Bleh

 

Your team sucking can make you collect less, which can make you blog less about baseball cards if that is your thing.

I haven't been posting on here much for the past few months.  Normally such lapses are due to me being busy, but while I have been busy this current lapse has been due to a lack of motivation caused by this year's final incarnation of the Tatsunami era Dragons.  

Over the summer as the 2024 season which just concluded wore on it became apparent that the Dragons, despite showing some promise in the first two weeks of the season, were well on their way to yet another last place finish.  Its just really frustrating watching a lousy team lose game after game after game.  And that feeling of frustration can really drain you of enthusiasm. 

I've put up with this lousy team for quite a few years now but somehow the accumulated agro of being a fan of theirs for so long just reached a kind of breaking point for me mid-season.  As a result this was the first season in three years that I didn't bring my kids to the Dome to see a game, which I feel pretty bummed about.  But why bother when they are just going to lose (half the fun for kids is watching the post-game celebration when they win).

This kind of "bleh" feeling the Dragons gave me seeped into my collecting habits.  If I'm not motivated to watch baseball, it logically follows that I'm not motivated to buy little pieces of cardboard with baseball players on them.  At the start of the year I had planned on buying a box or two of either Epoch or BBM's set with all the hits already taken like I did in 2023 which was great fun.  But by the time those started showing up on Yahoo Auctions mid-season (why do they release them so late in the year????)  the Dragons were doing awful and I just thought "Meh, pass".

It also didn't help that the Calbee set this year was pretty miserable and only consisted of 120 cards in 2 series.  I was flipping through some sets from the 00s last night and reminiscing about how nice it was when Calbee sets had about 300 or so regular cards and some decent photography.  

Despite that, collecting the 2024 Calbee set was the only bright spot.  My daughter really likes opening the bags with me so we'd sit on the sofa after dinner and each eat a bag of chips while checking off the checklist to see if we got someone we needed.  That is just the purest form of joy that baseball card collecting offers, so the year wasn't a complete write off (my son who is now 10 wasn't as interested as he was a couple of years ago, but I suspect he'll regain his interest later in life like I did).  

Anyway the immense fun I had with that didn't rub off on the rest of my collecting activities which for the most part were dormant this year.  What spare time I've had has mostly been devoted to other hobbies rather than chasing down old Calbees that I need like usual.

One bright spot is that Tatsunami will no longer be manager of the Dragons next year.  Its not fair to lay all the blame for the team sucking on his shoulders of course (though in 3 straight seasons under him they finished dead last in all of them), but at the same time it does give some hope that things might be done differently next year in a way that might rekindle my enthusiasm for the game and my collection. 

 From past experience I know that this is just a temporary "bleh" feeling (I was a Montreal Expos fan in their final years so this is nothing in comparison) and when the spring returns I'll go nuts with anticipation for baseball like I do every year.  I hope 2025 will be a better year in which the Dragons don't suck too bad, Calbee goes back to releasing 3 Series with a decent number of cards and the other makers start releasing their sets at a time that makes sense.  If at least 2 of these things happen I'll probably be collecting and posting a lot more than I have in 2024!