dEscape

The Mets won on Friday, in Washington, if you can believe it. I'm still sort of trying to process it myself. But it's true. They won 7-5, thanks to Travis d'Arnaud hitting a pair of long Home Runs off of Max Scherzer. They won thanks to Jacob deGrom ratcheting up another double-digit strikeout game. They won thanks to their offense stringing together some key hits and tacking on runs late in the game. Most notably, of course, they won because Terry Collins had the foresight to remove a struggling Jeurys Familia from a 9th inning jam, and replaced him with Josh Edgin, who managed to induce Bryce Harper to hit into a 1-2-3 double play to end the game.

This being a Friday evening game, it started with me getting home and falling asleep as opposed to turning on the game, and as such I didn't actually see either of d'Arnaud's Home Runs, and I didn't see deGrom have a 2nd inning hiccup and then go into lockdown mode from there. And that seems to be deGrom's season to this point. He's not the leading man like Syndergaard, he's not the ballyhooed reclamation project like Harvey or Wheeler and he's not a Rookie trying to prove himself like Gsellman. So it's easy for deGrom to fly under the radar and I think he likes it that way. Without anyone paying much attention, deGrom's had three very good starts in a row, he's throwing like he used to throw and he's been blowing guys out of the box outright.

So deGrom departed after 7 innings and 10 strikeouts and turned things over to the bullpen. By this point, I'd woken up and put the game on, and watched as the Mets had ran ahead to 7-3 and now had to try and negotiate through the final two innings of the game. Jerry Blevins got the first two outs and, in an indication of how much attention I've been paying or an indcation of how much the Mets have been struggling, or perhaps both, Addison Reed came in with 2 outs and a runner on and I thought "Jeez, Collins is going to him for the 4-out Save?" This feeling of course got a bit tenser after Reed gave up a 2-run Home Run to Ryan Zimmerman on his first pitch, and then a hit to Daniel Murphy, although the hit to Murphy seems to be a payment of penance for all Met transgressions nowadays, and I guess around this point I remembered that Jeurys Familia was the closer again and Reed was actually pitching where he was supposed to be pitching.

So Reed survived his hairy 8th and Familia came in for the 9th and started giving up hits and walks and then there was an infield hit by Adam Eaton in which Eaton tumbled over the bag in such a way that I couldn't watch the repeated replays, so whatever happened to him can't possibly be good, and then Familia finally stopped throwing his sinker or his slider, because it's just not working for him, and instead struck out Trea Turner with fastballs to finally get an out. And then Collins came and pulled him in favor of...Josh Edgin? I mean, I can get pulling Familia there. He's just not pitching well and it's been more than a week so I can't blame rust. He's struggling. He's pulling his sinker and burying it and hitters aren't buying that. And in a spot like that, well, I'm not sure how confident I felt in him going after Harper. I'm not certain that Edgin would have been my choice since he's basically been reeling from a Home Run he gave up to Howard 5 years ago, and of course if Harper got a winning hit the move would have been second-guessed for years, but instead Harper hit a comebacker to Edgin, who threw home, and d'Arnaud threw to 1st, and just like that the Mets had won. And of course with that everything was OK again.

Now, of course, the next thing would be to win another game and maybe use this as a springboard forward from the morass. 7 runs seems like a wealth of offense for this team so it's a start.

Marlins Get You Again

I guess the Mets were owed this one after the way they spent 8 innings cheating painful Marlin death on Thursday night. In spite of entering another war of bullpen attrition with the Marlins that seemed headed down a parallel track on Friday night, the Mets faltered before things got out of control as J.T. Realmuto doubled home the winning run in the last of the 9th to give the Marlins a 3-2 win.

It being a Friday and I being a year older, I was somewhat out of it for the early part of the game and as such I missed Noah Syndergaard's 6 innings of work, in which from what I can gather he had some bad luck leading to a 1st inning unearned run, an irritating rally, and then an irritating recurring injury as he either had another blister problem or a fingernail problem that caused him to leave the game altogether. As injury problems go, I suppose this is fairly benign stuff but that it keeps happening is more annoying than anything else. On the other hand, that's one inning fewer that he'll be able to throw as we get later in the season. It'll fix itself at some point, I would guess.

The Mets similarly didn't do a ton against Edinson Volquez outside of a Lucas Duda Home Run in the 5th inning. So things sat at 2-2 as things moved to the late innings. But, as the case can be on the day after some absurdly long games, the Mets had a bullpen issue. Unavailable were Addison Reed, Hansel Robles and Josh Smoker. Gone altogether was T.J. Rivera in favor of Sean Gilmartin, only around as an emergency arm. And left were the remainder of a mostly gassed group. To their credit, Rafael Montero and Jerry Blevins kept things in control in the 7th, and Josh Edgin did so again in the 8th. But Edgin, who is still on the fringes of trustworthydom, was chanced for a 2nd inning and although he nearly managed to negotiate it, he was black-flagged at the last step when Realmuto's double fell in the gap and scored Miguel Rojas with the winning run and it was Marlin Pizza Party Time.

I know, I know. The Mets for the prior 5 games felt kind of invincible. But games like this are unfortunately inevitable over the course of the season, and especially against the Marlins, a team who, as we've gone over many times, is built generally for the sole purpose of pissing us off. So of course they did it again.

Aw, Geez

Injuries, particularly devastating ones to the elbows of pitchers, seem to have become as much as part of Baseball as, say, the Designated Hitter. Nobody likes it, it causes divisive amounts of controversy and there's no good solution to stop it. The Mets have had plenty of their own pitchers shelved due to major elbow injuries that required the Big Boy Surgery over the past couple of years and now they've been hit twice more in the past couple of days. Josh Edgin was diagnosed with a ligament injury apparently caused by a bone chip that was cutting into the ligament and after a second opinion decided to go under the knife. That was bad enough. More disheartening to the Mets chances this season was the news this morning that Zack Wheeler had been diagnosed with a torn ligament in his elbow and would need his own operation.

Word later in the day revealed that Wheeler's elbow had been of concern to doctors, but that a major injury didn't appear imminent. It just required "monitoring." These kind of situations, however, tend to not end well, and that being said, perhaps it's not totally surprising that this is the end result for Wheeler. That doesn't make it a positive by any stretch of the imagination, and in fact for a team and a fan base that's constantly had to deal with injury after injury and disappointment after disappointment it's downright disheartening.

But in the big picture, it's not the end of the world.

When Matt Harvey went down with the same injury in August of 2013, that was really bad. Harvey had emerged among the Best pitchers in Baseball over the course of his brief career, and he was expected to lead the charge when the Mets eventually returned to prominence. His injury for all intents and purposes put things on hold for the team and basically threw the fan base off a collective cliff. Zack Wheeler's emergence helped to lessen the sting of losing Harvey in 2014, but ultimately his strong finish to the season didn't immediately turn the Mets into contenders. Wheeler's larger problem among fans seems to be basically that he's not Matt Harvey and he didn't come up and produce the same results. Wheeler in 2014 had a good season but pitched like a young pitcher who was still trying to figure it out. There were moments where he looked very good, but also moments that he was pretty bad and the goal for this season was more of the former and less of the latter. Matt Harvey came up looking like such a finished product that it was easy to project the same hype onto Wheeler. Not the same kind of pitcher, not the same kind of results.

Point here is that the loss of Wheeler is frustrating and annoying and a sizable chunk of the Mets fan base is probably yelling about "AW THERE GOES ANOTHER SEASON (these are the same people who think they can force the Wilpons to sell the team and continue to harp on how the Mets need to fire Terry Collins and hire Wally Backman tomorrow)," but in the grand scheme of things, starting pitching is the one area where the Mets could absorb a major injury. Wheeler's gone for 2015, and that sucks. Fortuitously, the Mets have a major league quality starting pitcher who can slide right in and take his place in Dillon Gee. Imagine that. For once, the Mets actually have a contingency plan! Sandy Alderson hasn't hit on everything, but the non-move of dealing away Gee or Jon Niese showed a good bit of temperance on his part. Gee won't be Wheeler but in this rotation he doesn't have to be. Gee just has to be Gee, and in certain periods of his career he's pitched rather well. He'll get the first crack at holding down this spot in the rotation, but if it doesn't work out, Noah Syndergaard and Steven Matz are also primed to move up the ladder this year.

So, don't panic just yet. If anything, the Edgin injury is more difficult for the Mets because they don't have another lefty reliever to replace him, or at least not one with any kind of Major League experience. But on the other hand, relief pitchers are like elbow injuries. Annoying and unpredictable.

Score Remains The Same

Sunday's Mets game in San Diego was the first game I'd had the opportunity to watch since returning from my European Vacation. I already had kind of an ominous feeling about this particular game, for several obvious reasons. The Mets had swept the Marlins going into the All Star Break, which finished off an 8-2 homestand and kind of got people feeling a little optimistic about the team. Coming out of the break, the schedule gods got cute and socked the Mets with a 10-game road trip to a few places they rarely fare well, among them San Diego, Seattle and finally Milwaukee, where they have won games once in a while, but have also had moments where they look like a bunch of horse's asses. Seattle, the Mets only go to once every 6 years or so (or at least it seems that way, a closer look reveals the Mets and Mariners haven't met at all since 2008 and only visited Seattle once, in 2005, where they were promptly swept). Then, there's Petco Park in San Diego, where the Mets usually lose every game 2-1.

Fittingly, the Mets nearly got themselves no-hit by the latest crafty Cuban Odrisamer Despaigne, got up off the mat and tied the game after Zack Wheeler pitched his ass off, and ultimately lost the game, shockingly, 2-1, on a Seth Smith single that went about 45 feet and somehow ended up winning the game because Josh Edgin fell off the mound and couldn't recover in time to make a play. The kind of ending that generally leaves most Mets fans either shaking their head or smacking their head in general disgust.

Despaigne pretty much tied the Mets up in knots for a majority of the day, to the point where I was actually beginning to think he was going to finish the job and throw the first no hitter in Padres history. But Daniel Murphy took care of that by doubling with 2 outs in the 8th, and David Wright, who very quietly has had a very un-David-Wright-like Season, snuck a single through the middle to tie the game. This got Zack Wheeler off the hook in the game after another fine outing in which he made one bad pitch, the Home Run that Yasmani Grandal lofted out, and his team gave him nothing in the way of run support. Those more optimistic among us might have believed that this rally would have spurred the Mets on to a win and a series victory to get the second half off on the right foot, but sadly that was not the case. Instead, it just set the stage for the Padres to win another 2-1 game at the hands of the Mets in typical annoying fashion, taking 2 of 3 from the Mets and putting that sinking fear back in the hearts of all Mets fans.

So, the Mets now leave the beautiful town of 2-1sville in favor of Pearl Jam, Starbucks and canned crowd noise...oh, wait. They're playing the Mariners, not the Seahawks. My bad.

Unnecessary Moves

I didn't see any part of last night's game for a variety of reasons, but I did try to keep track of the game when I could, and what I basically was able to grok was that there were essentially two games in one going on.

First, Matt Harvey went out and pitched a Matt Harvey game. He had a perfect game into the 5th inning, he struck out 11 batters, he actually got a little bit of run support, and by time he departed after his 7 innings of work, he appeared to be very much in line for his 8th win of the year, and his 3rd win in 3 consecutive starts, as the Mets had a 4-1 lead. I could expound more on Harvey, but, really, it's been done all year, and besides, I have a word count limit on the weekend.

The second game was the remainder of the game, which was patently awful. Terry Collins basically left the game in the oven about 2 hours too long and then tried to serve it up to everyone. David Aardsma came in for the 8th inning, which was fine, Aardsma has pitched well, and he gave up a leadoff single, and then very quickly got the next two outs without much issue. So, Terry Collins pulled him from the game to play lefty/lefty, bringing in Josh Edgin to face Denard Span.

This is basically where everything went wrong. Edgin gave up a hit, Brandon Lyon came in and gave up a walk and a 3-run double, and the Nationals had built up enough of a groundswell that they scored two more off of Bobby Parnell in the 9th to win a game that they really had no business winning.

I'm sure I'm not the first, and I can't imagine I will be the last to ask why, exactly, Aardsma was taken out of the game at that point. There was really no particular reason to do it there. If Collins was so into playing matchups, then why not pull Aardsma when Chad Tracy pinch hit one batter earlier? The entire thing reeks of overmanaging, and when you start doing that, you usually end up outfoxing yourself. Last night, Collins outfoxed himself right out of a victory for Matt Harvey. I say this a lot, but at least I wasn't there to witness the clown car at Citi Field, but that's besides the point. After this latest road trip, and after the Mets have actually looked a little lively these past couple of weeks, how is it that they've come home and turned back into a bunch of pumpkins? What is it about playing at Citi Field that makes everyone not named Harvey or Wright implode? I can't figure it out. Maybe they should make everyone wear road jerseys or something.

Full Team Effort

I was making dinner in the 4th inning, so I didn't really see what exactly happened to Jonathon Niese until a replay was shown. All I know is that while tending to something on the stove, I heard Gary Cohen say something about "He's coming out of the game," and turned around to see Niese scowling and walking off the field.

Already down 3-2 at this point, and playing in Atlanta, where as I've said nothing good ever happens to the Mets, I figured this was probably the perfect point for the Mets to lay down and die. Needing the bullpen to cobble together the remainder of the game was, at best, a dicey proposition, and even if they managed to get through, was there any guarantee that the Mets would come back and generate enough runs to offset their deficit? David Wright, the lone Met who could be counted on, had already hit a pair of Home Runs, which was more than his quota for the day. Someone else had to step up.

I finished making my dinner and was sitting down to eat when one of my questions was answered, in the form of Andrew Brown, whom I derided yesterday as basically cannon fodder, but in this particular moment picked a good time to show his worth, socking a game-tying Home Run off Mike Minor, a parabolic shot that Ratso Upton looked like he had lined up until he ran out of room. Brown was up pinch hitting for David Aardsma, who, since mysteriously surfacing with the Mets a few weeks ago (and replacing Don Aase at the top of the Mets alphabetical roster), has pitched rather well, in spite of it often coming in a hopeless situation. Aardsma was the first man out of the bullpen Thursday, getting out of a minor jam after relieving Niese.

LaTroy Hawkins followed Brown and Aardsma and, after starting out the season looking like he'd be one of my daily flogs, has actually done a reasonably good job of shutting me up. I can't say he's been especially flashy, but for the most part he's been effective (although when he's ineffective, he's patently awful). His two innings of work, the 5th and 6th, featured two singles of little consequence, which was good for two reasons: a) It kept the game tied and b) it allowed me to enjoy my dinner.

Still, all these good pitching performances stood to go for naught if the Mets offense continued to not hit. Omar Quintanilla led off the 7th inning with a double, and he was followed by another Pinch Hitter, Josh Satin. Josh Satin has been another player I've deemed a useless spare part, and for the most part, that's kind of what he is, but, much like Andrew Brown, he had his shining moment in this game by slicing a line drive down the right field line that looked for all the world to be curling foul, but fell to the ground just soon enough to tap the foul line and bounce into the corner for the tie-breaking hit. So now, not only have the Mets been getting lights out work from the bullpen, but their offense managed to get them a lead. Satin then got thrown out at 3rd on a boneheaded baserunning play later in the inning, proving that even the least common denominator on a 25-man roster can sometimes shit a diamond.

Now working with a lead, Brandon Lyon took the mound and immediately walked Ratso Upton. Fortuitously, however, Fredo Upton immediately followed by hitting into a double play, allowing Lyon to get through the 7th with relative ease (and a minor note, I goofed the other night, mistakenly referring to the elder Upton brother as "Cheech," forgetting that he should properly be known as "Fredo"). Things got slightly hairy in the 8th, however, courtesy of a David Wright error. Lyon still appeared primed to get out of the inning, but for a broken bat bloop from Tyler Pastornicky (who appears to be one of those guys that is always going to annoy the hell out of you) that fell in with 2 outs, putting runners at the corners, Jason Heyward at the plate and Lyon in the dugout.

Josh Edgin was where I figured the Mets luck was going to run out. Edgin was miserable early in the season and no better since he's returned. But, given one shot, and after working the count full, he did manage to get Heyward to ground to Duda, who made the maddest of dashes to beat Heyward to 1st Base.

The Mets, of course, didn't tack on any runs, so Bobby Parnell was summoned to protect a 1-run lead against the vaunted middle of the Braves Lineup, Bitch McFreeman, Ratso Upton and Fredo Upton. But, after so many innings of being lulled to sleep by the variety of relievers the Mets had been running out to the mound all night, Parnell simply carved the lot of them up, capping off a mettle-testing 4-3 victory by posting the only 1-2-3 inning of the night.

So, after all that, the Mets actually won this ridiculously extended 5-game series in Atlanta 3 games to 2, becoming the first road team to win a series in Atlanta. Given the Mets history at Turner Field, and the way the first 4 innings of the game Thursday night unfolded, you probably would not have figured that likely, but it actually happened. And after everything that's gone on to this point this season, the Mets are, in fact, beginning to show some signs of life. Maybe.

Out In The Cold

I left early.

I'm not proud of this fact, and I don't like admitting that I did it, but I left tonight's game early.

Josh Edgin had just surrendered a 2-run double to A.J. Ellis. Mark Ellis had already done his best Mark McGwire impression. The game, which had been moving at a snail's pace even without the Jonathon Niese injury delay, had stretched past 3 hours. The Mets had, to this point, mustered 2 runs and 3 hits in spite of the fact that they cajoled Clayton Kershaw into a sweaty 110-pitch effort over 5 innings, but had surprisingly little to show for it.

The temperature, cold for the standards of any game, was starting to make my legs stiff. For the second time this season, I was wearing a winter coat at Citi Field, which I already said shouldn't be done. The Weather Channel app on my phone said it was 51º, which was absolute, unadulterated bullshit. I've been out in January in Binghamton and it might have felt warmer than it did tonight at Citi Field.

There were no more than 10,000 people at the game, and they were abandoning in droves.

I just couldn't do it anymore. I didn't see a miracle comeback on the horizon and I was fucking freezing. Neither my colleague nor I could deal with another pitching change. So, we left. I realize this is a blow to my Mets fan street cred, but I can't say I particularly care. I wasn't really itching to sit out at Citi Field until close to 11pm, then spend another hour on the subway getting home. 

Up until the Ellises struck, this was actually shaping up like a marginally decent game. Jonathon Niese didn't particularly have his best stuff, and had an Oliver Perez-like 2nd inning where he walked the ballpark before Kershaw bailed him out by hitting into a DP. Then, of course, he took the Mark Ellis comebacker off his leg and was out of the game, day-to-day just like the rest of us. He was fortunate to only be down 1-0.

But Kershaw, who appears to be right out of the Tim Lincecum school of unorthodox pitching mechanics, didn't have his best stuff either. Known for his great control, Kershaw nonetheless ran the count full on pretty much every Met that came to bat against him. Hell, Kershaw managed to walk Robert Carson of all people, who came to bat for the first time in the 3rd and looked like he was ready to pull a Dae Sung Koo act had Kershaw simply been able to find the plate (and as an aside, after walking Carson, Kershaw then made a pickoff attempt on him, which I assume he did just to be a dick). Somehow, that innocuous 2-out walk to the emergency relief pitcher keyed a 2-run rally that put the Mets ahead, and when Carson acquitted himself splendidly over 2 innings, I was beginning to write a blog post in my head anointing Robert Carson as the unsung hero of a steely victory...

...Then Mark Ellis tied the game.

...Then the rest of the Mets bullpen struck.

The bullpen was going to have to do some heavy lifting if the Mets were going to win this game, and after Carson's 2.1 solid innings, Atchison held as well. Brandon Lyon, who has pitched reasonably well to this point, came next, and of course that's when the game started to get as frigid as the temperature. I'm willing to give Lyon one of those "somedays, the bear gets you" passes, even though just about every Mets reliever ever has been on thin ice with me. But Josh Edgin has just been putrid lately, and I'm sure I'm not the only one who seems to think he's just about pitched himself off the team. A 5-2 deficit, the way the Mets have been known to strike, wasn't necessarily insurmountable. All Edgin had to do was get through the inning without doing any damage, but it appears he's incapable of doing that. He killed the last game in Colorado, he gave up the HR to Harper on Saturday, and tonight, he basically drove me to leave the game an inning and a half early. That, right there, ought to be a serious indictment of Josh Edgin's travails this season.

Although if it were June or July, I might have felt more inclined to stick around, even if I knew how the ending was going to turn out.

The Stink

With 2 outs and nobody on in the 9th inning last night, I was standing up, stretching, ready to hop on the train home and write about how the Mets had finally won a game at home, in spite of themselves, and how great Matt Harvey pitched in his final game of the year, and how I'd been to 3 Mets/Phillies games this season and the Mets had won all 3, and how things were maybe starting to look up a little bit...And then the rest of the game happened.

I've made mention before about how losing begets losing, and once the stink takes over it's impossible to wash it off unless some heads are rolled, and that's basically what happened. Josh Edgin, in the game specifically, I assume, to face Chase Utley and Ryan Howard and get them out, got neither of them out. Utley walked after a couple of borderline pitches and then forgetting that Ball 4 was Ball 4, and then Ryan Howard, who looked slow and injured and mostly foolish all night, caught hold of a high fastball and Goodnight, Nurse. The punchless Mets couldn't punch their way out of this, and thus came their 8th straight Home Loss, their 22nd loss in their last 23 games at home, my 4th loss in a row, and basically killed all the good vibes flowing among the 236 or so people that were at this game (21,741 my ass).

But it shouldn't have had to come to that. The Mets managed only 2 runs on their 9 hits. On multiple occasions, Kelly Shoppach came up with men in scoring position and managed only to strike out. Lucas Duda fared no better. Andres Torres had, perhaps, the most unconscionable AB of the night, with the bases loaded and 1 out in the 8th, at a point where a measly fly ball would have produced a huge insurance run. Torres predictably slapped a ball right to Utley, who started a comically fast Double Play to end the inning and set the stage for the disaster in the 9th.

That's the epitome of stink, but in reality, the stink was percolating all night long. Matt Harvey, who was certainly more than deserving of a win after his brilliant 7 innings of 1-run, 1-hit ball, kept the stink at bay, but it really was there all night long. I could tell as soon as I got on the 7 train out to the game, when I noticed that, at about 6:10pm, I was the only one on the train wearing anything Mets related. I could tell when I got into the Stadium, walked around the Field Level for a while, found myself by Shake Shack...and found that there was nobody there. I mused to myself as I ate my first Shackburger of the season, "What would happen if the Mets had a game and I was the only one who showed up?" It certainly seems like things are heading that way. Tonight, I could have probably counted the number of people in Section 518 on two hands, and for my final game of the season next Monday, I wonder if I would even need that many.

There's all sorts of fan griping going on after this one, from the Mets failure to retaliate to Cole Hamels hitting Scott Hairston following Wright's HR (ridiculous—didn't seem to me like Hamels did it on purpose, and why should Harvey hand the Phillies the tying run on base when the Mets can't score in the name of macho postyring), to the Mets failure to retaliate to Howard's Home Run (at that point, what was the use?). But the calm, reserved nature I seem to have taken here might sum it up. The stink is so bad that I can't even get angry about it anymore. If this team were in a Pennant Race and this crap was going on, there might be some real sparks flying. But what's the point? You can only yell about the same thing so much before you ask yourself if anyone's really listening.

The Inevitable Meltdown

Sometimes, you can see these things coming well before they happen.

It wasn't so much that you knew the Mets were going to find a way to lose the game, but you knew that it was going to be that 3-run Homer that did it to them. The Reds, who have mostly played like the class of the NL Central to this point even if the standings might not necessarily agree, had every opportunity to wipe the Mets off the board tonight, but somehow the Mets managed to hang in there. The Reds probably had 2 runners on in every inning, I wasn't exactly paying full attention but it sure seemed that way (and a game that was 0-0 into the bottom of the 9th lasting well over 3 hours is indicative of such). With 2 men on all the time, and the tiny ballpark in Cincinnati, and a lineup full of mashers, well, you do the math.

Chris Young departed in the 6th after basically starting every inning with a runner on 1st. It didn't happen then, Ramon Ramirez got Stubbs to ground out.

Bobby Parnell didn't serve it up either, though he'd be as likely a candidate as anyone. He wormed out of a bases loaded jam in the 7th.

Manny Acosta took the loss, and deservedly so after walking Phillips and giving up a hit to Ludwick. It would have served him right if Terry had left him in to face Meatman Jay Bruce. But nooooo. It fell to Josh Edgin. Acosta, I suppose, would have made more sense, because he is terrible and inspires no hope, and at least Edgin is a rookie with some alleged upside to him, but no matter how you threw the pitch, somehow Jay Bruce was going to hit that 3-run Home Run. You could see it coming as soon as Acosta took the mound and heaved 4 pitches higher and higher over Phillips' head. That was how it was going to end. And yet, for some reason, I kept it on, like there was going to be some kind of perverse joy I'd get out of being right and calling the Mets demise. I don't know. It's not exactly pleasant knowing that there's going to be some your team will inevitably screw up a game, but I guess it softens the sting, somewhat. Somewhat.