Trust Me, Kid

You'll get over it.

And what the hell are you crying about anyway? How old are you? Five? Six? If you're crying like this now, you're going to be institutionalized by the time you're a teenager.

Bart Giamatti, who was the boss of baseball long before Bud Selig, said that baseball is designed to break your heart. But it does more than that. It steals your girlfriend, wrecks your car, sets your house on fire and drinks your beer like a bad country music song.

You have no idea what I'm talking about, do you?

How about this? It steals your bike, burns down your playground and breaks your Wii.

But you know what? You'll keep coming back to it. No matter how awful it makes you feel, as soon as February rolls around, you'll feel that little tug inside your heart. You'll try and fight it, of course, because that's what we do. We try and stay away from things that could hurt us. I swore to myself that I would never watch another baseball game again after the Red Sox lost Game 7 of the 2003 American League Championship. I was just like you. I cried for hours and barely spoke for days. I wanted nothing to do with the team, nothing to do with the sport. They were dead to me. Even when they signed Curt Schilling in the off-season, they were dead to me.

I don't think I made it through the first week of spring training before I started watching again. And at the end of that season, I was in the same room, in the same spot, crying for hours. Only this time, I was crying because they had won the World Series.

This game, this crazy, frustrating, maddening, heartbreaking, beautiful game becomes a part of you that you just can't shut off. So keep your head up, kid. It'll get better. And worse. And better again.

Just like life.