Orioles continue to experience Kansas City den of horrors, fall to Royals, 8-3

After getting swept at home in four games by the Twins, the Orioles arrived in Kansas City in desperate need of finding a way to win a freaking baseball game. Instead they turned in a complete stink fest against the Royals, looking mostly awful in an 8-3 loss in which they only got five hits in the whole game. The lone bright spot was an Adam Jones home run in the first inning.

A single sentence will suffice to encompass the horror that was this baseball game: Omar Infante hit two triples.

Relating any more of the sordid details of this game will not make either you or I happy. I suggest you go do something else in the world that will make you happy. If you're really, really determined, allow me to direct you to the box score of the game. I am going to see how much of the plot of my favorite video game, Chrono Trigger, I can condense into the span of about a thousand words.

The plot of the greatest video game of all time

Bells ring and seagulls cry out in the distance. A young man, this young man in fact, is slumbering in bed in the morning and is awakened by his mother. The year is 1,000 AD in the kingdom of Guardia, which means it is time for the Millenial Fair. Rousted, our hero makes his way to the fair, where he quite literally runs into a young woman whose name is Marle. They tour the fair.

The main attraction is two teleportation devices designed by our hero's friend Lucca, an inventor, as well as her father. Marle volunteers to be the first to be teleported. There is an accident. Energy in the teleportation device reacts poorly with a pendant on a necklace worn by Marle. She disappears. Because he's the hero, our hero takes up the pendant and follows through after her, accompanied by triumphant music.

On the other side of this portal, our hero finds a world much like the one he knows, only a little different. He is still in Guardia Kingdom but it turns out he has traveled back to the year 600 AD. He makes his way to Guardia Castle, where he learns that the queen of this time, Queen Leene, was recently kidnapped by the evil Mystics, but everything is OK - they've found her. They're calling off the search. Shown to Leene, our hero discovers that this is in fact Marle, who is a dead ringer for the queen of 400 years ago.

Suddenly Marle disappears with a scream. Inventor Lucca has whipped up a key that allows her to follow our hero through time and she arrives to explain that the pendant belongs to the Guardia royal family. Marle is Princess Marle, and she bears such strong resemblance to her ancestor that the Guardian soldiers of 600 AD thought it was her. Only, calling off the search means they never found Leene, which means that Marle was never born, so she disappeared in true Back to the Future style. Oops!

Our hero (let's call him Crono - you can pick his name) and Lucca make their way to a cathedral where Queen Leene was known to pray. There they find a man in the shape of a frog, who insists on being called Frog, who speaks like a knight. It turns out that this cathedral has been overrun by Mystics in disguise. Frog, Crono, and Lucca break into the inner sanctum where they are able to slay the monsters and free the real Queen Leene.

When the faded picture turns whole again

History is restored. Marle pops back into existence, sheepish over deceiving Crono. She just wanted to feel like a regular girl for one day! What a fateful day. Crono, Lucca, and Marle return to their own time, where Marle decides she should really check back in with the king. As the party makes its way into the castle in 1,000 AD, the royal chancellor orders that Crono should be arrested on charges of kidnapping the princess.

Off to the slammer for Crono, and when placed on trial, the chancellor spins everything against Crono to make it seem as though he really meant to kidnap the princess. Crono is sentenced to death, so of course he blows that popsicle stand, because it's clear something fishy is afoot. Crono finds Lucca and Marle on the way out and they are surrounded by royal soldiers in the forest. The King pleads with Marle to return. She will not.

Soldiers back them up, back them up, no one sees that right behind them is another time portal... the party falls in. The soldiers try to follow but the portal winks out. Our heroes pop out in a devastated wasteland filled with strange, advanced technology. Fighting their way through the mutated freaks and out of control robots that populate the landscape, they find their way to a settlement, where, deep in an abandoned basement, they find a video recording of the End of the World, which showed that, in the year 1999 AD, a creature called Lavos erupted to the surface and destroyed the world as they know it.

The beginning of the quest to save the world

Everything you know is doomed? What else is a hero to do but resolve to dispatch this threat with all haste? In this future, the year 2300 AD, Lucca re-activates a robot - Robo - who decides to join the heroes on their quest through time. He likes humans. In the dome where they found Robo is a gate that opens only to the touch of Marle's pendant.

Through that gate is a portal, which transports our heroes to the End of Time - a place where all times come together and they can pop out in many different times and places, as long as there are only three traveling at once. They learn all this from a mysterious old man, old as time itself, who inhabits this place. Before they return to their own time, they awaken new magic powers, because obviously.

They pop out in a closet. It's very Narnia. Turns out they have arrived in the village of the Mystics of 1000 AD, who are a much less violent bunch. A strange old smith named Melchior is here. This is not where they want to be, necessitating a trip through the Magic Cave to return to their home kingdom. In this cave is a beast named Heckran, who, after they defeat him, tells them with his dying breath that Magus, leader of the Mystics, created Lavos in 600 AD!

That punk! It's back to 600 AD to figure out how they might find Magus and stop him... but that will be a story for another time after another extremely crappy Orioles game where I have recap duty and no motivation whatsoever to describe their depressing play.

It's five losses in a row now for the Orioles. They're seven games back in the division. They're 2.5 games back of the Rangers for a wild card spot and they must also leapfrog the Twins and Angels to get back in that picture, while fending off the Rays, who are also 62-62. They will try to halt this losing streak on Tuesday, still against the Royals, at 8:10. The scheduled starting pitchers are Miguel Gonzalez and Danny Duffy.

Instead of venting about how the Orioles suck right now, tell us about something that has made you happy recently. Life is good - just not the Orioles at this point in time.