Mariners get carsick in middle of road trip, dad refuses to pull over

Out of all of the things that we know to exist, nothing is quite as amazing as the human body. Consider that we live in a universe where the number one rule is that everything that happens increases the amount of chaos in the world. Everything. Get out of bed? Brush your teeth? You’ve scattered some of your heat energy into the universe, and therefore made it chaotic. Every step you take helps push the universe to an icy end.

Despite that, our bodies are more highly ordered than anything our minds could conceive of. We are composed of over 30 trillion cells, each with a specific function. Each of our cells is composed of another 100 trillion atoms, each of those atoms helping the cell to carry out its specific function. Some of those 100 trillion atoms make up the microscopic water wheels (see below) that we use to generate energy and power our entire body. It is inconceivably complicated, and though we’ve made near-miraculous advances in medicine and biochemistry, we still know so little that we recently discovered a previously unknown organ.

Consider the amount of stress our bodies must cope with on a daily basis. For those of us that live in cities, the air that we continuously breathe is laced with smoke, heavy metals, and other pollutants. We can easily bounce back from injury (perhaps less easily than we used to), and are capable of monumental feats of strength when the situation calls for it.

Consider also, how easy it is for our bodies to be felled. In a world defined by chaos, our fleshy manifestations of order are impossibly fragile. A two-atom molecule can clog up our entire circulatory system within minutes. A stray ray of sun can strike a random DNA molecule in a random skin cell in just the right way, causing the DNA to break and mutate. Suddenly, we have skin cancer. All it takes is for just one of our body’s many systems to begin to fail, and the whole thing fails.

It is easy to get psyched out when thinking about how impossibly complicated and fragile we are.

The Mariners are a much less complicated entity than the human body. Well, maybe not. They are after all composed of 25 human bodies, so they should be 25 times more complicated. Strictly in terms of being a baseball team, though, they are far more easily understood. This iteration is so very cool. It is also as flawed as it is cool, and as fragile as it is flawed.

It seems like everything needs to break right for this team to do well this year. Yes, they are 11-10 at this point. Their -18 run differential says that they’re more like a 9-12 team. When Mitch Haniger is the mitochondria, it just takes a couple (or 10) misplaced Mike Leake pitches to be the carbon monoxide.

This team is fun to think about, and sometimes not so fun to watch. They were horrendously awful today, and it is reactionary to say they might not be good. Well. They might not be good.

For now, though, if ATP Synthase doesn’t do it for you, at least we have this.