August 10, 2011: Mariners 4, Rangers 3 (50-66)

Hey, cool, the Mariners won a game. That’s all right by me. What happened in this game? Lots of things! Lots of things happened. There were hits, and there were runs, and there were walks, and there were homers and errors and all sorts of wacky hi-jinks. It was great fun, indeed.

I had all sorts of stuff ready to write about defeat and the process of dealing with failure, but the Mariners had to go and ruin it by winning a game. Now I have no idea what to do. It turns out that effectively writing about baseball requires one of two things:

1. Some level of interest in the going-ons and outcomes of individual games. That’s right out the window, for obvious reasons. I’ll explain them anyway, though, because I need to fill up some space. The Mariners are not making the playoffs. After last nights game, their odds of that are zero percent, up from zero percent before the game. Neither are the Mariners bad enough to care about jockeying for draft picks. They will have a reasonably high pick, and they will take some kind of player that could maybe be useful someday. When that happens, I will defer to their judgment and maybe in a couple years I’ll be able to get a vague idea of whether the process behind that decision was reasonable. Or maybe I won’t. It’s not worth worrying about. So, caring about game outcomes is not an option. Maybe I could try caring about the game-to-game performance of individual players. I could also try caring about whether this coin in my pocket is facing heads-up or heads-down. These seem to be roughly equivalent options.

2. Baseball writing can also be a way to express emotions. This was easy to do when the Mariners were in the midst of a historically epic losing streak. Waxing poetic about defeat and failure is my specialty. Trust me, I know a whole lot about defeat. I have more experience with losing than just about anyone I know. But I can’t really do that when the Mariners win. If I did, that would reveal that I was just writing about whatever the hell I felt like and only using the framework of a Mariners game as a flimsy excuse to broadcast my thoughts over the internet. I’m not going to do that. Believe you me, I care deeply and passionately about making sure that each individual Mariners game gets the full respect and attention it deserves. This blog is going to stay on track, no matter what happens.

So that was a lot of writing about how and why I don’t really have anything to write about. And now I’m writing about how I’ve been writing about how I have nothing to write about. That’s weird. Consider that last sentence a bit of writing on how I’m writing about how I’ve been writing about how I have nothing to write about. This is getting pretty brutal. I’m sorry. I’m going to stop now.