Point: Friday playoff games are terrible, by Barry Petchesky
I sit here exhausted: glassy-eyed, cotton-brained, every synapse a misery. I watched seven consecutive hours of baseball last night, most of them emotionally disastrous to my rooting interests. It kept me up several hours past my usual bedtime, and tossing and turning in much of my ostensible sleep. Today I feel like I got hit by a truck. I feel alive. This is how the postseason should feel.
Playoffs are meant to destroy you, and as such, playoff games should only be played on evenings you have school or work the next morning. This means no Friday or Saturday night playoff games, which don't even feel real because they do not carry the threat of ruination as the hours tick away—you can just sleep in the next morning. That's cheating, frankly. Noble suffering is part of fandom. Do you really even like your team if you don't sacrifice some part of your physical wellbeing for them, as well as mental?
A game does not end with the final out or horn or whistle. When your team wins, you must devote several hours the next morning to consuming all media you can find. You must watch every highlight, read every column, trash-talk your guts out—all while in a state of pleasant delirium that results in you accomplishing zero actual work at your job. This is part of the ritual.
When your team loses, you perform the bad version of the ritual. You are strung-out and seething, studiously avoiding mention of the game except to engage in commiseration and blame with your fellow fans. Crucially, you also get no work done in this state, too. It is not what I might call "fun," but rituals must be adhered to.
This is why Friday night playoff games are ass. Just imagine: Your team breaks your heart, and you don't even get to grumble as you set your alarm for a distressingly small number of hours later, because you're not setting an alarm at all! You're going to take it easy on Saturday morning! You might not even think about the game, let alone obsessively dwell on its every pivotal moment, because you'll be spending time with your family instead of glued to a computer! Nightmare.
The moment you shoot awake the morning after a postseason game, your first thought must be either Oh man that ruled or Oh god that happened, take me now and then you must peel yourself up and fling yourself into the shower. Your first thought, upon waking up the morning after a triple-overtime classic that put you through the wringer, should never be Oh I hope the ramps are in at the farmers' market.
A healthy life contains balance. Weeknights are the time for serious sports-watching, be it at home or at a bar with the buddies. Weekends should be true days off: Hanging with friends without it being emotionally fraught, or lounging at home watching something on TV that doesn't have the power to ruin your life. A person cannot be psychically fragile seven days a week. Fandom is labor, and we all need a break from it now and again.
Here are the best nights for a playoff game, ranked:
- Sunday
- Monday
- Thursday
- Tuesday
- Wednesday
- No Game
- Saturday
- Solar flare that knocks out electricity on Earth for 30 years
- Friday
In conclusion: If your team wins a series or god forbid a championship on a Friday night, something is lost in the afterglow. Did it even really count if you couldn't spend the next day floating and gloating and glowing on an impromptu holiday for you and you alone? Do you remember how Deadspin imploded the week the Nationals won the 2019 World Series, and how you and the other Nats fans on staff said you couldn't fully enjoy it because we were jobless and adrift and depressed and traumatized, and sports felt like a sideshow rather than the most important thing in the world? That's more or less how I'll feel if the Liberty clinch tonight.
Counterpoint: It's nice to have a good night's sleep, by Albert Burneko
Mew mew mew, it's bad when the TV show doesn't make me miserable, weewee peepee, pwease don't make me sweep for eight hours and wake up feewing wefweshed after the baseball game, that would be too tewwible, shoopy woopy poopy.
That's you. That's what you sound like.
I do not want to have to get up and go to work the morning after my team won or lost an important playoff game. I do not want to have to get up and go to work after staying up until 1 a.m. watching baseball. When I am very tired, getting some more sleep is better than not getting some more sleep. When I have to get up and go to work, it's easier and better and less awful to do if it's in the aftermath of having gotten a good night's sleep.
Do not say to me any Puritan nonsense about righteous suffering or whatever! That is doo-doo of the reekingest order. And you know it! The Tuesday morning after your team won or lost a Monday night playoff game, if a genie popped out from your toothpaste tube and offered you the day off, you would dance around like you'd just won The Price Is Right. In the bleary honest seconds after the alarm goes off on the morning after you stayed up until 1:30 watching your team win the World Series, if by pressing a red button on your nightstand you could immediately cause the world-rattling natural disaster that would cause your workplace to shut down for the day, you would mash that fucker harder than you have ever mashed anything in your life. You would drop a double-decker bus filled with orphans into the Mariana Trench for a surprise work closure just then. 100 thousand billion trillion percent of the people pretending to believe in the nobility of day-after misery know this is true, as definitively as they recognize themselves in a mirror. Anyone—anyone—who looks you in the eye and denies this is lying to your face.
Here's a thought experiment: Here is the winning Mega Millions ticket. By taking it and cashing it you will never have to work again. Are you running out and getting a 9-to-5 day job, to preserve the sanctified sports rite of spending the morning after a playoff game sick with sleep deprivation and miserable beneath the flickering fluorescent light of a cubicle. No the fuck you are not. You would never get out of bed before 9:00 a.m. the morning after a baseball game again so long as you fucking live, and you know it.
Has this made your life worse? Don't even bother answering that question! It was rhetorical! My fucking dog knows you're lying! You frickin' piece o' crap!
