As the air starts to turn colder, baseball in the major leagues turns from being everyday to playoffs, a.k.a. October baseball. Now, only a few teams make it to the playoffs and, for some groups of fans, they believe that this will be the year that their team has a good shot to win.
However, that belief can go out the window when even a good team can be sent home packing way earlier than thought. When this happens, the excitement that comes with watching games daily for months to get to this point can dwindle as an at-home fan becomes less invested in tuning into the MLB. Fans like these can be left wondering what to do in the face of there being technically more baseball to watch but now not having a clear purpose. With that said, here are some ways to keep enjoying October baseball as long as possible:
1. you can root for the team that just beat you
It may seem absurd to root for the team that just beat your favorite team, but sometimes rooting for the team that beat you to get to the next round can help heal all wounds. If the team that beat yours does well, then you as a fan have some justification about why your team lost to them. Now the mentality can go from “my team lost to a worse team than us” to “of course, my team lost, that’s the World Series Champions of this year.” This change is markedly better because no fan wants their team to be seen as a pushover. Rather, thinking that the team that beat you was just the future champs can give the fan something to hide behind in order to keep the morale around their team alive. So one way to keep watching October baseball is to keep following the path that you were on but with a different team than planned.
2. you can root for their rival in the other conference
Perhaps, if you were the fan who was so invested in your team that you watched every game daily, it’s too painful to root for the team that crushed your team’s hopes. A fan in that state of mind might wish to root for another team to take out the one that beat theirs. In this sense, maybe to keep watching baseball for the rest of the season, a fan should set their sights on the opposing conference to their natural team, whether that be the American or National League. This creates a degree of separation between the sense of defeat and the prospect of karma coming for the team you just saw celebrate while your team packs up. Having this mindset can allow the fan to keep watching with either a true sense of spite or a sense of wanting to keep the competition alive. To that extent then, a rivalry may be in order, because if there’s something that is classic about sports, even just among ourselves as individuals, a rivalry can keep fans from being disenchanted. And if you as the fan are so in love with baseball but need a completely new purpose, this approach may work for you.
3. you can jump ship completely to the preseason of basketball
If the negative emotions from watching your favorite team lose is too much and you as the fan are looking for a clean break, perhaps a sport like basketball could be more your speed. The NBA season is currently in its preseason with the first regular season games taking place on Oct. 24. Watching the non-consequential preseason games could be an easy, relaxing balm for any stress left over from a baseball season gone bad.
When basketball season does start, fans can start with a clean slate and untainted hopes for whatever team they chose to back for the 2023-2024 season. In this headspace, the fans reattached themselves to another sport with the thought that maybe this year could be the year for their team to win but with the result of whether that thought would be correct very far off from the present. And one can still watch October baseball as it reaches its conclusion but now it can just be background noise rather than staring the fan in the face with all its disappointment.
4. you can jump ship so far to the kansas city chiefs and get invested in the taylor swift & travis kelce romance
If even basketball is too close to the heartbreak of the MLB playoffs, one can fully go in the opposite direction and start rooting for football and the Kansas City Chiefs. What’s more dominating than October baseball is the sheer media attention that Kansas City Chiefs’s tight end Travis Kelce is getting for being the new boyfriend of music sensation Taylor Swift. By paying more attention to Kelce and his romance, along with the fact that the Chiefs are number No. 1 in the AFC West, a fan can get swept up in the perfect combo of sports and entertainment that could replace a fading baseball season. There’s also the fact that Taylor Swift’s The Eras Tour is a sport in itself — one can get distracted watching what she performs during her acoustic sections of her tours, thus keeping anyone’s attention away from the bad outcomes that sports can produce. However, with the next The Eras Tour date not being until Nov. 9, the Taylor Swift and Travis Kelce romance can be a cotton candy filler till the fan finds their team in football or until The Eras Tour takes back the economy plus news cycle once again.
While maybe nothing can perfectly slot into a fan’s heart where they thought a World Series Championship won by their favorite baseball team would be, there are certainly other options. Sports are always a continuing rotating cycle with a promise of a new season always on the horizon. Even if something doesn’t work out the way a fan wanted, it doesn’t mean that it won’t work out to be something even better. The key is to remember that your baseball team not being in the October MLB playoffs is a blow, but not the end of all sports entertainment.