Please make it stop

God, this game.

There are no positives. There are no silver linings. If you’re looking for the happy-happy-joy-joy recap, look elsewhere. You will not enjoy this.

I hated writing this almost as much as I hated watching it, and I hated watching it a great deal.

Kudos to Ned Yost. In a way, it’s admirable that he stuck with this thing and didn’t intentionally get himself run. If my job were to win baseball games, and I was so great at it that I gave a 28-year old with a career 9.00 ERA his first start, then watched as everything went to hell and my team scored less than Kansas football against a quality opponent—and were beaten by a larger margin than Rutgers was against Washington—I’d probably find a way to get tossed and maybe even suspended. Time away might do you good, Ned.

I don’t blame Onelki Garcia, nor do I blame Andres Machado. They were put in an impossible situation—charged with stopping an MLB-caliber offense, in what was essentially a must-win game—and couldn’t get it done with their combined seven career innings pitched in the big leagues.

Color me stunned.

Garcia got one out. Machado got two. By the time pitcher No. 3—and realistically, the guy who probably should’ve started all along—Eric Skoglund came in, the Royals were down double-digits. Hittable pitches—the kind you can get away with when you have Quad-A stuff but are mired in Omaha—were smacked. Sadness ensued. Maybe (as our crack broadcasting crew kept pointing out after sifting through 37 pages of ‘break glass in case of blowout’ talking points) plate umpire Mike Winters wasn’t 100 percent consistent on his balls and strikes, but he wasn’t 17 runs worth of bad.

You could see players checking out as the proceedings drug along. In the second, Lorenzo Cain either (charitably) took a bad route and didn’t have good awareness of the fence on a ball crushed to deep center by Eduardo Escobar or (more realistically) gave up on said ball in order to not sustain needless injury in a game the Royals were already trailing by seven runs. Draw your own conclusions.

Thank God this was September and allowed Yost to make some changes early, and often. Cain, Melky Cabrera, Eric Hosmer, Salvador Perez, Mike Moustakas and Alcides Escobar were in the starting nine but all got to spend most of the latter part of this game observing.

Unlike most Royals fans, it’s unclear if they needed large glasses of brown liquor to observe this catastrophe.

Although every Royals pitcher who appeared in this one gave up at least one earned run (with the exception of Peter Moylan), it feels like the offense got a total pass because the pitching was so bad. That’s unfair; any group that allows Kyle Gibson to throw six shutout innings with five strikeouts deserves to take its rightful fisking. Paulo Orlando got two hits though; bully for him.

How does a team recover from this? I suppose we find out tomorrow afternoon when Ian Kennedy takes on Ervin Santana at 1:10 p.m. (CT). I know that when my team needs a victory, I turn to Ian Kennedy.

Holy Christ. What a disaster. Somebody pass the scotch. #boomyosted