How to deal with losing

I wrote this the day the Texas Rangers were bounced from the 2012 playoffs.  I was quite drunk at the time and very, very pissed off.  Enjoy:

You have to be a bit philosophical about it.  Losing that is.

Before you dismiss it, think about baseball in a vacuum.  As a batter, you are considered to be good hitter if you fail 7 of 10 times.  A good pitcher if you allow 3 scores in 2/3 of the game, and you don’t finish what you started.  Everyone loses a lot in baseball, including the winner.  So every small victory is something to savor, because you don’t know when it might happen again.

So when my Texas Rangers lost the wild card playoff game tonight, I immediately thought of the Boston Red Sox of last year – and how I feel a kindred spirit with their fans after tonight.

Each baseball fan has something in common:  losing.  To combat the side effects of anger, depression, rage, sadness, loss of emotion control, we all cope with some form of trying to understand what happened to us.  And it will all happen to us at some point.  Tonight it happened to me.

To recap, the Texas Rangers held an insurmountable division lead with a little over a 1/6^th of the season left to play.  The Oakland A’s were full of rookies.  The A’s won, and did not stop winning – the epitome of lightning in a bottle.  The Rangers dragged with an infinitely more developed roster.  And in the last week, they completely stopped playing baseball.  It was as if a virus had been incubating inside Venus de Milo and finally rotted off her arms the last week of the season.

So when the Rangers lost the wild card, single elimination game, I expected it, though it was no less devastating because of how beautifully they once were constructed and how tragically flawed they proved to turn out.

The confidence gone, the dream left stale, we leave our bodies and view our team’s corpse from above.  What we see is a team that would have eventually lost to anyone given a competitive environment.  Since the next three rounds would have been competitive, we accept that losing will hurt no matter when it inevitably comes.

We remember the tragic Red Sox of Tito’s last hurrah, and we do not blame a soul, but remember the false cutouts our heroes proved to be.  We think about how easily a fan can be duped, seduced into believing in his team as a champion.  We remember the ecstasy of winning for the first time; we remember the frustration and anguish of if not being enough.  Why is it that winning is so great and losing must doubly be worse?

So we decide to convince ourselves of the “truth,” that we were bound to lose at some point, and we look to rebuild.  ’Tis Nature.  Every fan will experience it at some point if you haven’t already.