Not Dead Yet

This is how it starts: You notice that your team, let's call them the Nationals, always seem to lose when you attend a game. And you can't just stop coming and watch on TV, because you've gone in for a ticket plan and you've got dates. So you start to change things. Red socks, white socks? Does Hecht's (RIP, Hecht's) carry blue socks? Because maybe you need to wear blue socks on game days. What about your cap? Are you wearing the right cap?

It's enough to drive a fan a little crazy.

Then you start to notice other patterns. Like how if you watch the game from start to finish without getting up, the Nationals win. But if you get up -- say, to walk the WonkPuppy, who has a huge bladder and a true lady's unwillingness to pee indoors but even a dog who once went 12 hours in the belly of an airplane without peeing has her limits -- the Nationals invariably give up lots of runs when you're not looking. And alternately, if you miss the start of the game -- say, because you're heading home from that policy conference at the Ritz, and no, not the Brookings one, the other one, with Nick Burns and the pretty good salmon plates -- the Nationals will be winning when you tune in but the moment you turn that satellite receiver to the game the Nationals will start giving up runs like they have a quota.

Like they know you're watching.

And really, it's not too big a step from that point to walking around with Kleenex boxes on your feet and saving bottles of your own pee and otherwise behaving like a Red Sox fan. Which would be fine if you were a billionaire engineering genius who could buy entire hotels and hire a bunch of Mormons to run your empire for you while you went crazy in the head. Or if you lived in Boston, where everyone acts like that. But here in Washington, that sort of behavior either gets you elected to the DC City Council or thrown in a padded cell with no one but the ghost of Goose Goslin and Cristian Guzman's floating head to keep you company until the doctors are convinced that you're no longer a danger to yourself or to the Nationals.

And that's where BallWonk has been of late. Oh, sure, there was some surgery, and then the floods that wiped out most of his neighborhood (you probably saw that on TV), and the whole series of crises with BallWonk's kid brother, the Billy Carter of sports blogging. But it was the craziness that has kept BallWonk offline these last weeks. Once the doctors saw how severe BallWonk's case was, they insisted on total separation. Cold turkey. "Ve can't help you eef you von't do exactly vhat ve tell you," the asylum staff said. "Do you vant to spend the rest of your life like a fan of zee Red Sox? Ees that vhat you vant?"

But after two weeks in a halfway house, BallWonk's gradual reintegration into Nationals society has been deemed complete. The final test came on Independence Day, when BallWonk listened to the game on the drive up to Bethesda and was able to get out of the car without once worrying what effect his not listening would have on the game. And when Joel at Big Planet Comics told BallWonk how the game ended, his first thought was not, "What? You mean the Nationals blew their lead after I stopped listening?" It was, "Way to go Zimmerman!" Which, as far as treatment for crazy fan syndrome goes, is pretty much a cure.