These days I hear a foolish adage kicked around way too often: there's no reason to like baseball unless you have a team playing; it has no reason to exist outside of your local or favorite team! Your team or the mega market Yankees, Red Sox, Cubs, Dodgers, Angels if its not one of them!

No disrespect whatsoever to everyone here with team loyalties, but give me a break! If that were true, ballpark chasing would not be as fun, and this site wouldn't exist. All those rotisserie, fantasy leagues wouldn't exist because no one would be paying attention to anyone outside one team. The All-Star Game should just be cancelled. They might as well close Cooperstown and leave everything at each team's hall of fame. It just gets more and more ridiculous the more I think about it.

Okay, I have the utmost respect to those who follow a team so closely. It's just never been so much the way I've followed baseball. It's not what I learned from being schooled on Ken Burns. It's not the way I think every October. It's not what I think no matter where I am on a beautiful summer night, in the midst of a playoff race, with a hot dog, pretzel and a good seat. To me it's MLB first, Giants second. The World Series is the Super Bowl.