A Glass Case of Emotion

As the prophet Ron Burgundy once shouted, “I’m in a glass case of emotion!”  With the Angels at home and the hated Rangers battling the even more hated Yankees mixed with a healthy dose of former Angel heroism, I just don’t know how to react anymore.

http://youtube.com/watch?v=A-qDE1GPyAc

Is there a scenario in life in which Anchorman doesn’t have the perfect quote?

Josh Hamilton was joking around when he pulled the “glass case of emotion” quote from Anchorman, but me, I’m not fooling around.  This ALCS matchup just has me so tied up and twisted inside that I don’t know who I am rooting for anymore.  My friends ask me who I am pulling for and I usually respond that I am hoping for a mid-air collision between the two team planes.  They laugh at the joke, but nobody said I was joking.

On one hand, I have the Yankees.  The Evil Empire.  The very physical manifestation of everything that is wrong with sports.  Nothing as a sports fan upsets me more than when the Yankees win.  Plain and simple, they are fascist.  A big powerful entity that does what it wants, when it wants and doesn’t care about who they hurt along the way.  Plus, I used to live in New York and have a lot of Yankee fan friends.  I assure you, there is nothing more irritating in this life than a front-running, entitled Yankee fan.

Well, that’s not true.  There might be one thing: an upstart, bandwagon-hopping fan of your favorite team’s rival.  Ladies and gentlemen, I give to you the Texas Ranger fan.  Despite the Texas franchise having never won anything ever, there seems to be an uncanny number of brash, mouthy Ranger fans cropping up of late.  Maybe they are real Ranger fans and I just never noticed them before because, well, why would I?  But it doesn’t make them any less annoying.  The would be so perfectly hateable if only their team wasn’t littered with former Angels, and likeable ones at that (if only John Lackey or Jose Guillen were on Texas, this wouldn’t be a problem).

When Bengie Molina hit that big home run for the Rangers on Tuesday night, I couldn’t help but throw my hands up in celebration; it was a totally involuntary reflex.  Your heart has to be made of stone if you are an Angel watching that short ball of perfectly round pudginess circle the basepaths at glacial speed.  Sure, the moment before that I was trying to think of some convoluted scheme to disqualify both teams from the post-season, but I’ll be damned if Bengie Molina didn’t put a smile on my face.  As much as I hate the Rangers, I want to see Bengie do good, and I have no shame in admitting that nothing would please me more than to see Vladimir Guerrero hoist the World Series trophy.  I’d just prefer he did it in a different uniform.

I guess that means I have to pull for the Rangers, right?  That is pretty obviously the station that this whole train of logic is pulling into, isn’t it?  I know that, you know that, the American people know that.  But why does it still feel so dirty and wrong?  Great Odin’s raven, this is difficult!

Now, this is the part of the post where I would like to drop some brilliant twist of logic explaining how I am going to reconcile my rooting interests for the rest of the ALCS.  I would really like to do that, but I can’t, it makes my head hurt too much to even try.