If this happened to you, you'd turn off the PlayStation
After a long day, you've finally found a minute to sit down. You power up your console, load your favorite game, connect to the servers to start a game and ... you're finished. You're destroyed. In mere moments of beginning to play, it's already over.
It could be anything: FIFA, and you're down by a handful of goals before you've even had a chance to pass between your players. Fortnite and you've just landed and already are fending off your opponents. Heck, even Tetris if you're given a really bad set of blocks to begin.
In those situations, you would sigh heavily, heave your controller across the room and turn off the console.
Your opponent has left the match
Well, now you know how the Braves feel.
After a year where everything went right, where every game was a kind of party led by their precocious and exciting youth, the Braves won the division and were ready to play far into October.
They made it to Game 5 of the NLDS -- a winner-take-all game -- and even if they lost it would at least be a tight and close affair, right? No.
In the very first inning, before most fans finished paying for their food and getting to their seats, Atlanta was losing -- bad. Starting pitcher Mike Foltynewicz gave up four runs and was forced to stand in the dugout and stew as more runs crossed the plate in an endless, lemming-like stream.
At the end of the first inning, the Braves were down 10-0. It was like the game was glitching -- everything the Cardinals hit managed to avoid a glove. Good pitches just missed the corner of the plate. It was a disaster that just never stopped. Clearly the source code was whacked. Someone should have called customer service to complain.
Because this was real life, the Braves couldn't just quit and start over, though. Instead, they had to hunker down and prepare for eight more innings, with hope draining after every out. All the while, the Cards could barely contain their glee, with giant smiles on their faces – like when Dexter Fowler doubled in the first:
All these exuberant ballplayers could do was watch as their dreams were extinguished over the afternoon with one massive blowout.
Instead of the smiles you normally saw from Ozzie Albies, this was the face that greeted you:
While the season is now over for the Braves, it's only four months until they can start hunting for the World Series again.
Michael Clair writes for MLB.com. He spends a lot of time thinking about walk-up music and believes stirrup socks are an integral part of every formal outfit.
