Lock-up: Inside the Kansas City Royals bullpen

There was rain in Mudville. Pain, too. They concealed it best they could, behind turtlenecks and necks shrunk into jacket collars, but it was seared into their souls, this I know. There was the gloom of overcast, the doom of knowing this would persist, the cold, the anger, the confusion. A bunt single by Joey Gathright. Another runner stranded on second. A grooved fastball redirected into the high mist, riveting in its trajectory, riving the deadbeat hearts of the visitors which beat with the empty thud of wooden hearts -- bitter hearts, as the singer sings -- their long, forlorn faces as plain as that element of blank (as a poet once wrote), as inscrutable as the pain of prisoners whose eyes fix on the jagged wires of their longing. Where, they implored to the high heavens lacerating their faces with tears, O where do we find peace in this cursed demesne called Kansas City?

Games are over when the Royals take a lead into the 7th, and when your starting pitcher gives you eight innings of zero-run ball, well, as Chris Keller of Oz would say... actually, almost nothing he says is quotable on a family blog, but if we had to choose something, maybe... "They stab me, they shoot me, I ain't going down."

After eight games, the Royals' bullpen has been swiped and shot at, but they haven't gone down: 22 IP, 2 ERs, 11 hits, 5 BBs, 28 Ks. Stunning.

The result tonight: a 4-0 win to improve to 6-2.

Who's singing the prison blues? The Yankees are, that's who. Locked up in Kansas City with nowhere to go but a cold, losing locker room, nothing to add to the world but scratches marking the passing of days and tallies in the loss column.

Maybe Johnny Cash can take this home:

Well, if they freed me from this prison -- if that railroad train was mine -- I bet I'd move on over a little farther down the line... far from Folsom Prison, that's where I want to stay, and I'd let that lonesome whistle blow my blues away.