Rongey: Don't forget this special time for baseball

You know, I like football season. I really do.

For someone who spends a majority of his year focusing on baseball, it might seem like it's the only sport I care about, but that isn't true.

I love this time of year, and I enjoy that for three hours, once a week, just about everyone in the city wants the same thing for the same team. There's a great deal of community in that from a town that spends the summer divided against itself.

But as entertaining as the next months will be, September always carries with it a little bit of sadness, for me anyway. It's terrible timing that the country's most popular sport gets underway at the same time some of the year's best baseball gets played.

I love playoff baseball, and often the races leading up to the postseason are just as thrilling.

Take this season: Both the American League Central and National League West races are far from decided, three teams have a legitimate claim at the AL wild card, and the NL wild card is even more unclear with four teams in hot pursuit.

Like many others, the end of this baseball season is going to be a fun one, even if the White Sox aren't a part of it.

It's a contradiction on my part because I'm usually the person who tells you not to let overall team coverage or ratings affect your enjoyment of baseball. In the end, it doesn't matter how many other people are watching. It only matters that you are.

Yet, I just can't help but want that same sort of "community" when it comes to baseball's finish.

I want us all in it together as we learn if the Milwaukee will be able hang on to that second wild card after having the best start in baseball. I want you to be watching along if Pittsburgh makes it to the playoffs in consecutive years. I want you to be talking about it with me if Detroit misses the postseason for the first time in four years and Kansas City makes it for the first time in almost 30.

What I don't want to be is the guy who just witnessed a leprechaun save a puppy from a burning building. "Did anyone just see that?! You were watching the Bills-Texans game? Oh."

Maybe I'm the soccer fan trying to convince the rest of his American friends just how great that sport is (for the record, I like soccer quite a bit, too, but not enough to try to convince you).

But when teams play as many games as these clubs do, only to have the last few make all the difference in the world, it makes the ending that much more intense.

They play nearly every day for six months and often that last Sunday still matters.

Think about that.

If we fall into some luck, we'll have a regular-season finale like we had in 2011, when all wild cards weren't decided until the night was over. Heck, maybe we'll even be treated to a Game 163.

And as Sox fans know, pleasurable anxiety like that is tough to duplicate.

• Chris Rongey is the host of the White Sox pregame and postgame shows on WSCR 670-AM The Score. Follow him on Twitter@ChrisRongey and at chrisrongey.com.