Baseball season has been described many ways over the years. The most used analogy is that you have to approach the 162-game schedule as a marathon. This of course means that over a six-month season you cannot let yourself get too excited about the moment you are in.

The thing about the length of a season is that by its length it overcomes the short-term winning streaks and losing streaks to show you what your team really is. In some cases that is a surprise and a step forward as compared to the previous season or in many cases the sheer length of time shows the glaring holes in a roster which justifies the losing record.

I’ve normally adhered to this adage of the season being a marathon. If you ask my wife, by the eighth of August when we have attended 57 home games the season feels like a never-ending death march.

This Diamondbacks season though it feels less like a marathon and more like Disney’s Tower of Terror.

When you first arrive at Disney’s Hollywood Studios you can see Tower of Terror looming over the park majestically dwarfing all other structures around it. (Fun fact: Tower of Terror in Florida is 199 feet tall. The reason for that particular height is that it is if it were taller, it would require an aircraft beacon which Disney felt would detract from the guest’s belief in the backstory of the attraction.). It stands as a challenge waiting to be conquered.

As you approach the ride, the building seems to grow which adds to the excitement but also to the nervousness wondering if you have what it takes to go through with it. Leading up to this moment you’ve told everyone how brave you are and that Tower of Terror doesn’t frighten you one bit. There are other rides that are scarier than this one.

You begin you walk on the property that leads to the entrance. It is meticulously themed to make you believe that you are walking into a dilapidated hotel from 1939 but you cannot help but admire the level of detail that Imagineers have put into this. You excitement continues to grow the closer you get.

When the ride actually starts, you look around and maybe in the back of your mind you think, “if this goes bad, these are the people who I’ll die with.” But you think, there are worse ways to go, at least you will be going out with similar diehard fans.

The cast members check all the safety devices to make sure that you are securely fastened thereby minimizing the thoughts that anything back could possibly happen.

Initially the ride will slowly lift you up while telling you the compelling saga of how this used to be a grand hotel that hosted many historical figures and where everyone wanted to be. You are provided descriptions and visual cues of those long-gone memories and think that perhaps with a little work this old hotel could once again be a destination that everyone talks about.

You are caught up in the story telling and lulled into a state of grandeur. Without really noticing, you have climbed to the top. Just to show you how much you have climbed, the doors are opened, and you can see out over the entire Disney property.

But before you can even take in all the beauty of what you can see or appreciate what the view looks like, the floor suddenly falls out from underneath you and all that hard work it took to get you to the very top floor is suddenly taken away. It is a freefall to the basement.

It feels as though you are going to fall forever. In a brief moment you are impressed at how high you had to go and how lofty the top really was but all that feeling of accomplishment of being at the top is replaced but the fact that falling from this height would seriously kill you.

You are also thanking your lucky stars that the cast member making minimum wage checked your seat belt to make sure you didn’t fly out of the car during the decent. But then you question your life choices of why you trusted your life to a kid that is making the same as that friend you had in High School that dropped out to become the reason your local McDonalds McFlurry machine is always broken.

As suddenly as you started falling you stop. You think to yourself that you survived but the struggle is not over. Your elevator car rises again and then suddenly drops. This sequence seems to go on forever and you are left feeling that you have become a human yo-yo with a frayed string.

In the end you find yourself back in the basement and the belt releases come on. You quickly try to gather your belongings and any kind of dignity you have left after screaming and crying like a baby and exit the car all while attempting to show a brave face.

Walking back to street level of the park you vow to yourself that you are never going to subject yourself to that again. You can hear the people currently on the ride screaming like you were just moments ago and wonder how you missed that when you were walking into the building.

For Diamondbacks fans, we are right now in that never-ending freefall. The team has now lost six games in a row. Some have been by huge bottomless drops like the 12-1 beating in Minnesota and others are smaller drops like missing out on beating the Dodgers by a single run. Nevertheless, you now find yourself exiting the ride just where you started, at 57-57 the same winning percentage as when you started.

Yeah, the baseball season, at least this one, is a Tower of Terror marathon. I’m just not sure how much longer my nerves can take this.