The Fickle Size Of Expectation

Watching Manchester United waltz through West Bromwich Albion--2-0 at the 30 minute mark with a Javier Hernandez goal a highlight for my fantasy team--and knowing that Newcastle United are losing 2-0 at home to Wigan, I am confronted again with the question of expectations in sports.

It's hard to say that there is always a David versus Goliath factor, in the sense that 9 times out of 10 Goliath will win. West Brom recently beat Arsenal, after all. But there is a scale of economics that over the course of the season tends to weight the odds. I had hoped that Newcastle would come back up as a top-of-the-table club, that their relegation was a fluke. But it looks like they really have been on a slide, and that their exile in the Championship, even if they did bounce right back up, left them weakened as a club, not in a position to pay for the players they need to challenge the top teams.

This adds nuance to the season, in the sense that relegation battles and position in the standings become metaphors for adapting to one's station in life, and that winning a championship is not the only hallmark of a successful season.

The flip side of lowered expectations for Newcastle is the season that the Giants have had in Major League Baseball. For all the stress I went through in the final weeks of the pennant race, you would think that I had forgotten that the baseball preview magazine I read in April predicted San Francisco would finish second from last in the division, ahead of only San Diego. In fact, the Giants won the division on the final day of the season in a showdown with the Padres, whose second place finish helped underscore the reason why games are played in the field and not in the minds of journalists, who are kind of like meteorologists in that they are occasionally right, but clearly not prescient.

To look at things objectively, the Giants, in the playoffs for the first time since 2003, having beaten the Braves 3 games to 1 in the Divisional Series to advance to the National League Championship Series against the Phillies, are playing with house money. That may be an unfortunate metaphor in light of the Pete Rose story, but I'll go with it. Nevertheless, when the Giants lost game two against the Braves, I was distraught, convinced that every failure of the Giants was a failure of mine. Somewhere, I thought, a racist white conservative Republican fan of Atlanta was experiencing a moment of validation as a human being, which is utterly ridiculous, of course. Such a person could never be validated as a human being.

As I write this, West Brom knocks in a pinball goal, cutting the lead to 2-1. David is limbering up his slingshot arm.

So, with expectation being the fickle, changing, subjectively emotional beast it is, should I be satisfied with the Giants finishing in the top four teams, even if they can't overcome the Phillies, particularly with the Dodgers having suffered a shambles of a season? Probably. Would I be satisfied? Probably not, but watch this space. And more precisely, read what I write when content fills this space again.

And West Brom just tied Manchester United at Old Trafford. Wow. This is why we watch sports. Expectations are meant to be overturned.