The Cruel Baseball Gods, revisited

One of the hard things about being a sports fan is that occasionally the Powers Above will align the stars in such a way that two teams you don't like end up playing one another, so you're forced to root for a team that ordinarily you'd never root for. My all-time worst instance of this was in the early 90s, during the Bills' Super Bowl run, when one year the Miami Dolphins, who are the Bills' biggest rival in the division, traveled to play the Dallas Cowboys, who are the greatest force for Evil on the planet. (Well, in the non-lethal sense of "evil".) As a Bills fan, I was forced to root for the Cowboys -- who ended up beating the Bills in that year's Super Bowl. Ugh.

So now I have the Chicago Cubs in a playoff series against the most evil franchise in baseball, the Atlanta Braves. Now, I have no overriding reason to choose one team over the other, as I did in that Dolphins-Cowboys tilt, so I'm holding my nose and rooting for the Cubs, even though I think a Cubs championship would unravel the threads of time, as well as elevate the nation's millions of inexplicable Cubs fans to apocalyptic levels of annoyance. My long-standing policy is to root for whomever the Braves are matching up against.

And if you're wondering what sin the Braves could have committed at some hazy point in distant baseball memory, remember that I am a Pirates fan, and check out Number Six on this list. To this day, that night remains the only time a sporting event has left me nauseous. (Not even the missed-field-goal in Super Bowl XXV made me sick at my stomach. But Sid Bream beating the throw? That did it.)