Sometimes we need a break.

What I Did

• while my teammates work on transaction processing I am picking up bug fixes
• let the rest of my simulation baseball league know that I am quitting when this season ends
• watched the Toronto Blue Jays dominate the Yankees in the MLB playoffs for the first two games

Longer Threads

One of the reasons I stopped doing the baseball hobby after 28 years (I was in this league before I even met my wife) was that I no longer found the struggle to try and build a successful pretend baseball team to be enjoyable.

Perhaps I am wrong to be results-oriented, but after missing the playoffs for 10 of the past 11 years I'd had enough. Hobbies are supposed to be fun, and this was no longer fun. In fact, I had grown resentful of this team I had built and that the failure to create a team that could be a playoff contender was making me angry and frustrated.

I had gone through this before with other hobbies, and it took me a very long time to stop feeling that way and come to terms with my other hobbies and make them enjoyable. Mostly by dropping the competitive part and find a way to participate that makes me happy and not a raging lunatic (the bad behaviour is all on me, not other people).

For Magic it was easy -- switch to multi-player, resist attempts to make it competitive, and run a weekly event encouraging others to do so. For my simulation baseball hobby, well, there is no casual outlet. We are playing games against each other where this a winner and loser, and the results are there to be shared with everyone else. The team you built is yours -- your choices and your successes and your mistakes.

In the end, I could not figure out how to create a team that had, as the floor, being a playoff team. Clearly I was doing something wrong. Could never quite figure out which metaphorical levers to pull. Does the team I built have some talented players? Yes. I just could never figure out the complementary pieces to make it work.

It was very disappointing and it went on for years. I used to rip up all the cards for the game after each season in a rage -- April to October spent trying to beat 23 other people and, from my perspective, failing miserably at it.

I will miss some parts of being in the league -- I will not miss the blinding rage that came with failure, or the obsessive behaviour where I would try and figure out where it went wrong.

One of my good friends who has helped me out a lot over the years has basically stopped talking to me once I told him I was leaving at the end of the year. This is someone who I have visited for 20 years to watch baseball games in Detroit. It's a shame, but I can't really blame them -- they are even more invested in the league than I am.

I build the web site and some other administrative tools that are used to run the league. I am going to transfer ownership of those projects to him and that will be the end of my involvement.

It will be very strange to change the hobby to just be trying to enjoy watching the Blue Jays on TV and not get upset when I player I have on my pretend team not do well.

Hobbies should be fun. I want to have the ones I participate in to be fun. The Monrovia Madness, the team I "owned" for 28 years, was no longer fun. Don't let your hobbies become obsessions. Take it from me.

Current mood: 3/5