August 2-3, 2011: Mariners 11, A's 6 (48-62)

Something strange is going on. The Mariners have played three games in the last three days, and they’ve won all of them. That’s three wins without a single loss. Three wins consecutively, or “in a row”, if you will. It’s wholly unprecedented. I don’t think there’s even a word for this situation. I'm trying to figure out what you would call it. A “win run”? A “victory parade”? A “binge o’ wins”? The best thing I can come up with is a “winning spree”. At first I thought that the similarity to the phrase “killing spree” might be a problem, but I think that it’s actually kind of appropriate. Like your typical killing spree, a Mariners winning spree would generally involve confusion and a mounting sense of dread. Inevitably, it would come to a quick and brutal end, and everyone would lament that it ever had to happen. The metaphor actually works pretty well. At least, I think it's a pretty clever little turn of phrase, so I'm going to stick with it: The Mariners are on a “winning spree”. I’m sure all the effort I put into thinking that phrase up will be useful quite often in the future when the Mariners do nothing but win games for a long time and everyone is really happy about it.

Heh.

Anyway, so these games they won. Probably the most exciting thing is that Charlie Furbush pitched. Charlie Furbush is a recently acquired pitcher who maybe could possibly be decent at some point now or in the future. To quantify things: on a scale of 1 to 100, we can confidently say that his level of skill is somewhere between 1 and 100. The margin of error for this guess is approximately +/- 100. Furbush is still young, so it’s possible he could get better. Or he could get worse. We should realize that this present quantification of his talent does not really reflect his potential value over time, and thus should not be taken quite as seriously as I'm sure you were about to. To sum up everything we know for sure: Charlie Furbush throws baseballs for a living. This is confirmed by the fact that he did exactly that activity in a baseball game on Wednesday, August 3, 2011.

Another thing that happened was that the Mariners got a whopping 14 hits in one game, but every single one of those hits was a single. That’s pretty incredible, and speaks to the lack of power of the Mariners lineup. Actually, no it doesn’t, but we already know that the Mariners lineup lacks power, so it’s ok to declare that anything and everything is proof of the lack of power of the Mariners lineup. They certainly aren’t going to prove me wrong. What are they going to do, start hitting for power? Well, maybe. I can’t predict the future. But, anyway, I'll say whatever I please. Let me give you some free advice: making wildly unsubstantiated claims can only make your life better. If you’re right, whoa, that’s awesome! You’ll get all kinds of attention and maybe even fame and money and women. If you’re wrong, what’s the worst that could happen? You’re credibility will be destroyed? Oh nooooooooo. More likely, nobody will remember, and probably nobody is even paying attention anyway. Nobody cares. I certainly don't. Just remember: cares are for squares.