There Is Nothing Worse Than a Shitty Baseball Team as a Sports Fan

The 2025 Atlanta Braves are a horrific baseball team. They are 39-50 after a weekend sweep at the hands of the equally miserable Baltimore Orioles, just a couple games ahead of threatening the Washington Nationals for the second-worst record in the National League. While the pitching staff has kept a lifeless offense even marginally afloat for the first half of the season, Chris Sale and Spencer Schwellenbach both recently suffered potentially season-ending injuries, leaving Atlanta with the likes of Bryce Elder and 20-year-old Didier Fuentes for the next few months.

So, the Braves will play 73 games of completely meaningless baseball to finish out the season. And there is not a feeling as a sports fan worse than that.

NFL franchises are completely turned around in one year all the time. If your NBA or NHL team stinks, the other is going on simultaneously. College football is an institution that is enjoyable even when it isn’t.

But Major League Baseball is all we have to carry us through the dog days of summer. When things are going well, baseball feels like a treat you have waiting at the end of almost every day. Now it feels like a chore I will be forced to endure just as often.

There’s even a peace in being a fan of a team like the Colorado Rockies, where you have no expectations whatsoever and every win is a nice surprise. The Braves entered this season with the second-best odds to win the World Series and will instead spend three months toiling in misery.

I love A. Bartlett Giamatti's essay The Green Fields of the Mind, in which he says baseball "...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.”

But that's the thing, baseball is supposed to get you to the fall. Instead, the chill autumn rains have come for me in early July.