Unfortunately, the Cubs season has been one long run of disappointment so far, and things don’t seem to be looking up at all. Fans of the Cubs at this point are basically just hoping it doesn’t hurt too much — we’re mostly putting our arms up and asking for it not to be right in the face if possible.

But I have gleamed something worthwhile from this baseball season so far, and that is a growing deeper appreciation for the game itself. Last year, I followed a bunch of Cubs tweeters, and while they gave me a lot of fun and good insight on my team, I didn’t get much news from the rest of the league. So this season I pulled up what I thought were a few good league-wide baseball blogs, and they’ve been extremely interesting reading even outside of the Cubs’ disappointing gameplay. I’ve learned fun things about numbers from all over the league, whether baseball is actually running out of records to break, Jackie Robinson day (call me dumb, but I didn’t know such a thing existed — how awesome), heard a great story from a Philly blogger about catching a foul ball for his kid, and gotten to watch a mascot fall off of a dugout overhead. Don’t worry, he wasn’t hurt at all.

Sports, to me, have always seemed pretty impenetrable — I never really had the time or interest to follow anything specifically, and the traditional sports talk (in which a bunch of dudes throw around names and numbers while subtly competing with each other about who knows the best or who can be the most dismissive) has never appealed to me much. But what I’m finding in exploring the bigger world of baseball this year, especially on these blogs, is not only a real sense of community (which is to be expected — what else is the Internet but a series of communications inside various communities), but a real intelligence and wit shining on through. Sports media tends towards the elite — even something like Sportscenter, shown at bars and gyms all over the country, has to keep the names and references coming to keep “real” sports fans hooked. But these blogs that I’m reading about baseball, especially the best of them, offer up no such walls or hurdles. Haven’t heard of the players they’re joking about? They link off their names, so you can go see them online, where they’ve been and what they’ve done. Don’t know what RISP or OBP are? They explain it, they link it, and they give a little insight along with the opinion.

For the most part (having followed Cubs bloggers and twitterers for over a year now, I do go a little deeper on the Cubs side, so there are a few bloggers I read who aren’t so accessible), the tone is jovial, and inclusive, and fun. And that’s really refreshing — even if my Cubs don’t win, I can jump into the baseball section of my RSS reader and hear a good baseball story or learn something interesting about a game that went down last night.

I like it. I don’t know if it’s just the way baseball is right now (it seems like as sports go, this one is pretty popular), or if the Internet really has made more of these connections and story-sharing circles possible, or, more likely, some combination of those two. But I’m surprisingly myself with how interested I’ve become not only in my own team, but the sport in general.

Not that it’s helped me — I downloaded the MLB 10 The Show demo the other day, and just got crushed (I’m looking around for a softball league or something like that — maybe I’ll do better in real life). But it has made a terrible Cubs season more fun so far.