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My Career as a Met Fan
As the 2020 baseball season approaches, you are probably optimistic about your team’s chances. After all, your team has not lost a game yet. Most of your players are probably healthy and rejuvenated. And when Ernest Lawrence Thayer described “hope” in “Casey at the Bat,” he said it “springs eternal in the human breast.” As a fan, though, before you get too carried away with your optimism, you should also be aware that how well your upcoming season progresses will depend on two factors and on the four combinations of those two factors.
The first factor is obvious: the success or lack of success for your team. If your team is in contention all summer long, you will probably consider that a good season, even if your team comes up a bit short. By contrast, if your guys start out slowly and deteriorate from there, you will struggle to maintain interest.
The second factor is one you might not think of, but it will definitely help to determine how much you enjoy, or fail to enjoy, the season. That second factor is the amount of free time you have to experience the games themselves, all 162 of them. If you’re a young college student, for example, you may have a lot of free time during the summer to actually attend multiple games. Similarly, if you are retired, you probably have plenty of time to watch all the games on television or listen to them on the radio. If, however, you’re…
