I'll Have To Wait For #28

For all intents and purposes the baseball season ended for me last night. The New York Yankees lost the American League Championship Series to the Texas Rangers.

The Yankees played like baseball zombies in their final 8 weeks of the season. During the regular season they couldn't win the games they needed to win so they could capture the AL East Division title. They limped into the playoffs with their hitters in slumps and their starting pitcher's abilities questionable at best.

Still with the start of the playoffs came a chance for them to "get hot" and win their way through to their 28th World Championship. They had as good a chance as any of the other 7 playoff teams. Hey, they probably had a little more of a chance because of their experience. But it didn't happen.

They beat the Minnesota Twins on a psychological basis. The Twins were psyched out by the Yankees. They played worse than New York in the division series; which was nearly impossible but the Twins did it.

So the Yankees, as a team, went on to stink up the baseball world with their lackluster performance in American League Championship Series against the Texas Rangers. When they lost game 6 and the series convincingly last night in Texas for me the baseball season ended.

The Yankees won't win their 28th championship. As a fan I'm very sad about that. You know from reading this blog how much I love baseball. The Yankees are my team and I get really disappointed, angry and then depressed when they don't win it all. It happens every October. I'm either very happy (like last year) or very depressed. What can I say? I'm a fan. That's short for "fanatic". I'm a Yankee fanatic.

But as the days go on I'll, for the most part, ignore the World Series because my team isn't in it. I probably won't totally ignore it but I'll only pay a small amount of attention to it. Then I'll wait for the exciting activity of the off season to begin and watch with interest the development and changes that occur on both the Yankees and all of major league baseball.

After the holidays, in early January, I'll start becoming anxious to see baseball again and begin to countdown the days until opening day. I'm already excited about the prospect of getting to go see the Yankees play the Reds in Cincinnati in June of next year.

Still for the next few days I'll lament the fact that the Yankees "let me down" this year. I mean as an organization they all but "guarantee" their fans a World Series win each year. They set the mark themselves and consider anything less a failure. As a fan so do I.

But there is one good thing about the Yankees being knocked out of the playoffs. A silver lining to the black cloud of baseball failure, if you will. The Yankees All-Star Mickey Mouse statue I have from this year's All-Star game is still relevant. It still has significance at least for another year. This is good because I've had it less than a month and it would be a sad thing (relatively speaking) if after only having it for such a short time it was "dated".

What I mean by that is the Yankees after being knocked out of the playoffs will still only (LOL "only") have 27 world championships. This fact is commemorated on the statue. Look at the picture of it I posted with October 21st's post. On Mickey's right shoe is a "27 world championships" logo. If they had won it all this year, it would be 28, and the logo would be obsolete. So now I'll have another year to enjoy a relevant Mickey Mouse Yankees statue. Of course I'll have to wait to see championship #28...but only until next year.