The Giamatti Rule: Your Biggest Disappointment as a Fan

"(Baseball] breaks your heart. It is designed to break your heart. The game begins in the spring, when everything else begins again, and it blossoms in the summer, filling the afternoons and evenings, and then as soon as the chill rains come, it stops and leaves you to face the fall all alone. You count on it, rely on it to buffer the passage of time, to keep the memory of sunshine and high skies alive, and then just when the days are all twilight, when you need it most, it stops."

― A. Bartlett Giamatti, Take Time For Paradise: Americans And Their Games

A little precious, I know...I agree with the basic premise, though, and I've already resigned myself to the fact that the two things I most care about this year--the Jays, of course, and also Arráez--will end with the Jays not winning the World Series and Arráez not hitting .400. Over time--true of any sport, true of life--you experience disappointment more often than elation. Or maybe it just stays with you longer.

What was your biggest disappointment as a baseball fan? Probably it was with a team, but maybe it had to do with a specific player, or maybe it was something else. My first huge disappointment was G6 of the '75 World Series, the Fisk game. My friends all knew I was a big Reds fan (pre-Jays); I stayed home from school the day after (grade 10). I'll have to give some thought to which Jays loss is my answer. It won't be Seattle last year, as gruesome as that was--the 2022 Jays weren't going to win the World Series.

in 2011 the Brewers had assembled a legitimate superteam, with 3 incredible starters in Zack Grienke (peak Zack no less!), Shaun Marcum, and Yovani Gallardo, they had a randomly amazing closer in John Axford who everyone loved, they had Ryan Braun (pre-PED scandal), Prince Fielder on his last year, Nyger Morgan playing out of his mind and giving a ton of insane postgame interviews, Lucroy playing like an all-star...they were a very likeable team and almost certainly the best Brewers team of my life. I mean they won 96 games, best in franchise history. And then their bats went dead and they lost to the Cardinals in 6.

important to remember the Brewers had a very long playoff drought - this was only the 2nd time in my life they'd even made it. the 1st time was 3 years prior when they lost to the Phillies in the 1st round. so to me it was like "yeah that's it, this was your one shot"

atlanta going up 2-0 in the road games vs yankees in the world series iirc a v young andruw jones homered in at least one of the games. then proceeded to lose 4 straight. also a play off series vs marlins where livian hernandez got some outrageously generous strike calls in the clinching game.

I was disappointed with the '96 WS too, being a big Maddux fan. (Atlanta outscored them 16-1 in those first two games.)

Disappointed by, not with--it was a close, exciting series after those first two games.

Cubs in 2003 was a difficult one, and totally not Bartman's fault but just a teamwide abandonment of psychological strength. the last couple innings of game 7 in the 2016 WS were exceptionally stressful but fortunately that team had more chill and didn't completely lose their composure. it was a more likable squad too.

i think with the Cubs in '84, even then I knew the tigers were the team of destiny. in '89, i never thought they had much of a chance. in 2015, they felt like a year away (vv correct.)

Bonds forcibly retired (effectively blackballed by the league) after his 1.045 OPS season in 2007. Feds dropped their charges in 2015, which they were still actively pursuing up until the very end.

Seems unfair in retrospect as Alex Rodriguez is on TV every week as a color commentator & David Ortiz is in the HoF.

nothing can compare to buckner in 1986, a play i didn't even see because i was already face down on my bed after calvin schiraldi had thrown the ball away too many times

mookie getting traded comes close though

As a Giants fan, prior to 2010 there were so many broken heart moments: 2002 game 6, all those first round exits in the 90's/early 00's. The absolutely gut wrenching end to '93, where winning 103 games was not enough for the playoffs (and the final time it would ever happen thanks to the wild card coming in 95 post-strike). '89 and the quake and losing to the A's who could have done us a solid and won the year prior and the year after instead? The vacuous 70's and mid 80's. And of course the hollow echos of overlooked greatness in the 60's, where legends like Mays, McCovey, Marichel, and Alou repeatedly found themselves 2nd fiddle to the Koufaxes, Musials, Gibsons and Mantles, while always sniffing around the top of the standings, settling for 2nd or 3rd many years before and after '62. Even in the storied Burns Baseball doc, those legendary also-ran teams were entirely glossed over (including the '62 team), with barely a mention of the San Francisco Giants until the earthquake game.

Once I discovered Charles Schultz was a local and a Giants fan (who's most famous strips are arguably about the Giants losing in 62), the Charlie Brown character made so much sense to me. I literally felt that I'd probably never see my team win during my lifetime as recently as 2009. I often felt my love for baseball was unrequited.

Suffice to say, the following 5-6 years were beyond rapturous, like winning the emotional lottery. Though now as time marches on, with those highlights and associated memories of the times and where I was in life fading a bit in the rear view mirror with every passing year, I'm now reflecting on them more in the context of aging than with the melancholy of baseball's inevitable heartbreak in mind. Honestly, it's for the better. Baseball's heartbreak is the worst.

Seriously, I just watch Ishikawa's walk off probably 3-5 times a year when I'm feeling down. Might still be doing it 30 years from now.

Octobeard I lack your history with the team but I saw those 62 strips and watched all the postseasons. I saw what a big deal it was when Lincecum came out and dealt zeros to the Braves in his postseason debutinitial appearance. Duane Kuiper’s call when they finally win it all is unreal. Even the echoes through time and distance are still hugely significant to me, a person who has never been to the Bay Area but loves those teams. Incredibly evocative.

Cruz waiting on Wilson. And the right hander for the Giants throws. ... SWING AND A MISS! AND THAT'S IT! THE GIANTS ... for the first time in 52 years, the Giants are world champions, as they come POURING out of the dugout ... circling Brian Wilson! The bullpen ... flying in from left-center field ... dancing, hugging. ... and you can't help but think, that this group is celebrating. ... for The Say Hey Kid, for Will The Thrill, celebrating for Number 25, and celebrating for all you Giants fans, wherever you are ... Giants fans ... this party is just getting started!

I was rooting against the Red Sox in '75 and '78 because of who they were playing, plus I was still young enough that I didn't have a sense yet of the team's past disappointments. (I missed '67.) By '86 I did, so that was disappointing, though obviously of a lesser magnitude for me.

A friend who's been a Giants fan since the '60s wrote a long series of blog posts when they won in 2010, which he's now put into a single post: https://begonias.typepad.com/srubio/2023/07/the-san-francisco-giants-and-me.html.

Answering my own question, I've got three (just about any Jays fan would list one of them): '85, '87, and '15. To start, I was sure the Jays had the best team in baseball each year--I'd have to look closer at that, but I think you can at least make the case. '85, their first post-season, was the 7th-game ALCS loss to the Royals when Stieb gave up a two-out, bases loaded, wind-aided triple to Jim Sundberg in the 6th. (Checking, I'm surprised to say that Sundberg had 36 career triples.) '87 was the nightmare week to blow the division: 3-1/2 games up over the Tigers, then seven straight losses (3-2, 6-4, 5-3, 5-2, 4-3, 3-2, 1-0) to end the year. And '15--the bat-flip year--ended with a 4-3 loss in G6 and the tying run on third with none out in the 9th. That the Royals went on to win the WS made things worse, not better.

At the player level, the fall of Roberto Alomar. I swooned over him his first few years in Toronto like no player ever.

the thing w being a cubs fan is when a team seemed like they had it together enough to make a run, when they failed it was typically not a situation where you actually felt confident about the following season. it was a situation where you felt the team was then psychologically damaged to the point of never coming back. that's what happened after '03, plus Prior and Wood just falling apart, Sosa was in decline, etc. when they got close in 2015, it didn't feel like the right year anyway, it felt like a surprise overachievement, and 2016 felt like the real team of destiny. i have to admit, once they won it, knowing that my dad finally saw it and my kid saw it at age 5, it was a good feeling (my grandparents were all born a few years after their last chip and lived and died a couple decades before 2016.) so y'know if they never win it again, i'll be cool with it. which seems unlikely but if any team can do it it's this one...

yeah as someone whose baseball fandom is relative recent (started with the white sox world series in 2005) and localized (to chicago teams), my disappointments are all pretty minor. mostly the cubs inability to keep a good thing going after the world series win (but can't really complain about it too much given the world series win) and the white sox current inability to get their shit together with a lineup that looked really good on paper (but can't really complain about it too much since that's a common occurrence for teams). i do root for other teams but it tends to be based on their current lineups rather than consistently rooting for a specific team.

(xpost) It was somewhat like that with the 2015 Jays--that was the year Anthopoulos emptied out the farm system for Price and Tulowitzki (and while on his way out of town--moves that never really ended up mattering, I don't think)--but at least with the '85 and '87 teams, you knew better things were ahead.

As a Canadian, I should mention the Expos' two most crushing disappointments (both strike seasons): Blue Monday in '81, and then the strike itself in '94. Because of circumstances, neither affected me as much as they might have. I've mentioned before that I was a little tuned out on baseball from '79 to '82; a few years earlier or a few later, and Rick Monday's HR to end the '81 season would have hit me harder. And by '94, coming off the Jays' two WS wins, the Expos were more or less like any other team to me (i.e., not the Jays). The bigger disappointment for me in '94 was not getting to see Matt Williams or Griffey or Thomas chase down Maris's HR record. Home runs hadn't yet been devalued in '94; today, I'd be much more excited by Gwynn's run at .400.

'94 was a major disappointment, probably the biggest non-Cubs disappointment in my MLB life. it was a season with so many players playing at a relentless peak. not just the three you mentioned, but McGriff (who probably would have hit 45-50 HR in a full season, and probably would have made the HOF within his first half dozen attempts if he had), Kevin Mitchell, Belle, Bagwell...just ridiculous statistical seasons even with the strike.

Matt Williams of the Giants was on pace to hit over 60 homers by the time of the lockout and don't forget Tony Gwynn was hitting about .400 too. '94 was a heartbreaker indeed.

Oh nm I see you mentioned them, Clemenza. That Expos team was pretty special though. Easy to root for the Alou family

I’d say the earliest one for me was the final ride of the Big Red Machine in the damned strike year of ‘81 when somehow Cincinnati had the best record in baseball and yet did not get a playoff spot. Then the hated Dodgers finally win it all…yuck.

Strike of ‘94 also took out one of the best Reds teams of my life too, as they were rolling. That Expos team was great but the Reds were really good that year too.

francisco cabrera + sid bream

I was pretty crestfallen when the reds smoked the A’s in the 1990 WS.

A’s getting beat by the royals and Ned fucking Yost in the stupid wildcard elimination game in 2014.

Didn’t know about Rickey’s rape accusations until reading the Howard Bryant bio last year :-/

Just dont even talk to me about the As.

Yeah what Fisher is doing to the A's is more than just the usual baseball heartbreak.

Charlie Finley blowing apart the dynasty and Billy Martin destroying all those good young starters in the early 80s was pretty bad too.

Buddy of mine as a kid back in early 80s his dad was a die hard A’s fan and had one of those huge satillite dishes in the early 80s to watch games in Indiana.

Losing a franchise must be the worst--can't imagine what it was like for lifetime Dodgers/Giants fans in the '50s (having the Yankees still there wouldn't help, being the hated enemy).

As a kid who was a massive Orioles fan, probably Jeffrey fuckin Maier - it didn’t decide the series but it kind of did, just felt like a psychic blow that couldn’t be recovered from.

Mets losing to Royals in the 2015 WS, especially how they did it in Games 1 and 5. Seemed like a team of destiny given their late season run and I was at Game 1 DeGrom/Kershaw to start the playoffs so was really amped up for that whole playoffs.

Other option is Mets losing to the Dodgers in the NLCS in 1988.

Side question: do people feel bigger sports disappointments when they are younger or older?

On the one hand, everything feels more intense as a kid - you have less life experience so everything looms larger.

As an adult, you get to experience the real disappointments of life, so maybe you feel steeled against things as trivial as sports disappointments. I do feel the clock ticking on seeing one of my teams win a championship though.

i had just turned eight for the '79 series so i honestly remember little more than Willie Stargell Making Everyone Happy, which was good enough for me

i had just turned 21 for francisco cabrera/sid bream, and i watched it in a room full of braves fans ffs. but it didn't occur to me at the time that that was the end of everything?

in the last 30 years, the absolute pinnacle of pirates baseball was when johnny cueto dropped the ball and russell martin homered. they've won no series nor even really pretended that they're trying to since then.

idk you don't know what it feels like to go decades without reaching the finish line until you've actually done it. my team didn't even make the playoffs until I was 26 so watching them blow it came with this feeling of "well there goes your ONLY chance"

We were talking about the age thing on another thread, and I was basically saying that as I get older, I try my best to dodge the disappointment by walking away the second things start to go bad--and that it took me two or three decades to understand why my dad bailed on a WS game (the Jays' first) and missed the Ed Sprague HR that turned the series around.

when i was 19, i watched the penguins lose every single game one of their four playoff series. when i was 20 i watched them go down 4-1 to the blackhawks in the first game of the finals and survived to tell the tale

now such setbacks hurt me in a way i can't explain and would simply rather avoid caring about altogether

yes i am divorced but tbf i'm not *elon* divorced

Someone I know basically stopped watching the playoffs because they couldn't take it, but still considered themselves a fan. No judgment, it's just very alien to me. I absolutely get turning things off when they are over but the game isn't quite over (I turned off the Sixers-Boston Gm 7 when that went completely sideways, because the Sixers weren't coming back from 30).

I fall into the category that nothing that happens to "my team" can compete with things that happen "in real life", like the loss of a job, a family member, a serious illness, or whatever, so as I've gotten older, I don't feel as crushed.

That's what I thought would happen as I got older--perspective, wisdom--but it never did.

Don't want to make it sound too much like wisdom - there is also a bit of expecting the disappointment at this point given the teams I root for.

My answer to this will always be the last game of the 1987 season, the final nail in the coffin of the Jays' 0-7 collapse to close out the season. The game was incredible (a 1-0 nailbiter with complete games from Tanana and Key, a very unheralded all-time great regular season pitching matchup when you consider the stakes) and I refused to believe their season could end right up until the final out. When Iorg (never liked that guy) grounded out weakly to end it I was just numb.

There have been a lot of historic collapses since then, and I don't mean to hate on anyone else's pain, but the Jays' 0-7 run was different:

1) The '87 Jays were almost unquestionably the best team in MLB, riding high on a 100-win pace, and their season was done a week later. They didn't lose the division and have to settle for a wild card or a lower seeding. The Jays were the best team in the game in late September and went home in early October without playing a post-season game, there has been nothing like it post-1994.

2) With all due respect to the '93 Giants-Braves or the '01 Giants-Dodgers, those were two great teams battling it out to the end. Sucks that they played in the same division and in the case of the '01 teams, had to meet each other in the first round when lesser teams easily advanced. The '93 Giants played great baseball but what are you going to do when the Braves go 53-17 in the second half or whatever it was. The Tigers were great in 1987, but the Jays blew it.

3) They had a 3.5 game lead with seven to play (granted, four of those games were against the Tigers, the team chasing them). The Tigers didn't go on a historic run to make their comeback, they went 6-2 in the final week, beating the Jays when they had to, but they also split a four game series with 67-win Baltimore. So this isn't in the same category as, say, the 2007 Mets blowing a seven game lead to the Phillies in the final 17. The Phillies went on a tear, the Mets were lukewarm. Plus you had two 89-win teams duking it out for the right to get crushed in the playoffs by better teams. The Jays were the top team in MLB (or at worst #2 to the Tigers) and choked.

4) All four losses to the Tigers in the final week were by one run (the three victories vs the Tigers prior to going 0-7 were also by one run). If this had been the ALCS (impossible by the rules at the time, but let's pretend), it might be remembered as the greatest playoff series ever (every game close and exciting, with the first ever 3-0 comeback by the Tigers, seventeen years before the Red Sox actually did it).

I'll add a couple more things. Directly before they went into their tailspin, the Jays had just beaten the Tigers three straight at home, all one-run games, the last two walk-off wins: 4-3, 3-2, 10-9. (On the thread for the best game you were ever at, I mentioned that I was at one of these games, I'm just not entirely sure which one.) And also--this is in no way an excuse, all they had to do was win once that last week; more like an omen--Tony Fernandez, having an MVP-type year (he finished 8th), was injured in the 4-3 win when Bill Madlock took him out on a DP slide. That was it for Fernandez for the year.

Small consolation: Bell's MVP, which even then I knew he really shouldn't have won over Trammell (or Clemens, if you were precociously ahead of the curve).

1999 Braves winning 103 games and cruising through the playoffs only to get swept by the Yankees in the WS. Got a big dose of "expectation is a prison" before having the lesson boiled down into four words years later.

Dusting this thread off in case I need it Monday. (Honestly, the 2023 Jays missing out would be more like massive annoyance than disappointment.)

I haven’t done the actual maths but it seems basically impossible to me that they miss out unless they get swept in their remaining games and the Mariners sweep in theirs?

I’ve basically made my peace with the Mariners not going through and they would just embarrass themselves with the way they’re playing rn.

They'd really have to fuck up to miss out. And they're winning 6-0 tonight--that might be enough. They got a real break in the way the scheduling fell towards the end.