Baseball is Boring: Marlins 9, Phillies 1

Baseball is very boring.

Do you need any proof that baseball is very boring? Well, please review the box score to today's barn burner game where the Phillies played the Marlins. The two pitchers starting today were Dustin McGowan and David Phelps. These pitchers would have elicited yawns last year on the Jays and Yankees respectively; this year, they have the power to put grown men and women in comas. They did not disappoint for three innings where they traded zeros against teams that, Giancarlo Stanton notwithstanding, would consider hitting themselves out of a wet paper bag a fairly dramatic challenge.

And then the Marlins scored four runs, and the game somehow got worse.

I know. It's unbelievable

And yet here we were, with a 4-0 deficit, Dustin McGowan weirdly over the pitch limit Sandberg set for him himself, and with a starting pitcher line of 3.1 innings pitched, four strikeouts, four earned runs, four walks. I dare you to write a more boring short story: YOU CAN'T. Meanwhile David Phelps pitched well against the Phillies with a seven inning, five strikeout, 2 walk line with no earned runs, but I must caution everyone who is rushing to their fantasy waiver wires to pick up this young new ace: he was facing the Philadelphia Phillies. Not only the Philadelphia Phillies, but the Philadelphia Phillies without Howard, Utley, or Ruiz. Andres Blanco is also no Jimmy Rollins, for what it's worth.

And from there, it's like a black hole: you try to escape the boredom, but you can't. Did Andres Blanco ground out 8 times, as I can only imagine he did? Well I did listen to the game, but I couldn't tell you. Could I look it up? Yeah maybe, but do you really want me to do that? Of course you don't. It's canon now that Blanco came to the plate eight times and weakly grounded to short every single time.

What else...what else.... Oh, Giancarlo Stanton hit a two-run home run, so that's neat. And Hector Neris debuted and was...okay? And the rest is just the miasma of a blowout that really has no significance anyway. Perhaps the game is best summed up with this exchange between Scott Franzke and Larry Andersen that I'm going to craft as best I can from memory.

Franzke: And the New York Mets are officially the best team in baseball, with 12 wins.

LA: And 10 of those wins were in division too.

Franzke: Very big for playoff implications.

LA: And it sends a clear message. To the Natonals.

Franzke: To the whole division.

LA: Yeah, but...really to the Nationals.

Franzke: ...I get what you're saying, Larry.

Hey only a non-trivial number of games left folks. Let's get crazy.

Fangraph of mehhhhh below.

<iframe src="http://www.fangraphs.com/graphframe.aspx?config=0&static=1054329&type=livewins&num=0&h=450&w=450&date=2015-04-23&team=Phillies&dh=0" frameborder="0" scrolling="no" height="450" width = "450" style="border:1px solid black;"></iframe><br /><span style="font-size:9pt;">Source: <a href="http://www.fangraphs.com/livewins.aspx?date=2015-04-23&team=Phillies&dh=0&season=2015">FanGraphs</a></span>