Landing a military fighter jet isn’t horseshoes. Nor is it hand grenades. Either you land the darn machine on the surface of the floating boat, or you don’t. There’s simply no in-between.

Is it like baseball? Maybe. Yes.

It is, in that either you win the game, or you don’t. Either you stick the finish and or you’re still flying (or skimming across the Atlantic).

They don’t, however, play much baseball in Russia, which is the country of origin for the SU-33, the pilot and the aircraft carrier featured in the following clip where whoops! something important doesn’t quite happen (basketball and hockey in Russia though? да. Very cool.

We brought up baseball out of the clear blue sky because — get this — it was actually former Washington Nationals skipper (and Hall of Famer) Frank Robinson who coined the now very popular horseshoe-hand grenade idiom during an interview with TIME Magazine back in 1973:

“Close don’t count in baseball. Close only counts in horseshoes and hand grenades.”