The start of these things tends to feel simultaneously blessed and mundane; usually, it has to do with where you were born. You meet them at the right place, right time; there are predictable sparks and rudimentary feelings, new patterns that morph into comfortable nooks in well-worn routines. Merchandise is purchased; affirmations are sworn; a bond is formed. There's a certain expectation of loyalty, a web of unspoken rules and attention-seeking feedback loops that came with the oath; an honor to keep on through the bad times, and honor that is perhaps even more rewarding than the pleasure to be reaped from celebration.

That is, of course, the hilarious thing: How many of us don't even particularly like the teams with whom we've sworn our summertime oath? But there is no trading up here; no one said this was supposed to be pleasant. If you want to enjoy your sports, baseball fandom is not for you, my dear. This is not for the faint of heart.

There are, among us with team loyalties, the oath breakers. Sometimes a certain something creeps in, a wink or a chill, an attraction that becomes slippery from the start. Often, these disloyalists surreptitiously mask their perversion as harmless flirtation, the way one makes the most sterile of water cooler conversations just to preserve the small afternoon oasis that is chit-chat with Beautiful Co-worker. Maybe your schedules just line up better, and suddenly it's not them you're seeing all the time, it's them. Maybe one team just isn't enough. Maybe one team could never be enough because how could there ever be enough baseball.

Or maybe I'm just a masochist.

What I'm trying to say is this: Hello, I'm Leigh. I'm a Tampa Bay Rays fan, and I've been cheating on my team.

the truth was that Oakland just played baseball like they fucking wanted to be there. And I missed that.

It started early in the season, but escalated quickly. From spring onward, I'd watch the Rays circle the drain on the East coast, then tune into watch the back-end of West Coast games, curling up with Oakland late at night when I was alone and working. Rarely did I miss a Rays game in favor of my scarlet A's, but friends of mine still balked at the idea that I would cheat within the same league.

Still, I really didn't think much of it until my husband began noticing that I didn't seem as sad as usual after weathering a string of Tampa Bay shutouts. "You're taking this better than last year," he'd say, and I'd laugh, chalking it up to the fact that the team was better in 2013 and therefore had been torturing me with the icicle spikes of October hopes. But I knew, deep down, that my nonchalant dismissals of Tampa Bay losses were soothed by the balm of time spent watching a team good enough to make me forget.

But, as much as I wanted it to be mere distraction, to chalk it up to late nights working and crippling insomnia, the truth was that Oakland just played baseball like they fucking wanted to be there. And I missed that. After the Rays were finished swatting their bats around like washed-up basket cases and children waiting for permission, Oakland came out swinging, weird and ballsy and probably in need of a shower. Plus they had a possum. My friend once described Oakland's bench as looking like a meth trailer with the side blown clean off; naturally, it was love at first sight. Meanwhile, Tampa Bay just seemed felonious, tragic; I couldn't help but feel like I was watching them exsanguinate, night after night, 162 times in a row.

I started having these weird conversations with my spouse late at night, where I'd lie in bed and discuss broadly hypothetical conditions under which a person could abandon their fandom. The Rays made me fairly miserable on a fairly consistent basis, and besides, I was currently not watching them play, unable to root for a team with literal rapist Josh Lueke in regular bullpen rotation.

It's notable, I think, that within days of Lueke getting the ax, I was back to watching the Rays again. And honestly, it wasn't even a total boycott, as I'd been watching the starters pitch intermittently, and then bailing once guys started warming in the pen. But, with Lueke gone, I resumed what now could only be described as a seemingly pathological fandom for a team I didn't like, which has a shitty fan base of approximately 14 people and no money, plays in a shitty stadium nowhere near my current home, and had been using a widely-known rapist to win a children's game played by adult men in pajamas. And the rapist wasn't even a good pitcher.

Why did I like this team?

I want to say I stopped watching Oakland play while I was avoiding the Rays, but I can't be sure. It sounds noble, the not watching, but surely by now enough of me was enjoying my new role as an American League Hester Prynne to render my resolve inconsistent at best. After all, while the Rays continued to break my heart with felons and trades and injuries and sexist remarks from otherwise likable players, there was Oakland in the dead of night, and its penchant for extra-innings meant 2 a.m. baseball in its wild-eyed company.

"What if we just became Oakland fans?" I'd ask my partner when no one else was around. "Are we allowed to do that? Can I just do that? God, it feels so dirty."

And then he'd look at me with a mix of patience and pity reminiscent of kindergarten teachers with potty accidents on their hands, kiss me on the forehead and announce that "God, baseball fans are weird." He'd assure me that I'm allowed to like whichever team I want and that baseball was meaningless and we'd laugh and I'd go back to chattering about Sam Fuld, and then that would be it.

Well, at least until The Incident.

I did not take news of Joe Maddon's departure well, nor did I react with the grace befitting any person over the age of 4.

It was this, not moving away from Florida, not a literal rapist on the team, but the loss of Tampa Bay's penguin-petting skipper, that was the final straw. And with the heart of the team gone, I was now ready to break up with the Rays. This was not unlike a human-to-human breakup, if I'm being honest. I ranted to my friends (none of whom have a single, lonesome fuck to give, naturally), I announced the split online, I made melodramatic and thoroughly maudlin jokes about my heartache, and even found the time to actually do some weird mourning in my own private, shameful way. Because that was the strange part: Bewildering as it was, I was actually sad.

Long story short, in my attempts to stop liking a thing that does not like me back in order to like another thing that will not like me back, I failed tremendously. So much so that today I am still enough of a sucker to be mad about losing Wil Myers to that team so well camouflaged everyone forgets it exists. And try as I might, I just couldn't stoke the kindling of my scarlet A's into a fire big enough to keep me warm without my stupid Tampa Bay Rays.

It's a sobering moment when one realizes that they not only operate willingly within the absurdist framework of "proper" fandom, but that they've chosen to do so in a manner guaranteed to induce misery. Why not just like a team who wins? Why not like a team with money? Why chose not to watch a team you like? Jesus Christ, who do you think makes the rules here, people?

It seems to me that if millions of people like me are choosing miserable fan experiences and backing loser teams, then there's more to it than just the desperate masochism of modern day ennui. Perhaps it's that we humans are more tightly bound by struggle, rather than easy times and pleasurable memories; to wit, you may not remember who helped you throw the party, but you will sure as hell remember who helped you clean that disgusting mess up. If the struggle makes it real, could it be that those of us who love struggling teams feel closer to said dumpster fires because we've, well, been through the shit together? I picture baseball fandom, those long-suffering Jays fans and crackpot Mets supporters, and I can't help but think it see their show of support like a monk wearing a cilice. We are here not because you are good, the fans say, but because there's a chance you might be.

Of course, this all raises the possibility that my attempt to pry myself away from the abyss of Rays fandom was foiled by precisely the dismal chain of events that inspired it. Do I love them more because, like steel, the bones of my hilariously one-sided feelings were forged in the hottest fires of misery?

Oh God.

You know what, I think that's enough for now.

And please don't ever trade Evan Longoria.