My team, the Milwaukee Brewers, is projected to win between 65 and 75 games this year. This may sound impressive until you realize that there are 162 games in a baseball season. Other teams in their division, like the Chicago Cubs and the St. Louis Cardinals, may come close to winning 100 contests.
As the season goes on from early April to early October, fans keep track of how many games out of first place a team is. Brewers fans will be excused if they dispense with that ritual this year. The whole concept of first place will be as meaningless to us as a bicycle is to a fish (or as a man is to a woman if you know that quasi-feminist saying). Our team will be a ton of games back, and what’s it to you?
And as awful as this season is expected to be, it’s not likely to be much worse than your typical Brewers campaign. Our club has had losing seasons in 30 of its 47 years of existence. If you were born in the only year the Brewers went to the World Series (and lost), you are now old enough to have a mortgage, a college loan halfway toward being paid off and kids approaching middle school.
Still, I’ll watch most of the games on television and witness a bunch of them in person. I’ll read about them in the paper and follow the Twitter feed of the Milwaukee Journal Sentinel’s excellent baseball writer, Tom Haudricourt.
There are some interesting storylines to follow. In the first year of a massive rebuilding, the team has acquired some journeyman ballplayers in the twilight of their careers to catch and throw balls until the young prospects filter up to the big leagues in the course of the next three years or so. It’s sort of like watching Kevin Costner in Bull Durham. His character, Crash Davis, was the most interesting guy on the field even if he was playing out the string in the minor leagues after only a cup of coffee in the majors.
When you’re actually looking forward to a losing season and accepting your fate cheerfully, you’re more than just a fan or an optimist; you’re the kind of person who can appreciate life because, in my view, life is pretty much a .500 season if you’re lucky. It’s full of mediocre performances, mixed statistics, gray areas. You win some. You lose some. Sometimes it rains (but not in Milwaukee, where Miller Park has a roof).
If winning were the only thing, there’d be no reason to take any kind of interest in baseball in Wisconsin or bother with much else in life. I’ve never come close to shooting par on a golf course. Most hunting seasons I never shoot a deer. A couple of years ago I took up trout fishing and I have yet to see a trout. I’m trying to break the 10-minute mile. If you’re into cycling then you know the concept of being “dropped.” I experience this on a regular basis. Every year, cruelly, Isthmus editors enter some of my writing for an award from the Milwaukee Press Club. I never hear back. Even in elections I’m a middling four for six.
Like most of us, I suppose, in most things I strive to achieve mediocrity and usually fall short. But winning isn’t really the point. The goal is to enjoy the game and to try hard to figure it out. Life better be about the journey because arriving at the destination before time runs out is extremely unlikely.
Baseball, with its long season and teams that are out of the race well before Memorial Day, is about understanding why it makes sense to still show up at the ballpark in July. You just do.
The season has only begun. Wait ’til next year.
