In baseball a shutout occurs when the losing team scores exactly zero runs.   Excitement mounts in the stands, in TV Radio and Internet land, during the waning moments of a 1-0 game.  If the team being shut out scores even one run the game will be tied, the shutout lost.  No team wants to be shut out, it adds insult to injury, as the saying goes.  Better to lose 5-1 than being shut out 5-0.

I was thinking about this late yesterday as I glanced at my stats page.  On the stats page I see a running tally of the individuals who look at this blahg.   I don’t know why I glance at my stats page, it has become a tic.  That kind of tic is the reason I don’t keep a phone with the internet in my pocket.     I started writing on this blahg on August 2.  I don’t know why I do that either, except that I love to write, and good writing takes practice, and that I daydream, sometimes, about being on a public radio talk show discussing my breakthrough book with a perceptive host.   Maybe I’d also jump up and down on Oprah’s couch talking about this remarkable book that, like my fascinating organization for largely doomed poor children, resides entirely in my head.   

Anyway, every time I checked how many people had read my recent posts the answer was the same, none.   “I’m being shut out,” I thought, as other perplexing thoughts wheeled through my head, illuminating the truly puny magnitude of my concern for the stats of gratituousblahg.   An hour later the tally was still zero, as it was six hours later.  At around 11 I checked the stats, and I was still being shut out.

“I got shut out,” I said to myself, glumly, going about some other business shortly before midnight.  It would break a streak of at least one person reading these words since August 2.

Apparently, though, just as the day was about to end, some time right before the stroke of midnight, the shutout was broken up.  I had one reader yesterday.

“Yes!” I said out loud, for no reason I could grasp, except that the sports metaphor had really taken root.

Today, so far, I’m being shut out again, and so soon after setting high water marks for readers in a day and in a week.  Well, like Robbie Cano’s torrid and cool season shows, these things go in cycles.  Maybe I’ll be 5 for 5 tomorrow, eh, Coach?