Blue Jays 7, Astros 5: Our Long National 0-8 Nightmare is Over

Breaking ball imo.

Imagine, if you will, that you are Houston Astros' right-hander Brett Myers. You are a major league baseball player, so your life should be a good one, but you pitch for the Astros, so instead it is misery. But not today: today, the offense has staked you to a 4-0 lead, and you have held the hometown Blue Jays off the board into the sixth inning. Sure, Jose Molina has just led off with a solid single up the middle, but you've got just the thing for that: you will compel Yunel Escobar to ground crisply to short, a perfect double play ball! And you actually manage to do it! But on this day, the usually sure-handed Clint Barmes forgets to shut the barm door, and it goes right through the wickets (this is not a mixed metaphor it is all literally true), and now you've got two on and oh shit that's Jose Bautista isn't it? 


Now open your eyes (I asked you to close them, right?). You are not Houston Astros' right-hander Brett Myers. Brett Myers is Houston Astros right-hander Brett Myers. But aside from that single detail, everything else that has just been imagined is all too real.


Bautista hit a three-run home run in the sixth and added a solo shot in the eighth -- and let us not overlook Escobar's blast in the seventh -- as the Blue Jays overcame some fair-to-moderate shakiness from Brendan Morrow and pulled this one out late. It was awesome. Jon Rauch did his best to blow it again but Ocatavio "Don't Ask" Dotel closed it out and I thank him for that; that's real to me. Coming into the game, Bautista was mired in his worst slump of the season, I think, 0-8 with a walk in there somewhere. But yesterday he came out clean shaven, perhaps in the interest of slump busting, and he went 3-4 with a single, those two home runs, 4 RBI, a stolen base, and he threw a dude out at third. Was the dude fat? Sure: it was Carlos Lee, who is listed at 6'2", 265 lbs. Was he probably actually safe? Absolutely. But whatever, Jose Bautista owns. That's 4.3 WAR on the season now, for those of you who are (sabermetrically) scoring at home. Also his beard was mostly back by the third.  


This is in all likelihood the only time I will be able to say this all season, so I'm just going to go ahead and say it: the Blue Jays are actually the hottest team in baseball right now, with eight wins in their last ten. They're only a-game-and-a-half back in both the division and the wild card. Playoffs? Almost a certainty. Almost.


KS