FanPost

We Root For a Good Team, Now What?

If you are an O’s fan born anytime after the Carter administration, looking forward to the 2015 season can’t help but feel strange. The 2012 great emergence from the wilderness was written off as a fluke by the baseball world on an almost daily basis from the All-Star break to the final out of the ALDS. The 2013 campaign certainly had its moments and yielded a second consecutive winning season (no small feat around these parts), but ultimately the whole year felt like one of those annoying half-sneezes that gets stuck and refuses to come out.

But 2014 was the season non-insufferable mid-Atlantic baseball fans had been waiting for. Running away with the AL East and taking the season series from all four divisional rivals in the process was sweet; a convincing ALDS win over the Tigers even sweeter. Of course it would all amount to fogging up car windows in the cargo hold of the Titanic, but still– 2014 proved that the Orioles (for the first time since that movie was in theaters) were an actual good team again.

They fought the good fight then ran in to a Royal-blue buzzsaw, losing because they came up short in the end as opposed to running out of pixie dust. It’s a brave new era in Birdland, where the gut-punches come after Labor Day as opposed to before Memorial Day. Next year actually seems worth the maybe.

We find ourselves in the proverbial next year that is the present, and it is terrifyingly awesome. This is basically the second time since the last embers of the ’83 championship team burned out in the mid-80s that fans have a bona-fide good ballclub to follow. Unless you count the truncated 63-49 effort from… 1994 (cue the lightning strikes and horses baying), last year was the first time that the O’s registered three straight winning seasons since Cal gleefully leapt around the drawn-on infield at Veteran’s Stadium.

Those wacky Johnny Oates Orioles did achieve a certain degree of goodness, then Cal salvaged an otherwise forgettable 1995 season, and of course ’96 and ’97 happened. The stage seemed set for the birds to reclaim their place in the league’s upper echelon; the Orioles were finally going to be one of those "good" teams again.

Which brings us to the last time anyone who gives a rip about the O’s could realistically enter a season inoculated by justifiable optimism: 1998. Cue even more lightning strikes.

What felt like the beginning of an era was instead the beginning of the end. The 1997 team was still largely intact! The Orioles had the highest payroll in baseball! They signed half thee 1992 All-Star team in the off-season! Doug Drabek won the Cy Young that one time! If the Camden Yards Senior Center gave fans pause, Ryan Minor and Calvin Pickering were waiting in the wings! Jeffrey Hammonds was bound to pan out eventually! Sure things didn’t start so well– but they won nine straight coming out of the All-Star break and surely this would… oh forget it.

They also lost 10-in-a-row in that second half and Cal’s streak ended (on my frigging birthday none-the-less, but that’s irrelevant). Being "good" sucks.

It seems silly, given baseball’s current statistical age of enlightenment, to invest any value in whether a team is worthy of the "good" moniker. It’s as intoxicating as it is pointless, and once the season starts is irrelevant until at least July. Allegedly "good" teams throughout the first half fade to mediocrity all the time (see: 2005). And even if a team makes it past the 81-win threshold, good doesn’t guarantee a playoff win– or even a playoff berth.

Good is a hollow comfort, a manifestation of hope founded in tenuous rationalization. Like any savvy huckster, it qualifies itself by gently reminding its willing marks that past performance is no indication of future success while simultaneously convincing us that its mere presence increases the likelihood of winning.

But it still feels good to be good, dammit.

The psychological stink of losing can be even tougher to ditch than the physical stench. There’s a comforting complacency to it: Players fall back on their ginormous piles of money, fans pursue the (hopefully) other fulfilling aspects of their lives, owners bathe in their large golden vats filled with the blood of the innocent. As Homer (Simpson) once said, "Trying is the first step toward failure." Fans of not-good teams can drift in and out of the season, catch an occasional win on TV, never check the standings and never risk the danger of caring. When a team spends 14 years losing in such listless fashion, a three-year trend of success feels way more consequential than it should.

Good guarantees nothing, and provides little insight as to what impact losing Cruz, Markakis, and even Miller will have. The spending spree of 1998 was ill-advised, but I’m sure most would have preferred better gets in the off-season than Travis Snider and Everth Cabrera (I hope I eat those words). The 2015 Oriole philosophy relies on both biology and mathematics– that Manny Machado and Matt Wieters will be healed and that Chris Davis can’t possibly be that bad again.

On the other hand, regression in an indiscriminate disease and so is the injury bug. It seems almost too pessimistic, but in an age where the average fan can tell you just as much about the ligament structure of the human knee as they can Chris Davis' BABIP to the right side, it doesn’t seem too paranoid to think that if Machado and/or Wieters do play the whole year that some poor soul will wind up on the 60-day DL in their stead (I’m looking at you, Hardy) or another breakout star will turn back into a pumpkin (watch it, Pearce).

But, for now at least, none of that matters. Why try to resist the irresistible logical fallacy of goodness when you have a good team to root for?

FanPosts are user-created content and do not necessarily reflect the views of the editors of Camden Chat or SB Nation. They might, though.