July 14, 2011: Mariners 0, Rangers 5 (43-49)

Jeez, they’re STILL playing these games? Why? Nobody cares anymore. Nobody is getting emotionally invested in these games. Not one person in Seattle harbors any illusion that the Mariners are heading towards anything but failure. The team is finished. Kaput. Dead men walking. And yet, still, they walk. They left the plank a while ago, but somehow their legs keep propelling them forward, gracefully cutting through the air as they descend to the lapping waves and Davy Jones’ Locker below.

People are still watching, too. I would continue beating the high seas metaphor to death, maybe with a line comparing the Mariners’ fans to captured ship’s passengers, standing on the deck watching the original crew march to their deaths and thinking “Wow, I am so lucky that that isn’t happening to me. This is an incredible life-changing experience, and I am going to infuse it with meaning in order to shape my life for the better”, even though they’re just gonna die eventually too anyways, and so on and so forth, but I actually have too much respect for baseball to go down that route.

Today is the start of the best part of the baseball season. There’s no longer any obligation to watch the games, pay close attention to the team, care whether they get humiliated on national television for the infinitieth time. No obligations at all. Now, you can take a step away and just view baseball as background noise. It’s going on. It’s there for you if you want to passively listen to it while trimming the hedges or whatever. Whether you care or not, it’s something that really is always there, no matter where “there” is. And then you take another step away, and you realize that it’s not always there. For starters, there’s the offseason. Six months a year, baseball does not get played. And what about all those cities that don't get to have a Major League Baseball team playing in their backyard, representing the pride of their hometown night in and night out? What about all those countries that don’t even have baseball at all? And hey, let’s not forget, baseball has only been played for about 150 years. The number of years in which baseball has not been played is, um, bigger. We’re incredibly lucky to be living in this infinitesimal sliver of space and time in which baseball is an immediately accessible cultural thing. When you realize that, hearing a baseball game becomes something a bit different. Something a bit more special. It’s the sound of summer. It’s the sound of childhood. It’s the sound of dreams and memories and the greater culture that unites us all. It’s the sound of humanity. It’s beautiful.

Er, today’s game: from a Mariners perspective, this game came as close as possible to having literally nothing happen. It was so good at this that you couldn’t even say that it was noteworthy for having nothing happen. Maybe you could extract some interesting information from this game if you care about what the Rangers did, but the Rangers are just a bunch of people I’ll never meet who happened to play a sports game against some other people I’ll never meet. That isn’t quite enough to make me care. If you reeaaaally want some analysis and statistics, here’s a statistic for you: “0”. That’s quite a round number, isn’t it? Yeah. Think about that one for a while.