It must be the Dog Days.
I’d be lying if I said I understood the appeal of the MLB Trade Deadline. Maybe it’s the speculation. Maybe it’s the spectacle. Or maybe, just maybe, it’s all a trick of the weather.
Eddie Cochran wasn’t kidding about the summertime blues.
Unfortunately, most fans around the league seem to have missed the memo.
I’m not trying to rain on anyone’s parade here. I love breathless hype as much as the next guy, and I certainly wouldn’t want to put Peter Gammons out of a job. Still, there’s something about our collective Deadline fixation that merits a second look, if only because it seems so obviously tied to a sort of simmering seasonal pathos.
In January, summer is soft and warm and glowing with pennant fever.
In July, it’s thick and sticky and fraught with third-place angst.
No wonder we spend so much time wishing we were something other than what we are.
It’s fun to pretend that a few spare parts might turn a lemon into a hot rod. That doesn’t make it so, of course—but then again neither does it make the truth any more palatable. Every man has to believe in something. When you’re six games back and staring down the stark eye of Sirius, it’s only human to bet on the transformative power of a quick and half-cocked fix.
He not busy being born is busy dying.
They not busy getting better are busy becoming the Royals.
Sometimes, standing pat simply isn’t a viable option.
Stasis is no friend to the mammalian psyche. We lust for change because it’s in our blood, is bound up with the evolutionary adaptability that got us where we are today. The only catch is that the survival of a species is rarely correlated to its deliverance. We all waste our summers praying for saviors. Most of us, alas, wind up settling for bargain-bin corner outfielders.
It’s all right there in the Book of Jeremiah, Bubba:
The Deadline is past.
The summer has ended.
And we are not contenders.
Because the more things change the more they stay the same.
And anyone who talks about fresh starts in early August has got to be only just saying, is all...
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