November. Another season closes. Usually around the time I realize how much time I've wasted on ESPN and Baseball Reference.December. Hot Stove sizzles. Sox start addressing some needs. Spend money that doesn't belong to me, but still, I needlessly pretend that I have a say in how its spent. The Theo Epstein voodoo doll gets alot of pins in it during December.
January. Nothing happens in January. Except for snow. Sometimes snowballs look like baseballs. Thats the only connection I can make there.
February. Much like how I forget Valentine's Day, in February, I completely forget all the problems the Sox had the previous year. It is the month of unsolicited optimism.
March. My birthday (yup, the entire month), and with it comes a bunch of really boring exhibition Florida baseball. Also, Remy and DO in Floridian clothes.
April. Season starts. Clean slate. 162 games ahead of us to fill our spring and summer nights. The highlight of April is Marathon Monday when Sox baseball starts at around 11am. Bacon and baseball. That's f*cking heaven if you ask me.
May. Sox beat some teams in the division. Expand their division lead to 6 or 7 games. A lead we know that will fizzle down to 2 or 3 at some point soon. ho-hum.
June. Interleague. or as I like to call it "nap time."
July. Midseason. The All-Star game. I've always had a fascination with the All-Star game ever since I was a kid. Cable TV was at its infancy then, and nationally broadcasted games were few and far between, so I think I enjoyed it because I could see all my favorite baseball cards come to life all in the same game. Now the game is full of apathy, despite homefield advantage in the world series. Ok, that's enough nostalgia for one month.
August. Usually some kind of slump and a few big losses to the Yanks in August. While others begin to get more interested and cynical in August, I drift off here. I have the attention span of a retarded cat. 162 games is too much for me. I cross my fingers that the Sox make it to the playoffs, and I tell them I'll meet them there in October.
September. Pennant races tighten, gets really exciting and nerve-racking. But my attention span just can't handle it. Heidi and Kathryn and all the other pretty girls at NESN tell me what happened the morning after. Meanwhile during the downtime, I try to expand myself by taking up new hobbies.... like graphing my interest in the Red Sox.
October. There's a couple meaningless games to close out the season. And thats the signal to remind me that the playoffs start soon, and that I probably missed my wife's birthday on the 3rd. I usually buy her something extremely un-romantic to kick off the playoffs... like a 'Hooray! The Sox won the Wild Card!' sweatshirt. Then playoff baseball. I get really excited, like planning my entire week around where I'll watch the games, what kind of beer I'll drink, what things I'll throw across the room when the Sox screw up. Its a fun month of baseball, that usually results in the loss of alot of sleep and slow, groggy mornings. I stupidly put all my emotions into these games and my mood is solely dependent on how well the Sox did the night before.
And now I'm 12+ paragraphs into this thing and just realizing that I may have a problem...
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