Thoughts on a 4-1 Rangers loss

Mets 4, Rangers 1

• That was...I’m not sure what to call it. Disappointing? A letdown? Just kind of blah?
• In the book “Life, the Universe, and Everything,” the accidentally immortal alien Wowbagger the Infinitely Prolonged could not cope with Sunday mid-afternoons, and the listlessness that sets in at a certain point in the mid-afternoon on Sunday, which he referred to as the long dark tea-time of the soul.
• That would well describe today’s game, and really, many Sundays for the Rangers this year. goET says the Rangers are 5-9 on Sundays this year, but he could have said they were, I don’t know, 2-23 and I’d probably have believed it.
• Honestly, I’m confused about today being Sunday, because I worked from home on Friday and had a light day, and the kids were home, and tomorrow is a holiday, and all the days have sort of mushed into one another, as if they all have been lowered to a very low temperature and have state shifted into a Bose-Einstein condensate.
• In their normal states, what are days of the week? Solid? Liquid? Gas? I don’t think they are plasma. I think that “gas” feels right as being the state of matter for a day of the week normally.
• Wowbagger the Infinitely Prolonged, incidentally, chose to deal with the ennui he was suffering, that was ultimately pushed over the edge by these Sunday afternoons, by insulting everyone in the universe. Personally, face-to-face. He could do this because he was, well, immortal, and his spaceship could travel through time (which, to be clear, was kind of like having Bluetooth capabilities with your car in our reality), and he had a shipboard computer that could keep track of everyone who ever lived or would live in the universe, and where they could be located, which is the type of thing that would be rather difficult to do by hand.
• Also, Wowbagger decided to insult everyone alphabetically. Which, I guess, makes some sense…you have to have some sort of system if you’re going to do this sort of thing, after all. You can’t just run around willy-nilly insulting people at random.
• And you probably couldn’t, say, do it by geographical — or, I guess, cosmographical — area or region. Since the universe has, according to most cosmologists, no center, and is constantly expanding, and is thought to stretch out in all directions infinitely, such that if you started traveling a certain direction you would never reach the end of the universe, but instead would end up returning to where you started, but would be doing this in a sort of two-dimensional plane that would represent a slice of the universe, that would not result in you covering the entire universe, and plus you’d have missed everything inside and outside that path you took in that section represented by that plane, much less the infinite portion of the universe that is above and below that plane (to the extent that above and below would even have meaning in describing relative positions of things in the universe), and given that the universe doesn’t really have a shape that would allow you to figure out how to structure that…well, it is fair to say that this would present hurdles.
• So anyway, Wowbagger was insulting the universe, and everyone living in it, which, when you can travel back and forth from the beginning of time until the end of time, means everyone who will ever live in it or ever did live in it, ever. And he was doing it in alphabetical order. And in the book, he was still on the “A”s.
• Which, on the one hand, is pretty impressive, because he had gotten to the “Ar”s, and it would seem to take an incredible amount of dedication and commitment to get that far. I’m pretty sure I’d have quit before I got to the “Aab”s, even if I were immortal, which I’m not, and had access to a time-traveling spaceship, which I don’t, and had the desire to insult everyone in the universe, which I definitely don’t.
• I tend to be pretty conflict-averse. Insulting everyone in the universe, to their face, would probably stress me out.
• I should offer a caveat that, while I said I’m not immortal, I’m actually not sure of that. I have long said that I was going to be immortal by virtue of the fact that I have simply decided not to die. The power of positive thinking. I’ve thought maybe I should do some affirmations as well, maybe put it on a vision board. In any case, when asked if I think that’s really going to work, I say that you don’t know until you try. So maybe I’ll be running around in two hundred years like a 23rd century Comte de Saint Germain.
• There’s also the possibility that all of us are immortal due to quantum immortality. That presumes that the many worlds interpretation of quantum mechanics is correct. Personally, I tend to think it is correct, but it may be that I find the many worlds interpretation to be the one most personally pleasing, and thus gravitate to that.
• Anyway, the Rangers lost.
• Jon Gray topped out at...98.2 mph on his fastball? Really? He averaged 96.5 mph today. Brett Martin threw four pitches, one of which was a fastball, which was 94.5 mph. Jose Leclerc reached 97.4 mph with his fastball.
• Jonah Heim’s home run was the Rangers’ hardest hit ball of the day, at 106.1 mph. Heim also had a 102.9 mph groundout and a 102.3 mph single. Corey Seager had a 105.8 mph lineout. Nathaniel Lowe had a single at 103.8 mph.
• Now to Baltimore, and an early Independence Day game tomorrow.