Like most sensible people, I hate interleague play. I can describe this hatred, but to explain it would be to do violence to the depth of my contempt for a misbegotten, half-animate monstrosity. Asking me why I hate interleague play is like asking me why I love my wife, democracy, or Prospect Park. It’s insulting.

And like others, I’ve tried to make this visceral, irrational anger more respectable by claiming it’s caused by one of a number of implausible reasons. I have, for instance, said that I value tradition and thus don’t like seeing National League teams play American League teams in May. This is embarrassing. Baseball tradition is a concept rich men who own ballclubs use to make money, not something to be valued for its own sake. Notable baseball traditions of the same vintage as league demarcation include racial segregation, throwing World Series games, and alcoholism.

I’ve also claimed to dislike interleague play because it’s a new contrivance of modern, Croesian owners, who in their naked lust for money have prostituted the game’s integrity. This, too, is nonsense. It’s an old idea. In 1933, William Veeck Sr., as president of the Cubs, implored his fellow owners to see reason and give the people interleague play. Twenty years later, his more famous son Bill, owner of the St. Louis Browns, proposed the same idea. Six years after that, the American League owners actually voted in favor of it. Anyway, as the younger Veeck rightly pointed out every time he had the chance, baseball has no integrity and would be useless if it did.

I’ve further based my dislike for interleague play on the ridiculous series that have to be played as part of the price for supposedly glamorous Yankees-Mets and Cubs-White Sox games. This is valid to a point — there is no reason for a Padres-Mariners game — but ultimately this point, too, is nonsense. Yankees-Mets games are offensive in their own right. If every small-market team had its own glamorous natural rivalry, this would change nothing.

There are many more reasons for hating interleague play. Some of them are credible. Along with Royals-Rockies games, we also have to suffer the unbalanced schedule because of interleague play. The fates of baseball teams, like those of college football teams, are now subject to the vagaries of schedule makers. Teams can legitimately complain that they ‘re being rooked out of fair shots at playoff berths because they have to play tough teams from the other league while their rivals play patsies.

The distinctive and unique qualities of the World Series are gone because of interleague play, as is much of the prestige of winning the World Championship.

Interleague play, though, is not to be scorned because it has evil effects. Its evil is fundamental to its nature. By its existence alone, interleague play marks out the rest of the schedule as unworthy of notice — filled with meaningless games of little consequence, mere preludes to the garish spectacles on offer at the beginning and midpoint of summer.

The slow, comfortable rhythm and routine of the long season, into which we should just now be settling as May winds into its final days, is suddenly broken; the charms of small games against minor teams give sudden, abrupt way to games of apocalyptic consequence.

We have now endured a decade of this, a decade during which baseball has become more popular than ever and baseball players and owners have made more money than anyone ever thought possible. We will endure it for decades to come. The public has its tastes, and for mystifying reasons the public will rise to the customary pitch of warlike enthusiasm when the Yankees and Mets meet this weekend for their 18th exercise in reducing our national pastime to the level of a crosstown high school football rivalry.

There is no hope for those of us who know that interleague play is an abomination. All we can do is ignore it, and the irksomely chipper rationalizations and half-honest proofs that seek to force us not only to endure but actively enjoy it, as best we can. It will pass. The unwelcome interruption of the season will end. Baseball, soon enough, will return.

tmarchman@nysun.com