Leading up to the trade deadline, all I wanted for the Phillies was a starting pitcher. Please get a starter, please get a starter, please get a starter, my brain muttered, despite the fact that they insist upon not consulting me at all before they do things, which is a real insult to my several years of paying attention to the team.

My hierarchy of needs (Phillies edition), where a starting pitcher is water, a left-handed middle reliever is love and belonging, and a great right fielder is self-actualization, was based on a couple of things. The big two were the Malaise of Aaron Nola, a sad story now a couple of seasons old, and the Protracted Elevation of Andrew Painter, a drama in which fans are still trying to work out whether we are waiting for Cristopher Sánchez Part 2 (people do not always remember he took a while to become fully nasty as a pitcher) or, you know. Godot.

I had a lot of opportunities to ponder the nature of baseball fandom sitting in the stands for three straight Phillies-Orioles games in Baltimore. The Phillies had the worst record in baseball since the All-Star break coming into the weekend; they’d gone from contending for the NL East lead to clinging to a wild card spot, and it was hard not to wonder whether they were already off the cliff and in the air, Wile E. Coyote-style.

During the game on Friday, which the Phillies lost 6-4, I spent a lot of time thinking about why I wasn’t angry. Wasn’t everything going wrong? Wasn’t the season, and perhaps the whole era, kind of slipping away? Don’t I see people every day condemning their own teams as bums and losers, wanting them all traded? Why did I mostly feel a possibly perverse desire to big-sister this bunch of professional athletes, like, “You got this, I believe in you.” I tend to be disappointed for them, not in them. I certainly know the cause is not optimism, because I am not optimistic. In fact, I inherited a certain tendency to conclude my team is going to lose the minute anything bad happens.