I write here a lot about competitiveness. So much so, apparently, that I wrote two posts entitled “Winning and Losing” on this blog, both mostly about RUDU, both in 2010, two posts separated by That Summer. You can read them, one from March 2010 and one from November 2010.

I also write a lot about the Mariners, hapless though they are. When people from Seattle get into my Uber (this happens a lot, especially lately, including a night where two parties from Seattle were in the car in a span of four trips), I describe myself as a “long-suffering Mariners fan”. This immediately establishes my credibility with these individuals, because just describing oneself as a Mariners fan doesn’t indicate that one has really truly committed to the experience. It’s about the suffering. In an ideal world (i.e. 2001), maybe that wouldn’t be true. But just like a Yankees fan identifies conceptually with swagger and a Red Sox fan with redemption, so does a Mariners fan identify with the inevitability of disaster. Even 2001 ended that way, as I misdocumented in 2014. And as I wrote about just about a month ago when Griffey entered the Hall of Fame, maybe 1995 was the only exception to the disaster narrative, since losing the ALCS was so beyond our wildest dreams that it counted as a total success. That said, though, there is something deviously Sisyphean about even that year. Without it, the Mariners would have left for Tampa and we would have been released from our torment forever. Instead, that year preserved our ability to watch this team roll a boulder up a hill, just past the tipping point, and scream “wait till next year” as it went back down the other side.

Am I being too fatalistic? It’s being drummed into me, just like the hope is being drummed out. Last night, the Mariners lost a baseball game in Chicago by the score of 7-6, blowing a 6-3 lead and surrendering the winning run in the bottom of the 9th. It was deja vu all over again. On Sunday, they blew a 6-3 lead over the Milwaukee Brewers entirely in the 9th, losing by a score of 7-6. Last Tuesday, they coughed up two runs in the bottom of the 8th to lose a game to the Angels (who’d lost 11 straight prior to the game) by a score of 7-6. And on the last day of July, they mounted a 6-0 lead in the first three innings against the Cubs, only to lose a walk-off in the bottom of the 12th by a score of … wait for it … 7-6.

Reader, I watched every inning of all of these games.

I have been thinking it’s a privilege of my new flexible schedule and plan that I can be invested in a Mariners season where the games count and the M’s are contenders. Because, despite the 4 gut-punchers (all in the last four weeks, mind you! and two in the last six days!) listed above, the Mariners are playing meaningful baseball in late August. They remain just 7.5 behind Texas in the AL West and 3 games out in the Wild Card, mostly behind a bevy of AL East teams destined to take games from each other and leave a slot open for a non-East team, probably. Of course, had they won just two of those four 7-6 losses, they’d be 5.5 out and 1 back, respectively. And all four? Well, then they’d be in playoff position, with a bit of a lead, and just 3.5 behind the Rangers.

The Mariners have the longest streak in baseball without visiting the playoffs, a stat made possible by the recent success of the Pirates and Blue Jays. Since setting a record for wins in 2001, their embarrassing 5-game exit from the ALCS against the Yankees is our last taste of October baseball. Call it the curse of 9/11. So many things in my life could go by that name.

And it felt like this could be the year to turn it around. I even intimated as much in that post about Griffey, that in ’95 it was Griffey’s return from injury that was the spark and this year, the return of Felix could mean the same. A week later, I briefly gave up on this scenario after the first of those 7-6 disasters. That was objectively the worst of the four – the only one they led 6-0 and the one in which they lost in extra innings after giving up 3 in the 9th with a 6-3 lead and their closer on the hill. They changed closers after that game and August started out amazing despite the last game in July feeling like a negative turning point. They opened August 14-5, which was close to the best record in the game that month, keeping pace with the red-hot Rangers and scratching to within a game of playoff position.

Since then, including two 7-6 blown games, they’re 1-4, dropping a series to the Yankees and losing 3 in a row. The magic seems to be off.

If past years are an indication, I will stop watching them now, giving up on them after just one too many echoey losses, they will start winning in my absence, they will pull me back in, and I will tune in just in time to watch them just miss the playoffs in some sort of epic-tragic way.

This is a privileged and silly problem to have, being a Mariners fan. Compared to being a Syrian refugee or a homeless American or anyone who doesn’t have time for baseball, it’s embarrassing to even worry or complain about. Part of me wants to delete this post, because it’s not about something that has a chance at changing those larger problems. Of course, part of me also recognizes that I depress the heck out of people when I only post about those things and that itself has a slight counter-productivity in some ways.

I think I summed it up best at the start of the 2015 season:

Sports are objectively stupid. They take valuable energy and resources away from fixing our problems, offering little beyond the value of pure entertainment, already an overrated pursuit in our society. I have made my peace with the fact that baseball is wasteful and unhelpful and still I love it and can’t help myself. I will always pursue it, always invest time and emotion and energy better suited for nobler things into the crack of the bat and the dive of the catch and the eruption of tens of thousands as a ball clears a wall. It’s silly. It’s nostalgic and beautiful and heart-rending and strategic, but it’s also silly.

But last night, I was mulling over whether this is really such a good use of time and mental energy. Ceding so much of my emotional investment to a team like the Mariners feels like flipping a slightly tails-heavy coin each day and walking around being really upset if it comes up tails. Of course, I’m awfully elated when it comes up heads. But is it really necessary for a manic-depressive to sign up for an additional emotional binary in each of his days for the duration of the warmer months of the year?

Yes, I’m watching the game tonight. Why do you ask?