Orioles bats sleep through last game of Marlins series, a 5-2 loss

Relax, breathe deeply, and prepare to ponder a truth. Chaz Roe was the best player in the Orioles' game against the Marlins today. What kind of image does that truth conjure up in your mind? Can you grok the fullness?

For me, it makes me think of a very particular part of any disaster movie. You know the one. After ignoring whatever has been threatening whichever city the people happen to be in, there is always that part of the movie where, almost as one, the populace realizes that they should probably go ahead and abscond to a different part of the globe.

As they all go to leave at one time, all points of egress become jam-packed, or at least the way out of the city that leaves the most recognizable glimpse of a skyline in the background of the camera shot is completely packed. There are so many cars and they are all stopped in complete gridlock because, well, nobody ever knows why, really.

Maybe some poor soul's old beater overheated in one of the travel lanes and this set of some cascading failure that led to cars overheating every which way and they're all jamming up the lanes every which way, and there are either no cops in sight or a handful of extremely stressed out and overworked cops in sight. It could be, depending on the particular movie you're watching, that the law is busy elsewhere, or, if things are especially bleak, even the law is trying to get the heck out of Dodge ahead of whatever catastrophe they might imagine.

Whatever the case, there are always all of these people stuck in their cars. They have some vague sense that something bad might happen, which is why they hit the road in the first place, but it's not so bad that they are doing absolutely everything in their power to be anywhere other than stuck in that crush of humanity. They don't really know just how bad, though, so they're just kind of sitting there waiting for something to happen.

Then, suddenly, with little to no warning to those people, the bad thing that they were all waiting for happens. Maybe it's the alien laser beam of death. Maybe it's some giant tidal wave caused by a large meteor striking in the middle of the ocean. Maybe it is a wave of molten lava that has only just erupted out from the earth. Whatever. There are a lot of disaster movies. Pick your favorite.

The people who were looking backwards see all of this stuff happening and they start to run away from it. There's always the one poor idiot who, the first he notices of this impending destruction, it's in his rear view mirror, OBJECTS IN MIRROR ARE CLOSER THAN THEY APPEAR plainly visible on the screen, of course. Sometimes this guy manages to get out of his car and run for two or three seconds before he dies. In other movies he never makes it out of the car and he's picked up and tossed to his fiery death.

But all of these people are screaming and running and dying, and all around them buildings are being destroyed, windows exploding, landmarks that everyone in the country would recognize being obliterated. They were in the wrong place at the wrong time. They're all goners. It kind of sucks for them.

Anyway, the Orioles lost to the Marlins, 5-2.