8/21/2013 -- Mariners Get A's

You may find this hard to believe, but the Seattle Mariners played a baseball game today. Shocking, right? Ok, fine, you probably find that very easy to believe and not at all shocking. After all, the Mariners have now played 126 games in the past five months, and they have a 35-year track record of playing 162 games every year. To be honest, you would have to be completely insane to be surprised by today’s Mariners game. Sorry, that's not fair of me. I know insanity isn’t the only explanation. You could be some heathen bandwagoner who isn’t very knowledgeable about baseball, but I’m trying to give you the benefit of the doubt here, so we’ll stick with insanity. In conclusion, you were either surprised or you weren’t.

That was the introductory paragraph. I’m not going to stop writing, despite the fact that the previous paragraph ended with “in conclusion”, which is a sentence that usually signals that something is, well, concluding. But, as you can see, I’m not too concerned with conforming to standards of “structure” or “content” or "quality" in my writing. This ain’t no book report, this is a discussion of the Seattle Mariners, and the throbbing fiery passion that is the Mariners demands a more freewheeling style. Think of this like a Bruce Springsteen song, except about baseball.

But seriously though, do me a favor and go to espn.com. Mouse over the thing where they show the score of the baseball games, and click on “Recap” next to the Mariners game. I think you’ll find that someone has already written a detailed factual account of the events in this game. Now go to mlb.com and try the same thing. Oh look, somebody wrote about the Mariners game there as well. Now try the Seattle Times. Hey, they wrote about today’s Mariners game too! Now try Googling “seattle mariners blog” and click on one of the many hundreds of results. You’ll find that there are several people out there who have already spewed unreasonable volumes of words about this game.

Did you do that? I’m going to assume that you didn’t, because those were all rhetorical questions and I respect that you’re smart enough to understand that. Or, even if you’re so dumb that you’re currently composing an angry email about my snobbishly affected use of a clearly superfluous letter “h” in the word “rhetoric”, you probably saw that I already told you what you would find, and you didn’t bother checking yourself because the idea of doing your own research and questioning the veracity of what people tell you is utterly alien to you.

Now, where was I? Oh yeah, I was about to fulfill the absolutely necessary function of giving you an account of the events of today’s Mariners game. So, here it is: The Mariners beat the Oakland A’s by a score of 5-3, bringing their seasonal record to 59-67 and keeping their odds of making the playoffs at a hearty “< 0.1%”.

Perhaps today’s victory is a sign that things are changing, and the Mariners will beat their foes more often in the future. Perhaps today’s victory is a sign that the Mariners, like all baseball teams, will sometimes win games, as evinced by their 59 wins on the season. Perhaps today’s victory is a sign that Barack Obama is secretly a lizard. A lizard from outer space, hell-bent on devouring the old and also devouring the young, and also cutting taxes on the wealthy. May Xenu have mercy on us all.