Dearest Dodgers, you’re giving me the Blues.

Two things made me fall in love with baseball in 2006: the realization that they’re on every day and the website Dodger Blues. Around this time in my life (May/June) I was going through a deep depression brought on by future fears and the extant pressures of life after high school.

I was about to go to college and my roller coaster hobby didn’t feel adult enough to carry on into the next phase of my life. I was really self-conscious and cared far too deeply about what people thought of me. The internet felt like one of the few places I could truly be myself because of the mild-to-moderate anonymity. But I had fallen away from a lot of my Internet Friends who I’d met online and hung out with at Six Flags. Most everyone my age on America’s Coaster Network and Westcoaster was moving on to something else and it seemed I should do the same. Honestly, though, it’d started to feel like my sense of humor was different from the people posting on those coaster sites. It felt like I wanted something more “adult.” Y’know, a place where you can swear and stuff.

Dodger Blues was a baseball message board that was uncensored and offensive and louche. I can’t remember how I found the site, I just remember thinking it was everything the coaster boards weren’t. It was the wild west built on rooting for a terrible team that was under the auspice of a questionable owner. Suddenly, I had a new hobby and a new community built around it. In the beginning—and all throughout 2007 too—it was as much about getting to post on the site as it was about watching the games. It was that watching the games allowed me to be a part of the conversation.

And the games we watched that year were… Well? Not the best most of the time. In 2006, Russell Martin and Andre Ethier were in their rookie season. We had that 4+1 game on September 18. It was high tide in the McCourt era—a naïve time when we thought he was just a bad owner and not a greedy little cuss who stole from the team. So basically there was a lot to complain about. While the team played terribly, we reveled in loving to hate it.

Dodger Blues closed up shop and my 2,000+ posts about how much I disliked JD Drew drifted into the ether early in the decade but I stuck with following the team because I’ve come to love the game in spite of it seemingly being a three-hour snorefest. It’s all in the rhythm of the game and the fact that there’s no play clock. When the ball has left the pitcher’s hand and hasn’t reached home plate, anything is possible.