Excruciating.

I can't take this. It's got to be bad for the heart.

I have nothing to say about tonight's disaster that hasn't been said already by better writers (to start: here's Joe, here's Rany).

I'm not quitting the Royals; I'm not selling my fandom on eBay. I'll still be watching, criticizing the bad things, celebrating the good things (wait, there's enough good to warrant an 's' on the end of 'thing'? Hrm.), and hoping like hell that this thing ends. In 2005, during the 19-gamer, I liked to share with my radio listeners all the different ways my team was inventing to lose games. I didn't think that this year of all years would be the one in which they decided to invent more.

Enough of this. I'd rather think about stadium evacuations due to hydrochloric acid spills. That's a lot easier to stomach than anything the big league club is doing. After a sloppy beginning to the top of the 4th, Matt Wright seemed to be working his way toward salvaging the start, and had at that point only given up 2 hits and 2 runs. I was really curious to see what he would do in the 5th after that adventurous 4th, so when the O-Royals went away pretty quietly in the bottom of the 4th I got all ready to pay extra attention to pitching.

Instead, I got pulled aside and warned that we were about to evacuate the stadium because of a chemical spill nearby. This was officially the weirdest postponement I've heard of since the days when games had to be called on account of darkness. The official box score on the front page at oroyals.com says "Postponed: Other." The game will be resumed tomorrow afternoon, and the regularly scheduled game will be shortened to 7 innings, like a normal rainout situation. I wonder how both managers will handle their pitching staffs: Do the starters stay in, since they had each only thrown 4 innings and neither was doing too poorly? Surely that's what they'll do, right? I can't imagine putting that many innings on the bullpens' shoulders, given that they have to get through Game 2 as well.

Lastly, here is a post to which I contributed at Ladies... . I think I'll expand on the ideas in a little more detail here soon, because the balancing act of being a girl and being a sportswriter is something I've been thinking about a lot lately.