7/31/2013 -- Mariners, Again

The Mariners played baseball yesterday, again. The Mariners lost yesterday, again. Those were the 106th and 56th times those things have happened this year, respectively. These guys just don’t let up.

Some perspective: the average Mariners game this year has taken 3 hours and 2 minutes to complete. Over 106 games, that adds up 321.5 hours of baseball. In that time, one could watch every single episode of Seinfeld and every episode of television Joss Whedon has ever produced, and still have time left over to watch Zoolander about 26 times. That’s 24 years of television and 26 viewings of Zoolander, all in the time it takes to play 65% of a single baseball season for a single team (playoffs excluded). Baseball takes up an absolutely staggering amount of time.

Consider, also, that we still don’t know much at all about the Mariners. Two-thirds of a season isn’t nearly enough to determine the actual talent level of a team. It isn’t nearly enough to determine the actual talent level of any players. The Mariners have played 321.5 hours of baseball this year, and we’ve learned virtually nothing about them.

Baseball is colossally slow. It’s possibly the slowest of all entertainments. It takes hundreds of hours for even the hint of a narrative thread to become apparent, and thousands of hours for any sort of firm development to unfold. We watch, but nothing really happens, and we never really learn anything. Who are these Mariners, really? We don’t know.

On the one hand, this might point to baseball being a massive, pointless time sink. On the other hand, I hear ambiguity is all the rage in entertainment these days. If you’d like to watch a program where significant plot progression is a rarity and the central characters are complete ciphers, the Mariners may be exactly what you’re looking for.

So, sure, the Mariners might be a terminally boring waste of time. They might also be fine art.