Tigers 10, Blue Jays 5: Toronto I Love You, But You're Bringing Me Down

Brandon Morrow, throwing up a little.

You see 10-5, and you think, hey, a wacky shootout! No. This sucked and was never close after the fourth.


The Blue Jays went up in the first when Jose Bautista plated Corey Patterson on a double and then scurried to third on the throw home -- Jose Bautista is the best, by the way -- and added another run on a Yunel Escobar solo shot in the third. Everything was cool. But then Brandon Morrow got into trouble in the fourth, and with his velocity and arm angle both getting kind of weird, according to manager John Farrell, out came the early hook with two runs already in and the bases loaded. Morrow obviously wasn't wild about getting pulled that early, nor should he have been, but at least he didn't Kevin Gregg his way off the mound (cursing the hook that came from without rather than coming to terms with the hook that dwelt within). Shawn Camp, who has been excellent thus far, allowed all three of those runs to score and threw another one of his own in there for good measure.


It was grim, so with the score 6-2, I decided I would take a break from the action, set my soul at ease with slow songs on the piano, and come back a few innings later when hopefully the Blue Jays had made a game of it, and watch the dramatic conclusion. Except when I came back it was 10-2, because Octavio "Don't Ask" Dotel got ripped in the seventh. I didn't even stick around for the Blue Jays' three runs in the bottom of the ninth. Because who could care.


This team is awful right now, just absolutely brutal. This is a shit-storm with, like, gale-force shit winds; better haul the jib in, lest it grow shittier still. And yet there's Jose Bautista, being utterly amazing despite the futility (and haters) around him, as dialed-in as any hitter I have seen since Barry Bonds retired. Can this last a whole season? Almost certainly not. But Baseball Reference has him as a 3.1 WAR player through twenty-six games this season. And it totally feels that way. This is insane.  


I would like to clumsily add, before bidding the Tigers adieu, that I heard on the radio that the only Detroit Tiger other than Justin Verlander to have two no-hitters is the impeccably named Virgil Trucks, who pitched both in the 1952 season, a year he finished with a 5-19 record. Baseball, man. There is nothing else even a little bit like it.


KS