Stop Freaking!

We live in a society of immediacy. People tweet, post on Facebook, carry around smart phones, and get all of their news even before news happens. We need to know everything before everyone else. And with that comes the immediate need for success.

So I want to give sports fans the best advice you'll ever hear. Stop freaking!

Tiger Woods will win eight more majors in the next decade. Just because he hasn’t won one in the last two years does not mean his skills have eroded. He was plagued with drama and had to completely change his life around. Yet he still finished in the Top 10 in back-to-back Masters. Woods will be fine, so stop freaking!

The Yankees and Red Sox will be fighting for the AL East come September. The Red Sox lose a few early games and they need to panic. The Yankees fall two out of three to the same Red Sox and they are old. Let’s be real here. The baseball season is just too long. There’s always this debate of “Are April games meaningless?” No, April games are not meaningless, but when there are 150 games left to play, everything evens out. The good teams win and the bad teams lose. Even if the Yankees lose their next game, its only one game, so stop freaking!

So where did this freaking come from? I definitely feel that the social networking world is part of the problem. Everyone has to magnify everything. A pitcher gives up a three-run homer, and we need to over analyze to pitch, the command, and the location. Soon enough, people get ingrained in their heads negativity and we then believe that the pitcher is now bad. You log onto Twitter, follow 35 fans and writers, and all you see flooding your page is posts on the three-run homer. Then you get involved in the discussion as well, and it completely blows up. One pitch does not make a season, so stop freaking!

I also think football is one of the roots of the issue. Football is the shortest of all of the seasons. It is also the most watched and elicits the most in-game attention. So when your team loses a game, you have to worry. One game is almost 6% of a season. And when football is over, the conditioning it gave us to be into every play carries over to the other sports. Football is unique in its length, but every other sport requires patience. And not every sport is football, so stop freaking!

Sorry to fantasy sports players (including myself), but we can throw that into the blame game. When your own money and pride is on the line, it makes you worry rather quickly. You smell that $5000 first prize, so every week needs to be near perfect. Brandon Phillips is doing to have a bad week. But you drafted him in the 5^th round and he’ll produce like a fifth rounder, so stop freaking!

There’s a time to worry, just give things time to settle. And stop freaking!