Losing two games to a team whose owner’s attitude towards fielding a winning team is the petulant annoyance of a five-year old who has been caught pulling his sister’s pigtails is, in all candor, aggravating. Our bums never cease to surprise, but they have a knack for ceasing to hit, and I don’t think this is the year we win 120 games.

If you wanted to extrapolate larger conclusions, you could probably say something about how great teams take care of business against bad teams, or some such. Or you could talk about how our players, nearly all on long-term contracts, have cast doubt upon their putative reliability over that horizon. Or you could point out, as others have, that the 18th- and 19th-century Massachusetts variant of baseball, with no foul territory, was likely a more fun game than the New York variant that the Knickerbockers promulgated and which we all now watch, whose chief advantage was offering a place for spectators to sit, and that baseball has been going to hell for something near three centuries.

Well, anyway, the highlight of both games was the performance of the starting pitcher. I woke up and saw we lost to Oakland and Bryce Elder lowered his ML-leading ERA, both of which I’d have thought had roughly the same probability. I am too old to watch games that start at 9:40 and respect you all too much to claim that I cared to spend more than five minutes skimming the recap and box score. “Tedious and brief,” to quote Shakespeare.

There’s another one against these guys in about six hours. Can someone remind our offense?