Summer Burnout

It’s the dog days of summer and my baseball team is out of contention. Sure, we’re still attending games, but my heart’s just not in it. When certain pitchers are scheduled to start, I find myself not even wanting to turn the game on. I go through the motions and I turn the channel on every night, but my heart’s just not in it.

By this point of the year, we’ve attended the majority of the games in our 20-pack, plus some others, as well as minor league games, and I’m just spent. The baseball season seems to take forever when you’re not gearing up for the end of the season, but winding down.

It’s too early to talk about the postseason stuff that might get me interested again. Roster moves and which free agents will get signed, who will end up in arbitration and what the team will look like next season are all questions that won’t be answered for another few months.

Basically, I’m burned out from 140 games in which my team failed to live up to expectations and I’m stuck somewhere between wanting to cry because my team got swept by the Reds and not being able to muster enough fandom to care.

But it’s not just baseball’s fault…

At the same time all that baseball fatigue is happening, we’re smack dab in the middle of the big tease the NFL likes to call pre-season. We build up to week 3 of the preseason where the starters play a full half, but next week it will go back to one or two series. And our fantasy leagues are doing their drafts because no one will be around on the holiday weekend.

So it’s nothing but football build-up with no payoff. The first game isn’t until September, 10 – but even that’s a tease because it’s only two teams. The rest of us have two full weeks to wait before we get to see our team play any sort of meaningful football.

And college football’s not any better. Sure, they’re starting next weekend, but excuse me if I find it difficult to get pumped for the grudge match between Akron and Penn State or the key match up  between Florida Atlantic and Nebraska.

It feels like sports no-woman’s land.

It makes me wish it were an Olympic year or that those swimming World Championships were happening a few weeks later. I need some reason to care – to snap me out of my sports coma.

One of the problems is that despite all of that, I can’t seem to turn the TV off. So, instead, I would like  to be released from any and all contractual obligations I had to the Brewers at the beginning of the season.

I can’t for the life of me figure out why I stayed up until midnight to watch them lose to the Reds in 14 innings the other night. Or why I was up into the AM every night for a week over the recent West Coast swing. The season’s a wash and yet I’m still being pulled in by it’s tractor beams. Like a bad car wreck, I can’t turn away.

But I don’t think that’s fair. I devoted hours and months of my life to the Brewers season and for what? So that I’m so emotionally attached that I feel like I’m telling the broadcast “I can’t quit you”?

They least they can do is give me my walking papers so that I can move onto football season without guilt.

There are bigger and better things on the horizon. I should be eagerly watching preseason football to make notes for my fantasy drafts. I should be excited about the Packers’ performance, while quietly reminding myself that the Lions were undefeated in preseason last year, and look where that got them.

I blame you, baseball, for my sports burnout. You, with your pretty stadiums and your nice summer weather and your games on every night when there’s nothing else good on TV. You pull me in, no matter how hard I fight it.