A Little Rain Falls on Every Sports Fan

The Angels’ vacation began Sunday night just as mine was ending. In search of a metaphor in the creeping hours of darkness, I stood on my apartment balcony and watched a cold rain come down. Aha. The end of vacation. The end of all my hopes and dreams?

A few miles up the freeway at Angel Stadium, the exact same thing was happening to the ’05 Angels. Hopes, dreams washed away on a dark and dreary night.

All right, can the metaphors.

The Angels and their fans need not worry. The universe remains in perfect balance, for the simple reason that when the baseball gods close a door, they open a window.

There’s a reason the Walt Whitmans and Lord Byrons of baseball writing continually tell us that the game reflects life in all its successes and failures, joys and disappointments. One man’s blown save is another man’s walk-off homer. For every Josh Paul, there’s an A.J. Pierzynski.

The poets keep saying it because it’s true.

I’ve been a baseball junkie all my life -- a Pittsburgh Pirate fan since 1958 -- and it has caused some of the greatest psychic pain of my life. It also has produced some of my most euphoric moments.

But even when suffering, I realized that someone else was cheering. And when I exulted, it came at someone else’s expense.

I watched much of the Angel-Yankee series with friends in Tustin. When the good guys wrapped up the Game 5 victory, we celebrated with hugs and high-fives and genuine glee. At that very moment across the country in New Jersey, other close friends of mine who are die-hard Yankee fans no doubt were cursing the darkness as we danced around a California living room.

A week later, it was the Angels’ turn to cry. I was glum but not depressed (after all, it wasn’t the Pirates), but a buddy in Sacramento and lifelong White Sox fan was beside himself. I called him after Chicago’s Game 3 victory; he liked what he was seeing. But since the Sox hadn’t been in a World Series since 1959, he knew better than to gloat prematurely. He knew the kind of pain that can generate.

Ask Houston Astro fans. They had it won Monday night.

And then they didn’t. A strike away from the World Series, they lost the game two batters later when Albert Pujols hit a three-run homer in the ninth inning that won it for St. Louis.

That level of pain inflicted on Astro fans is reserved for the most unlucky and tortured among us.

Of course, that meant someone else was reveling. So on Tuesday I phoned my niece Michelle in Washington, Mo., deep in St. Louis Cardinal territory. Knowing she and her husband are Redbird fans, I wanted to gauge her joy.

Instead, she only reinforced how elusive baseball euphoria can be. “In the ninth inning, when they got the first out, I turned it off,” Michelle said. “I watched it all the way to the ninth and I couldn’t take it anymore. I didn’t want to see them lose.”

With her husband out of town on business, she went to bed. “I woke up this morning and turned on the news and they said, ‘If you missed last night’s game, this is what happened.’ ”

Delayed euphoria is better than none, but Michelle knows she deprived herself of unbridled joy. She cursed herself for it. She said the TV people were describing how morbidly quiet the Houston crowd became after Pujols’ blast, and I asked if she felt their pain.

“Oh, no,” she said, and I wondered what happened to the sensitive little girl I once knew.

After berating herself appropriately, Michelle let the joy rush in. Among other things, she found herself saying, “Pujols, you’re a god.”

Who was the last person you called a god? Why do otherwise normal people let themselves think and act like this?

Hey, that’s baseball.

Before hanging up, I reminded Michelle of something only a wise old uncle knows: “The game is never over till the last man is out.”

“Yeah,” she said, “no matter how late at night it is.”