July 19, 2011: Mariners 5, Blue Jays 6 (43-53)

My recap of today’s Mariners game isn’t very good. The problems start with the first sentence – it doesn’t say anything about the game, for one thing, but that’s beside the point. Leading with game info is a sure-fire recipe for failure when you’re reporting on the Mariners. The problem really lies in the ideas it sets up – a shamelessly corny gimmick that’s too clever by half. To make it worse, the recap even acknowledges the almost embarrassing nature of the premise, but does nothing to stop the unfolding car wreck. It promises an article that is immediately unsalvageable, no matter where it goes from there.

The second paragraph isn’t much better. There’s still no real baseball related content. Instead, the article does nothing but reveal an author wholly caught up in his own desire to be clever. It looks pretty clearly like a masturbatory ploy to seem creative and self-aware and intelligent, and, while that phrasing is probably a little harsh, it’s hard to argue that that’s not what it is, given the total disregard for the ostensible “purpose” of the article. Obviously, there’s not a lot of respect for the material there. The article is quite hard to read. Not like literally difficult-to-extract-linguistic-meaning-from “hard to read”, but emotionally why-am-I-reading-this-I-feel-embarrassed-for-the-author “hard to read”. I know that I cringe when I look at it.

Finally, after an eternity of self-serving rambling, it gets into some baseball stuff. But it doesn’t actually say anything but the score (6-5, advantage Toronto), and it’s obviously just a token mention with no effort to be interesting. The baseball content is nothing but self-justification, an attempt to seem like there was some kind of point there. It’s an excuse to publish some thoughts that really shouldn’t be shared. And, right there in the article, I point all this out, acknowledge all the problems and the pointlessness and the idiocy, and I keep going anyway.

Eventually I reach a point where it would be natural to go into a conclusion, to end the suffering, but I don’t stop. I ramble away, lost in my own head. It starts to get pretty obvious that there isn’t any kind of mental filter there. All my thoughts are right there on the page, pouring out in all sorts of bore-izontal directions. It’s just tangent after tangent, all of them sort of containing information, but none of them adding up to a purposeful whole. It’s all so self-serving. Certainly not a shining example of the baseball-postgame-recap genre.

By the last paragraph, it’s apparent that I’ve mostly given up, which is actually a reasonable thing to do, since I’d have to be way more egotistical than I am to believe that anyone would have waded through all that preceding drivel and still kept reading. It ends pretty abruptly, without a real conclusion. I couldn’t even be bothered to type a period onto the final sentence