Today's debacle

Cal and I were there. The weather just before the game and the fact that it was a previously unscheduled makeup game kept almost everyone else in the city away. Foul balls rattled around in unpopulated parts of the park and sat unclaimed. Rhythmic applause from three fans could be heard throughout the park. A lunatic right behind us yelled something incomprehensible everytime the ump called a strike against us when we didn't swing. Everyone in the park heard him too.

Yes, I took the day off from work, and all I have to show for it is a bad sunburn and a stomach full of bile. The most horrendous, gut-wrenching, hopeless, despair-inducing game of an already lost season, and I was there!

I don't have words to describe it that you haven't already read or will read tomorrow. You know what happened; you know about the nearly incomprehensible depth of the failure by Burnitz, Sanchez, Castillo, Bautista, and Wilson to win the game when doing so would have been so easy. It was a collective choke by a team that competed valiently until the bottom of the ninth only to give itself that opportunity to choke so thoroughly. What a tidy little game it would have been if someone--anyone--had been able to just punch one through a drawn-in infield, hit a ground ball, draw a walk, get hit with a pitch, or get a fly out of the infield.

It was like watching an automobile accident or a natural disaster. There's just not much you can say. It happened, and it was horrid.