the point would be of trying to troll this. Vote if you’d like! My own thoughts are below.

I take the Red Sox. It’s entirely an individual decision, so there’s no such thing as a right or wrong answer. For me, I take the World Series win and the surrounding letdowns. The biggest part of this, probably, is I haven’t witnessed the Seattle Mariners win the World Series yet. I haven’t seen my favorite hockey team win the Stanley Cup. I did see the Seahawks win a Super Bowl, but I don’t care about football, so it doesn’t work. That didn’t fill the void. I’d like to have the void filled.

This is why I added two more polls — I assume different people will have different answers, based on their own experiences of team success. Those who haven’t seen a title are probably considerably more desperate for a first than others are for a second or a third. I don’t know that to be true, but it seems very likely. An interesting follow-up would examine the significance of additional titles, after the first one, and maybe they almost all feel the same. I guess we’ll see what the polls say.

I think this is kind of about conditioning. Rationally, I know I should be pleased if my favorite team is really good, even if it ultimately falls short in the postseason tournament. The most a general manager can hope for is that his roster is successful — there’s not really any planning for the playoffs. You can’t rig them. Rationally, success should be its own reward, but when it comes to sports, emotion takes over. I’m emotionally programmed to want that championship far more than anything else. The championship is the goal. Psychologically, that’s true. The only true victory, then, is the final one. To fail to win the championship is to, in some way, have a failure of a season.

Just because I’m not sure I want to feel that way doesn’t mean I don’t still feel that way. As a consequence, losing in the playoffs is extraordinarily painful, and it has a retroactive effect on the months before. It’s impossible for me to think of the 2000 and 2001 Mariners without thinking of the losses to the Yankees in the ALCS. All the positive memories come with an asterisk. The weekend I graduated college, I watched the Ottawa Senators win in overtime and advance to the Stanley Cup. It was the best sports had ever made me feel, until I went to the Stanley Cup in Anaheim and everything was much worse. I can still enjoy some highlights from the year, but there’s no escaping the knowledge of how that team eventually got steamrolled. The whole season is rendered bittersweet.

There are dual considerations: There’s the experience of following a team at the time, and then there’s looking back upon the seasons when they’re finished. Quite obviously, it’s more fun to follow a good team than a bad one. This is why so many people chose the Tigers. The Tigers allowed their fans to be mostly happy. The Red Sox have been a wreck for the majority of their games. Why not pick the most day-to-day happiness? To me, though, I think the value of a championship blows the other stuff away. On the enjoyment scale, following a good team might rate as a seven. Following a bad team might rate as a four. (Even bad teams have interesting stuff to talk about.) Winning a championship might rate as a 20. These numbers are totally made up, but I figure there’s a bigger difference between a championship and an ordinary good year than there is between an ordinary good year and an ordinary bad one.

In the bad years, you’re still following your favorite team. Maybe less than you’d like, but you still follow. You still get to watch the sport. You can focus on player development and prospects and talent acquisition. When seasons are over, you get to have a regular offseason. More talk about talent acquisition, and so on. It’s really not that bad because there are always some positives somewhere. If you have interested friends, a bad year can be something to bond over. Given success or failure, sports can still revolve around community. A bad team doesn’t have to be a waste of your time.

Following a good team keeps you more hooked. There’s leverage, and stakes, and that sort of pure emotion that in the moment feels absolutely important. Sports-emotion is real, if silly, and a good year comes with more good moments than a bad year. This is all obvious, but then a good year without a championship ends in crushing disappointment. It ends with steps not taken. That good year doesn’t live forever in the memory. At least, not unblemished. It will fade away.

A championship, I’m given to believe, sticks. Every little part of it. Every anecdote, every transaction, every glorious highlight, every deceptive lowlight. Every year, fans somewhere get to believe theirs was a team of destiny, engineered to win from the beginning, and there’s no disproving it. Losing in the playoffs pulls everything down. Winning in the playoffs pulls everything up. Even lowlights become highlights. It’s adversity, overcome. I know this is all me speaking of other peoples’ experiences, but if you want to state it simply, it really is summed up in the expression that flags fly forever. In a championship season, everything necessarily breaks right. That’s something I want to experience, more than I’d want to experience four solid years of unfinished business.

Your mileage varies. It has to do with your level of tolerance for watching a bad team. It has to do with how much you value a playoff run. It has to do with how much you let a conclusion color everything that came before it. And it has to do with how often you reflect. It seems to me, most seasons die when they’re over. A championship year is eternal. I want to have that in my experience vault. I want to have seen something I know was special, as opposed to something I had to convince myself was all right.

I’d want the championship, like a lot of you. A different lot of you went the other way, and nobody’s wrong. It’s never a bad idea to consider what we’re even in this for. I’m clearly not in it just for wins, because I can find satisfaction in failure. But it’s precisely that ability that makes me willing to tolerate more of it, provided it comes with one sweet, final triumph. Me? I just want to know.