Faith and Fear does occasionally have some business to attend to, so periodically your bloggers get together to exchange blog-related news and ideas. (“Faith and Fear: The Interpretive Dance” will blow you away with both its kinetic nuance and its rococo wardrobe.) But tonight we were wary that the Olympics would squeeze the Mets off the TV in various bars and pubs, so we opted for a sit-down at my house. And thus it was that Greg and I held down either end of the couch and passed papers back and forth with the Mets as backdrop.
And what a backdrop! While we were chewing over our agenda for the night, Mets kept hitting and running around and getting walked and the score kept climbing. “You know,” Greg said finally, with cheerful disbelief, “I just realized that the Mets have been up since I got to your house.”
If only it were always so easy [1]. I actually felt sorry for Jason Bergmann, left in to absorb a fearful beating for no apparent reason. Soon enough Keith was doing his usual blowout thing of all but ordering SNY's viewers to turn off the game and do something more interesting with their evening (they must love that in the truck), the two of us and Emily were comparing the horrible local ads that run in Kings County with the horrible local ads that run in Nassau County, and the only suspense was whether Brian Stokes would earn a rather ludicrous save. Well, unless you count whether any Nats fans would be left above the loge. If there were, I tip my cap to them. The Nats had four hits and are now 33 games under .500 — at the risk of getting all Mex on you, that's devotion, even on a nice summer night.
These games are the flipside of fiascos like Monday's implosion against the Pirates, which was the kind of game that's like letting the water gurgle out of the warm bath of the soul. Except we tend to go into cruise control during laughers, chatting and reading and attending to household business, while bullpen meltdowns and ill-timed offensive brownouts and other varieties of cruel defeat leave us stretched out on the rack, helplessly focused on the awful things that are happening to us. Or, to borrow from some writer preoccupied with something other than baseball, laughers are all alike, but every bitter defeat is bitter in its own way.