Introduction September 22, 2010

“I had some dreams, they were clouds in my coffee.” Carly Simon You’re so Vain

Suffering through a losing season of baseball is like a long car ride home from a nice vacation sitting cramped in the backseat. It seems longer than it really is because you are heading nowhere fun, and you know when you get there it will be close to midnight and that evil alarm clock is way too eager to proclaim its existence at 6:00 AM.

Baseball is like a lot of things. A lot of different metaphors can and have been used to describe it. Sitting in the back of my friend’s car riding back to his house too late at night and staring out the window I thought of that metaphor. I wasn’t particularly comfortable and all interesting conversation had died long ago. All that remained as we got close to his house was the quiet drone of his music and the silence of the night. That is how it feels to watch the end of a losing season. All the fun is gone. It has been a long time since anyone even bothered to mention the Washington Nationals as anything other than the team that the Braves and Phillies are playing in an effort to pad their stats and make it to the playoffs.

Being a baseball fan of a losing team is tough. It is very tough. It is downright trying at times. I set there every night hoping for a win and there is around a 40% chance that I will be rewarded with one. In a way it is a marriage. I love the Washington Nationals. It is probably not a phrase a lot of people say. I also love my wife. I am not sure in this metaphor of being a baseball fan as a marriage if my wife is the mistress or baseball is. My wife would demand that she comes first, but at times baseball demands to come first. In my dreams of one day seeing a World Series game in person I can imagine very little coming in front of it. Nothing short of my wife giving birth or being seriously injured will keep me from that game, but of course that doesn’t mean my attention will be diverted from it.

I imagine as the business man fucks his mistress on semen stained sheets on a dirty mattress in a cheap motel has his wife in the back of his mind. The mistress can be put away and forgotten about, but the man has to go home to the wife eventually. Maybe that is how it is. The baseball season never truly ends and my marriage never truly ends. It is always there and present in my life. When the off-season arrives I will be trying to find out who the Nationals are trying to sign and trade for, and I know every year I look forward to February 14^th because it is close to the time that pitchers and catcher report to Spring Training. My wife of course looks forward to that date for an entirely different reason.

The two are so intertwined in my life that my wife and baseball are both the mistress and the wife. The metaphor applies to both equally. There are times when my wife will stand next to my chair looking down at me longingly waiting for a goodnight kiss and all I can say is, “Hold on. Zimmerman is batting.” Then there are times when the baseball team is losing. Down 9-1 in the 8^th and I think it is suddenly a great time to give my wife all the attention she craves. She is very understanding and that is why this whole thing works. She understands I love baseball at times as much as I love her. She has things she feels this way about and at times she is out at the barn with her horses until 9:30 or 10:00 at night. I hardly notice because I have baseball to care for me, but that will end soon and Hot Stove news won’t come quick enough to hold my appetite at bay. Then it is my turn to be understanding.

If you are reading this it means I was successful at what I sat out to do. I want to write a book, not just about baseball, but about life, marriage, and the times that try us. I want to take you with me on my journey through a season of baseball. It will most likely be another long trying season, but there is that small chance that it will be something magical. That some miracle will take place and the Nationals will actually have a winning season. Again if you are reading this you know the answer to that question.

Or maybe not.

I am not going to wait to find a publisher and release this to the public. I am going to keep you updated along the journey. Each week of the 2011 season I will put up two chapters. Before the season begins I will put up seven chapters. One right after the world series, one after the winter meetings, one when pitchers and catchers report, and then one a week when Spring Training games are going on.

I will include many different things about baseball. I will talk about how much I like stats, and then how much I dislike them. I will talk about the beauty and the poetry I see in the game. I will talk about my travels and the cities I see. But most of all I will talk about how baseball has entwined itself into my life and how my wife and I deal with it. How she hides in the bedroom some nights while I watch the game, how she can talk with me for five or ten minutes while I listen to the game on the radio before she realizes that I haven’t heard a word she said, and of all the times we sit at the games together and enjoy each other’s company.

I invite you then to join me on this journey. To enjoy my pleasures and my pains as I watch and suffer along with the Washington Nationals, and as my wife suffers and endures a husband that at times loves baseball as much as he loves his wife.