Reopening old wounds
So, most of the time I'm a regular reader (though infrequent poster) at the Giants newsgroup (that's alt.sports.baseball.sf-giants for those of you who care). Around playoffs, though, a combination of several factors (namely, increased volume, decreased quality, and very strongly decreased desire to read even more about what I had just seen altogether too much of) led to my abandoning the newsgroup. Well, being the compulsive type that I am, I can't just mark all those read and done with and move on to the new stuff; I feel the need to read all of it. It's not that much more pleasant to do so; time has dulled the horror of it all, but it still makes me tremendously disappointed.

It continues to appall me just how easily many of the people in the newsgroup wholeheartedly embraced rooting for the Marlins. I could never bring myself to do so, yes, even though their opposition was the Yankees -- it's at least more excusable to embrace the Marlins under such circumstances, but many of the people had chosen the Marlins before either of the League Championship Series were done, which is just awful, in my opinion. When a team crushes your dreams like that, in such excruciating fashion, I sure as hell am not going to turn around and root for them.

To tie another thread to this skein, it suddenly became cold around here, so I put on my 1997 NL West Champion sweatshirt. I will freely admit that in 1997, things were different. In 1997, the Giants were a surprise team -- no one expected them to do well, and merely making the playoffs was a delightful achievement, after eight years of drought with one particularly painful near-miss in the middle. Sure, I would have been ecstatic if they had managed to do well in the playoffs, but after such a wonderous season it wasn't hard to accept their playoff loss. Under those circumstances, I could have rooted for the Marlins, especially since their ownership hadn't yet been proven evil (though I did actually root for the Indians, since they were more deserving in my opinion, and also had Matt Williams). But the fundamental difference is expectations. In each of the Giants' last three playoff appearances, I've actually hoped that they could win the World Series, and so when they fall short, it's always a bitter disappointment.