Not a great month for the Royals, to say the least. At the moment they are actually a game behind the Blue Jays for home field advantage throughout the playoffs (they are tied, but lose the tie-breaker, so they need to beat the Jays by a game to gain the edge).
You would think that clinching the Central Division title on Thursday would be enough excitement for me, but you see my brain doesn’t look or act like others’. My wiring is such that when the Royals aren’t winning 10 in a row, then they’re losing…really! All it takes is a couple of straight losses and I’m usually convinced their demise is imminent. When they started the season 7-0 and then lost the next two I told a friend that had I purchased season tickets, I would have torn ’em up! I was absolutely positive they would go on to lose 100+ games, thus reverting back to the old totally inept team I’d come to hate.
What causes me to think this way? Surely it isn’t fun, isn’t the way I’d like to think. It’s all about the way I’m wired. I look at events differently, not always pessimistically, but often times having an outlook which goes against the grain.
The good news is that I’m learning to deal with my craziness. When the Royals lost last night and fell behind the Jays, instead of declaring I would never watch one inning of the playoffs since they were going to lose anyway, I told myself that home field advantage in baseball doesn’t mean as much as it does in other sports like basketball and football. I spent the better part of the day looking up the stats and found, hey! I was right! Half the teams winning the World Series in the past 10 years did not have home field advantage! Wow! Maybe my Royals were actually better off NOT having more games than not at the “K”.
They won today…so did Toronto, but I’m okay with it. The Royals will lose the rest of their games this year (there I go again), but it won’t matter. They’ll have home field advantage during the American League Division Series and since my brain tells me they won’t win that series, home field advantage for the American League Championship Series wouldn’t mean anything anyway.
There, I feel much better. I still won’t go buy season tickets for next year (they’ll just lose anyway, won’t they?), but I’m not depressed over it. In fact, I’m kind of glad they’ll lose in a couple of weeks. Then I can concentrate on the Chiefs. Aargh! 🙂