For Phillies fans overseas, their playoff heartbreak is magnified by being far away from the team they love

TEL AVIV, Israel — Being a sports fan can feel like embracing a life of frustration, anger, and confusion. This goes double for Philly fans, because expectations are so often high, and so rarely met. And the ridiculousness of it goes through the roof for career expatriates like myself who, through the digital magic of 21st-century technology, have the choice of deciding to suffer before screens, far away from the team they love, in the middle of the night.

Especially in October. As was the case for me in Tel Aviv this week, as I stayed up till 3 a.m. my time to watch the favored Phillies fall to the hated New York Mets. That prematurely ended a season in which I must have seen over 100 games, mostly lasting into the morning hours. I’m Class of ‘81 from Upper Merion High, which means I’m not that young anymore. So all of it is silly.

The whole thing is a vexation because, despite the intense emotion fanhood generates, it makes so little sense. The teams we think we love are businesses, not family — no matter their protestations. Every decision is driven by financial gain, from player trades to overpriced tickets and merchandise. The players are millionaires, the owners are billionaires, and we’re all stuck on the sidelines, emotionally invested in something that’s mostly a corporate venture.

The players we are supposed to adore can be traded, often on the whim of general managers we disdain. (I still cannot forgive Ruben Amaro Jr. for his 2009 ditching of brilliant starting pitcher Cliff Lee, and now Eagles fans disgusted at the porous 2024 defense are cursing Howie Roseman’s abandonment of sack machine Haason Reddick in March.)

And even if your team is great, they rarely win it all, so your season will likely end in disappointment. For the majority of fans, the season concludes in loss and heartbreak if they make the playoffs — or in irrelevance if they don’t.

And that’s the truly maddening part — the paradox of supporting a good team. Since we are rooting for our teams to win, logic suggests that at least fans of a good team would experience greater or more frequent joy. Wrong: Given the way most people are wired, the better the team, the worse the experience for the fan.

This is because of human psychology. Studies reveal the dominance of expectations in determining happiness. So for sports fans, yes, the highs are high — but the lows are devastating, to a more powerful degree.

If a team is expected to win, the disappointment of an early playoff exit is crushing, especially for baseball fans who invested an excruciatingly long season of 162 games in the expectation of October joy. You stop enjoying the games and instead live in a constant state of anxiety, praying your team doesn’t blow it. By the end of the season, you’re more likely to feel anger than love for your team, unless they win the championship.

The bizarre truth is that it’s psychologically better, for many, to root for a mediocre team where the stakes are low. A losing team lets you shrug off losses without agony. There is a chance — a small chance, but it exists — that you might experience what they tell us is the actual purpose of the enterprise: love of the game.

The Phillies are a perfect case study. They won their division, secured a playoff bye, and faced the Mets in a best-of-five tournament. We knew anything short of a World Series win would have ignited rage — but certainly going down 3-1 for an early exit. Fans feel the crushing weight of wildly unmet expectations. There is little joy in the experience.

For expatriates like myself, the situation is especially exasperating. Work and home life suffer amid a constant grogginess. The mockery of one’s foreign friends is cruel. The syndrome has a name, which I made up: “expat sports disorder.” Why does it exist — how could all this be? That, clearly, is the question.

It’s psychologically better to root for a mediocre team where the stakes are low. A losing team lets you shrug off losses without agony.

Because being a fan is a devotion that defies logic, as we have seen. But there is certainly something else. An optimist — or a lover of the counterintuitive — might view it as a beautiful madness. It’s not about joy, obviously. Not really. Perhaps it’s about shared suffering — enduring the highs and lows with a group of people who care just as irrationally as you do. Community, even among strange people, is a powerful urge that can overcome the constraints of space and time.

I grew up in King of Prussia, just outside Philadelphia, and once told my friend Roger that I would dedicate my life to the study of human absurdity (some would argue that, as a journalist, I actually have). “You’ll never get out of King of Prussia,” quipped Roger. We laughed and laughed and laughed, little elitists that we were.

But the joke is now on me. I did get out of King of Prussia, but Philadelphia somehow stayed within me. Now my study of absurdity focuses squarely on myself.

Dan Perry is the former Cairo-based Middle East editor and London-based Europe/Africa editor of the Associated Press, the former chairman of the Foreign Press Association in Jerusalem, the author of two books, and a long-suffering Philly sports fan. Follow him at danperry.substack.com.