Can't Anybody Here Play This Game?

Like I said in the original post of this blog, the goal of this blog is not necessarily to make fun of failure, because losing sucks.

Not necessarily. Which means we will do it sometimes.

Especially when it comes to something like this, the worst play of 2012 and quite possibly the worst play I’ve ever seen on a baseball diamond:

But that’s only the beginning. We must not forget the throw from rightfield ...

Ladies and gentlemen, I give you the 2012 Houston Astros, a team that even myself – a devoted champion of losers, stragglers, and hopeless causes – is at a loss for words to explain.

IN PLAY LOSE

This is a blog about losing. Why losing? Because winners are boring.

For those of you who may not understand the title, here is a brief explanation: when you follow the MLB gamecasts, the site gives an original description of the play that reads something like IN PLAY OUT, IN PLAY NOT OUT, or IN PLAY RUNS, after which the site will give you more information about the play. Among tech savvy baseball fans, this has led to a bevy of jokes: things like IN PLAY FAIL when your hopes for the big inning are crushed by the .218 hitter grounding back to the pitcher with the bases loaded. Or a better example would be a AAAA reliever who shuttles between San Francisco and Fresno and goes by the name of Dan Runzler, who has inherited the unfortunate moniker of “In Play Runzler” when he's not particularly effective on the mound.

IN PLAY LOSE is a blog that will be about losing – the act of losing, the history of losing, the seemingly inescapable ability to fail, the ability to snatch defeat from the jaws of victory. I personally find winners to be boring as fuck. Guess what, we all want to win. None of us like to lose and none of us try to do so. Well, there is the occasional person or team who throws a game here or there, and their defense when challenging the assertion that they tanked usually reads along the line of, “I didn’t lose on purpose. I just suck.”

And winners get all the publicity, anyway. They get all the spoils. They get to rewrite history and make it look like they were fucking superstars. Whatever. The losers don't get their due, in the end. They had similar objectives, they prepared, they competed and they came up short, and often times weren't so far removed from being the winners themselves. In games and contests, the differences between being the superstar who gets the babes and the bum who “coulda been a contenda” is often infinitesimally small. And often times, it turns out the losers are far more likable.

The point of this blog is not to out-and-out ridicule those who fail. It will only seem that way sometimes. Failure is funny, after all. But we will attempt to show the appropriate sympathy for those who come up short, while also lampooning their incompetence from time to time.

And while this may be quite often a sports blog, it is not restricted to such – after all, there are lots of things to lose and countless ways to lose them. The aim of this blog is to be a larger examination and explication of failure.

Ready, set, LOSE.