Now, Back to the Baseball Book

Yes, the one I wanted to write about earlier and got sidetracked in baseball reminiscing. Confessions of a She-Fan

Jane Heller is a best-selling novelist and a great Yankees fan. The greatest, she hopes. Except she gets angry and fed up at their losing in the first part of the 2007 season and writes an Op-Ed piece for the New York Times "divorcing" them. She's had enough. No more. They don't deserve her love. They aren't living up to their part of the bargain. They are not winning. So, like in any marriage, time to give up. Get a divorce.

But she is stung by some of the responses she gets from other Yankee fans. She decides it's time to show them she's a true fan. In order to do that she will follow the team for the second half of the season and write a book. Most of the book recounts the season week by week, the ups and downs.

Lo and behold she comes away with a different view of what's going on. And the turning point really begins in week 22- the week of August 27 as the September race is about to start. She is interviewing Sweeny Murti, the beat reporter for WFAN in New York. What he says "gnaws" at her.

Teams will have ups and downs, but Yankee fans don't want anything but ups. The fact is you don't win every year- you can't win every year- and the fans will have to deal with that.

With that seemingly obvious statement we see Heller turn into a true fan- one who loves the sport and her team because they are hers, for better or worse, for pennant or basement.

Have all the championships completely warped me? Have I lost all sense of perspective? Do I really know how hard it is to win?

Along her way she meets many fans from other teams who are there cheering even when their team is in the basement. She begins to understand "true love."

Yes, I know that too often we make more of baseball (and sports in general) than we should. We read into it all the ups and downs of life as if baseball itself is life and death. It is not. (Nor are, I am forced to admit- the Packers- but they come mighty close.) But we can learn from baseball (or football or music or anything that comes along) something about living. Thanks Jane Heller for reminding us that love is about sticking with it while winning AND losing. Perhaps mostly in the latter.