This Mariners season, which started with great hopes of great promise, is at this point, broadly speaking, full blown off the rails. Wednesday saw the Mariners lose as Felix Hernandez gave up two home runs to former Mariners backup catcher Welington Castillo, a man who was traded for Mark Trumbo (who watched the game from the bench) and replaced on the roster by Jesus Sucre, who has hit one home run in his Major League career.

So yeah, the Mariners aren’t a good baseball team right now. The Mariners are not a winning baseball team. But since when is baseball about winning? Or rather, since when is watching the Mariners about winning?

Sure, baseball can be about assembling a great team and watching it operate beautifully over 162 games. Baseball success can be the success accumulated through the aggregation of small successes. But it can also be about the day-to-day narrative, indulging in the joy of the small successes themselves rather than worrying about the cumulative lack of success those minute successes accumulate into. We’re all going to be forgotten in the broader scope of history, so we might as well enjoy moments of madness in the meantime.

Which is to say that the Mariners are bad at baseball, but sometimes cool stuff happens anyway.

Like, holy shit! Jesus Sucre hit a home run last weekend. That aforementioned one home run of his? It just happened! That’s cool! Sucre, as detailed extensively in the pixels of Slog a couple weeks ago, had been hitting Major League Baseball pitchers as you or I would: extremely rarely. Heading into last weekend, he only had one hit this season and no home runs in his entire career. He then doubled the first of those numbers, and increased the latter much in the way the Big Bang increased the amount of universe in our universe. That’s great, especially considering many have attributed Sucre’s slump this year to the loss of his mother. Sucre’s home run was a weird baseball moment that may have, for a moment, provided succor to a grieving man. That’s beautiful.

Similarly cosmically improbable was a 3-6-2 triple play by the Mariners last weekend. How often has a 3-6-2 triple play happened in baseball history? Twice now. The answer to that question had been “once” since 1955, “this will take forever to look up, I think the answer is never” from 1860 to 1955, and “what the hell are you talking about, witch,” for all of history preceding 1860. So that’s a cool thing you can only see by watching Mariners baseball every day, looking for cool things, like some sort of sad old-timey gold panner, panning for gold in the mostly barren river of Mariners baseball. Or, like an astronomer just sorta winging it with his telescope and coming across a cool nebula by chance.

Cool stuff can also happen in less cosmic ways when watching Mariners baseball. For example, Robinson Cano can start looking like Robinson Cano and not Chone Figgins in a rubber Mission:Impossible-style Robinson Cano mask. Or catcher Mike Zunino can hit like a top hitting prospect and not how Jesus Sucre is supposed to hit. Or Franklin Gutierrez can hit walk-off home runs after four seasons of horrible injury luck. Good stuff happens! Baseball! Woo!

Why mention any of this? Mariners baseball right now is a tough sell. I get that. The season is off the rails for the 14th straight year, the buzzards are circling the general manager’s office, and talk will soon turn once again to the future of the franchise rather than its inglorious present. But my phone died at Tuesday’s game and it gave me time to think.

So, the point of all this is that the present exists, practically begging to be looked at. And baseball is the sporting manifestation of the challenge of mindfulness. Staying present with mediocrity allows one to see the world for what it really is. By gazing upon the paint-drying tedium of late-season Mariners baseball, we can see the illusions of modern life for what they are. By distracting ourselves with a distraction that does not distract, we can get closer to inner peace.

If you want “good sports” or “good art” you can always go to CenturyLink Field and watch whatever excellence Paul Allen will allow you to indulge in. But if you want a to look in the mirror and find beauty in your frailty, cross the street, buy a hot dog, and watch the Mariners.