6 Weeks to Freedom

[Maulers]

L.H. Thompson

Manchester Boutique

8/16/2008: Manchester, NH – Leave it to Maulers GM Jeff Dudas, that insufferable horse's ass, to put too fine of a point on it. "Things haven't gone quite as we'd hoped," he ruminated in a rare moment of introspection, "but we still feel like we've gotten ourselves into a very good position going forward." Hardly. Instead, let's cut to the chase and thank the heavens that this awful, dreadful, miserable season - which features a motley crew of increasingly incompetent and ungrateful baseball "players" - is nearly at its end. Only 6 more weeks for pitiable Maulers' fans to spend their evenings alternating between rage at the Gods and catatonic, alcohol-induced stupor. It's almost over.

It's not as though the season began with high hopes. After selling off its best players during the off-season, one could hardly have expected for the Maulers to be anything more than mediocre. And yet the grinding, hopeless dread involved with actually watching this team play every day is simply too much to take. Vicente León's recent catastrophic meltdown - which opened the floodgates for 26 Florida runs - was satisfactory as a moment of catharsis, for taking the pulse of the throbbing sear of this soul-crushing experience.

You will thus forgive me, gentle reader; for it is I who have been forced to watch every miserable inning, every meek ground ball, every 80 mph "fastball", every throwing error, every… every malfunction. And then the indignity of writing about it all, for your amusement, to satisfy your morbid sense of fascination as to just how a major league team could enthusiastically give a stiff like Hunter Bridges multiple-hundreds of at-bats before deciding that, “He would be more effective off the bench," as Maulers manager Joseph Moore delicately put it last week. No, you will forgive me if I simply cannot mount the effort today. Instead, over the next several weeks let us look back to earlier times, better not because of the sense of anticipation to a surprisingly-good year, but only because they were, in fact, times that were earlier, far earlier than these difficult days…

[Tyler]

I enjoyed the typewriter font on the homepage. Kinda gave the article a "from the desk of the Dark Ages" feel.

[Maulers]

Considering that I just learned how to hyperlink, the typewriter would appear to be a more appropriate format!