Navel gazing over Melvin’s Boner and the way we talk about a bullshit loss

People gonna be mad online – WHOOOOOOOOO!!!! Photo credit: Ken Blaze-USA TODAY Sports

“That was so bad I have to fucking write about it,” I said out loud after coming inside from watching the end of tonight’s Jays game at a friend’s place outside of Peterborough, but nobody was there. Earlier a different friend, the only one here with me at the moment, had headed upstairs to shower as I went out to the TV on the deck (note: outside TV >>>> inside TV) to catch the end of the ballgame. Apparently he was still up there, so he’d missed the stupid, stupid ending to this one.

As I stewed, thinking about how I was going to explain what the fuck had just happened in Cleveland, I saw a tweet from another friend watching the game back in the city that caught me off guard.

He’s not wrong. And it’s funny — as I was gearing up to tell the person who missed it, “YOU WILL NOT FUCKING *BELIEVE* WHAT HAPPENED AT THE END OF THAT BASEBALL GAME,” I was tweeting “Oh well. But boy that was terrible,” to follow up my earlier deadpan, “Less than ideal.”

That’s kinda weird, eh?

Forgive the insufferable, head-up-my-own-ass tangent here, but I guess it speaks to the difference between online and actual human communication, or maybe simply the public nature of a tweet compared to a private conversation with someone you know well.

I don’t worry that telling my friend, “UPTON WAS JUST STANDING THERE, IT WAS FUCKING *BRUTAL*” — as YOU ARE GODDAMNED RIGHT I ABSOLUTELY DID — will lead to swells of enthusiasm for the dumbest baseball dipshittery imaginable, each response more infuriatingly small-minded than the last.

You know the kind of shit I mean, I am certain. Stuff like YOU *CAN’T* DO THAT — THAT’S INEXCUSABLE!, HE’S A BUM!, THEY’LL NEVER WIN WITH HIM ON THE TEAM, etc. Bullshit uttered by living, breathing straw men whose statements can, every single time, be obliterated with a simple, “What you’re saying is literally false, and… uh… are your pants wet?”

Because of course you can do that, and of course there will be some excuse for it and we’ll all move on, and Upton’s not a bum, and the Jays sure can win with him around (and, to be fair to Melvin, considering the other butchery in the inning, Saunders isn’t a bum either, nor is Martin a reckless pitch caller, nor Osuna a shrinking violet).

But holy shit, that WAS terrible. Awful stuff. Throw-whatever-shit-is-in-front-of-you-at-the-TV stuff.

Meanwhile on Twitter I try to steel myself and those listening and remind everybody not to lose their goddamn minds because baseball. 

That sure as fuck isn’t wrong either! It’s a long season and a whole lot of shit happens. You get good fortune and bad fortune and going off the deep end with vitriol after a particularly painful loss is, genuinely, a waste of everybody’s time. 

And maybe that’s just it. Maybe it’s as much a problem with me as the medium. Because holy shit, something I hate even more than a terrible loss is when I become a lightning rod for fans’ oblivious-to-sanity venting. Go be a garbage person with terrible opinions and piss running down your leg to somebody else, you know?

And, honestly, I can say that I think I’ve done pretty well culling as much of that shit as possible from my online experience by nipping it in the bud as much as possible with the kind of Twitter demeanour that David is talking about. It’s a defence mechanism that I don’t think is unique to my feed, and the other thing is: holy shit it sucks! Because OH MY GOD, YOU GUYS, THAT WAS FUCKING ATROCIOUS. That whole half inning was utter, inescapable, unfathomable fucking bullshit.

DON’T DO SHIT LIKE THAT, JAYS. FOR FUCK SAKES!

It’s just… y’know… if we’re talking about shit not to do, another one is: please don’t take these acknowledgements as validation for every single keystroke of impossibly negative trash to come firing out of your spittle-encrusted keyboard. Because not only does that shit suck the fun out of being a fan when you’re in it, even just trying to remain vigilant against the goddamned cesspool is the worst! And OK, I know the vast majority of people can handle things like grown-ups (even when online!), but — #firstworldproblems — it’s a bit of a real fucking drag to let out a little bit of genuine negative emotion only to have it start to feel like I’m being whipped along on a wave straight to the front of an army torch and pitch fork-wielding morons. OBVIOUSLY that’s a drag, because apparently it’s easier for me and a whole lot of other people to act fucking dead inside!

Dumb eh? I can feel your eyes rolling from here. But, as far as I can tell, that’s the answer to David’s confusion.

NOW CAN SOMEBODY ANSWER MY CONFUSION ABOUT WHAT THE FUCK UPTON WAS DOING THERE??????

TL;DR: Never tweet. TL;DR: *wank-off motion*. TL;DR: NICE JUMP, SAUNDERS! GAHHHHHHHH!!!!