Well, we won again, and we're still second. I just don't know how to handle it.

I walked to the stadium. It's nearly an hour's walk, but I felt like stretching my legs. On the way over I saw two men hunched over an A to Z, and deduced they must be Stoke fans. I showed them the way, and we compared seasons.

This has happened to me a few times on the way to games, and I always enjoy it when it does. That whole thing about rival English football fans fighting all the time is a bit passe these days. Oh, there's taunting during the games. The fans are segregated, and some like to gibber and flaunt at each other, but there's always a line of police between them. Which is why they do it, obviously. Outside the stadium, where taunting has the potential to lead to some kind of fisticuffs, you rarely see any.

Most of the away fans come by bus, so they never actually come face to face with City fans, but there's always a few who come by train or live locally. In all the games I've been to, this led to trouble precisely once. I missed the initial incident, but I did see a Middlesbrough fan flat on the ground with a heaving mound of policemen on him. My first instinct was that the fan had fallen over and one of the policemen had shouted 'all pile on!', but apparently he'd provoked their intervention by being a bit naughty. What kind of naughty I'm not sure, but I think it was somewhere between a ruck and a maul.

In the stadium yesterday, fairly much all the taunting and flaunting was saved for the Stoke manager, Tony Pulis. He was City's manager for six months back in 1999, and recently won a poll for the least popular manager in the history of the club. When I mentioned this to the Stoke fans, they said he'd been voted their least popular manager ever as well.

Pulis took a different angle. He told the BBC that he was brought up a Rovers player and it was always going to be difficult transferring allegiance when I became City manager, thus implying that we disliked him for reasons of local rivalry.

This was not the case. No-one I spoke to even mentioned his past with Rovers. He was remembered as a manager with a taste for defensive, boring football that sent everyone to sleep. Yesterday he turned up with a very tall team with a natural talent for the blatant foul but no obvious ball skills, and it reminded everyone of the bad old days.

Our team aren't the tallest, bless them, and they realised there was no point playing the long ball. Almost by default they were forced back on the passing game, and very elegant it was too, like watching a pack of hyenas run rings round some giraffes. Elliott scored a wonder goal, and I remembered not to Dare to Hope.

I was asked why Daring to Hope was such a problem. It all goes back to the Roman era, and a philosopher and man of letters called Seneca. His work was based on the observation of other upper class Romans around him, who despite living in the lap of luxury, with massive wealth and slaves to indulge their every whim, didn't seem as happy as they might have been. His said this was because their good fortune encouraged them to set their expectations beyond anything real life could ever deliver, and that if they could learn to expect less they'd be happier.

I'm sure you've immediately spotted the main problem with the argument, which is that in real life results are not independent of your expectations. If you're not confident about getting the job, you're less likely to get it. If you feel threatened walking home at night, you're more likely to be attacked.

The success or otherwise of your sports team, however, is almost entirely independent of your expectations, which is why fans have such a deep sense of pessimism. Some fans haven't even read all Seneca's writings, but on some level we are all aware of the absurdity of our position, filling an entire layer of our happiness trifle with essentially trivial events we have no influence over when we could be filling it with custard, so we compensate for our inability to control the team by exercising a rigid control over our attitude to the team. By refusing to indulge hubris, we feel that we negate the possibility of nemesis. We don't, of course, events roll on exactly as they would otherwise have done, but in our minds we've participated in the collective drama.

From the sublime Seneca and Bristol City, to Christians in baseball. You may remember I said a few weeks ago that my heart was with the Red Sox, but the cold, dead hand of statistics was pointing with bony finger straight at the Yankees. Well, the Yankees went out in the first round of the playoffs, and the Red Sox are 3-0 in the World Series. It's the best out of seven, so one more win does it. Strike up another victory for Not Daring to Hope. Unless - but no. Just no, OK?

Not that irrationality in baseball always works. Look at the Colorado Rockies, for instance. They think they're batting for Jesus. Their owner, half the staff and some of their star players are Bible bashers of the most trying kind. To quote their general manager, Dan O'Dowd, You look at some of the games we're winning. Those aren't just a coincidence. God has definitely had a hand in this.

So it gives me great pleasure to report that it's Colorado that the Red Sox are 3-0 up against. Battling bravely against Matt Holliday, a strong bull pen and God Almighty, they've scored 25 runs to 7 conceded, and could wrap it up tonight. The last Colorado batter ground out after a shattered bat, which Jesus perhaps intended to symbolise the breaking of his body upon the cross. Or some nonsense. Just make it up as you go along, it's what they do.

Teleological nonsense aside, though, I do enjoy the baseball. To compare it to rounders, as some English people do, is to miss the complexity and intensity of it. Did you play rounders at school? What was your Earned Run Average? When batting, what was your On Base Percentage? Well bugger off then.

But I would like to complain about a couple of things. Firstly, the nationalism. It's all very well having the national anthem at Cup Finals, but you really don't need it every game. At World Series games they actually have two national anthems - The Star Spangled Banner, which at least has a bit of history in it (although it's always worth mentioning that the American War of Independence was actually a military victory for the French), and then at halftime, which for some reason comes three quarters of the way through, the nauseating piece of shit which is God Save America. If they sang God Save Colorado it would at least be funny.

And the commentators don't seem to be able to get through an inning without reading out some dreary email from Sergeant Redneck, on the USS Warcrime in the Persian Gulf somewhere. Give it a rest, guys. We know about Abu Ghraib even if you don't.

Even worse than the Gott Mitt Uns nationalism is the chewing. Gum, nuts, sesame seeds, the mastication never stops. And bubble blowing, and spitting. If they really must, then at least the cameras could stop zooming in on it.

But I shouldn't nitpick. After all, the Red Sox are about to win the World Series (there, I've said it), City are second and Leeds won again to move into the playoff places in League One - a remarkable performance by them under the circumstances, which completes my trilogy of cautious joy. Go me!