As I've posted a few times before, I'm a proud fair weather fan when it comes to sports. Athletic contests are supposed to be entertaining. Losing makes for bad entertainment. Why would I want to root for a team that loses a lot, especially a professional one. Would I buy a stock in a company that loses money every year? Would I watch the movie The Betsy - the worst movie ever made in my humble opinion - twenty times just because I think Robert Duvall and Laurence Olivier are wonderful actors? It makes no sense to me.
I follow a team fervently when it wins. But if that team starts losing year after year, I happily ignore it. Fickle passion has worked for me for decades now. However, baseball poses a special challenge.
I love baseball. It's really the only sport I care about. My team of choice is the Oakland Athletics. I adopted them when I moved to California, having been without a team for many years. The Milwaukee Braves left me and my hometown city with all the selfishness of a child-support-dodging dad - hyperbole I know, but I couldn't resist - when I was young and by the time the Brewers came into town, I was too into drugs to even notice. The Giants were in closer proximity to my new California home, but their ballpark at the time, Candlestick, was the worst place to watch baseball in the country by far. It was cold, foggy and damp most every night and sometimes during day games as well. The swirling wind was a constant and the fans were loutish drunks. Fights would break out next to me at games. Yuck. Oakland was far better.
The A's weren't very good when I arrived in California so like the proud fair weather fan I am, I barely paid them any mind and only went to a few games a year. But the late 1980s and early 1990s were dream years and my fanaticism for the A's blossomed. I even bought season tickets!
Lately though, the A's have been a depressing bunch. They got a new owner several years ago who sees the team strictly as an investment, starves the team's payroll, and lives off major league baseball revenue sharing. Every year is the same. By the end of June, the A's are so far behind that the season is effectively over. So it will be this year.
I still go to A's games now and then. However, even a die hard fan's ardor would be tested by what the current owner is doing to the team. Neglect is, after all, perfectly valid grounds for divorce, but that's not my style. Instead, I've decided a new approach is needed this year. I need to broaden my horizons. I'm doing what many neglected spouses do. I'm cheatin'. The Giants have a nice ballpark now and they are playing pretty good ball (and miraculously won the World Series last year). I haven't taken drugs in decades so I now know my hometown Brewers exist and they're playing well, too.
I'm not a glutton for punishment. I've decided to hedge my bets and root for three teams this year, the Giants, the Brewers, and the Athletics. I'm calling this three headed beast the "Gieretics" (pronounced ji-er-eh-tics). It's the best idea concerning baseball that I've come up with in years. After all, I have legitimate reasons to root for all of these teams. The Giants are my proximity team. The Brewers are my hometown team. The A's are my adopted team. Go Gieretics!
My new approach has already yielded great benefits. When I scan the box scores in the morning, the chances are that one of my teams has won. Winning is, as I've noted, entertaining. Being associated with one or more winners most every day has greatly improved my mood. I no longer shout out "my team stinks" to no one in particular most every morning as I read the sports section. Three heads are indeed better than one.
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