Blue Jays 3, White Sox 2: Well, that's it.

You would think 162 games would be enough, but I am not convinced.

Last night was maybe the single best night of regular season baseball I can remember, with four games with serious playoff implications going on at the same time, all easily followed through the glory of baseball on the internet. (Bill covers all of this superbly in the post just below mine, but I got about halfway through this earlier today, saved it, and am returning to it now, hours later, and I think it would be wrong of me to deny you my, you know, word bounty, so here it all is. Inevitably, we cover some of the same ground, but get used to it: everyone is writing about last night, and I would be stunned if there were not at least one 28 September 2011 book on the shelves this time next year. So here we go.) 


The Cardinals got out ahead of the Astros early with a five-run first, and Chris Carpenter allowed only two hits all night, so the pressure was on the Braves to stay alive against the Phillies, which they very much did not, losing in thirteen in a straight-up hell of a game. "Braves Cap Collapse," the headline says, and yeah, they sure did. I don't want to diminish the severity of that collapse, or the agony of the Braves fans who endured it, but the Red Sox implosion has been far more vivid to me, a streak of incompetence so wide and so deep that it began to look like self-abnegation. Last night, when Papelbon threw the last of his fifteen pitches in twelve minutes -- the one that ended up lined into and then out of Carl Crawford's glove in left, allowing the winning Baltimore run to come across in the bottom of the ninth -- it was the perfect ending to a seven-win, twenty-loss month, a fitting bookend to Boston's equally improbable two-and-ten start to the season. 


Meanwhile, the Rays, with a total payroll that exceeds the combined salaries of Papelbon and Crawford but not by as much as you might think, clawed themselves back from a seven-run deficit through seven-and-a-half innings, with Evan Longoria's three-run shot in the home half of the eighth bringing them to within a run. When pinch hitter Dan Johnson, who came into the game batting .108, and who I had literally never heard of, homered to tie it in the ninth, it was ludicrous, even more so than Longoria's walk-off shot in the twelfth, I think. According to FanGraphs, the only player in either leagues with worse production in at least ninety plate appearances this season is Roy Halladay. Just amazing stuff. Too bad they couldn't even put thirty thousand in the seats for it, but that's baseball in St. Pete, I guess.


Despite all of that amazingness last night, in all honesty my attention was much more firmly focused on a perfectly meaningless afternoon game between the Blue Jays and the White Sox. A game of utterly no playoff consequence, it was played entirely for the benefit of a bunch of people with nothing better to do on a pretty nice fall afternoon, people like:


(i) An old man with a scorecard.

(ii) A man with a helmet full of nachos.

(iii) A couple of Frank Thomas fans.

(iv) A lady with a beer.

(v) A kid with a rally cap behind the bullpen and his brother.

(vi) A young couple messing around with their phones but in a way that looks fun and shared and not alienating.

(vii) Seventh-inning stretchers.

(vii) And this guy.

So the usual, basically. 


What they saw was, from their perspective, I'm sure, kind of a debacle. With the White Sox up 2-1 in the top of the ninth after perfectly OK outings from both starters (Humber for the Sox, Morrow for the Blue Jays), Chris Sale just pretty much blew it: double, single, sac bunt, intentional walk, run-scoring walk, run-scoring walk, and then, inevitably, the hook. That Frank Francisco managed to seal the deal in the bottom of the ninth was both a relief and a pleasure. (After an absolutely abysmal first couple months, Francisco has actually kind of almost salvaged his season, and so good for him, I guess, but the hurt remains, a little.) I was entirely satisfied with the slightly strange way this one ended, but I've got to think White Sox fans felt it the worst bullshit ever. 


The win on this last day of the season brought the Blue Jays back to .500 for the thirty-third time this season. I don't know if Mike Wilner was entirely accurate when he called the 2011 Toronto Blue Jays the five-hundredest team to ever five hundred, probably not, but it has definitely felt that way: no great streaks one way or the other, no real can-you-even-believe-this runs of elation or let's-trade-everybody stretches of incompetence and despair. Things have been even-steven. I will have more, much more, senselessly more, to say about the 2011 Toronto Blue Jays in the coming weeks and months, but for now I'm just like, "Well, that's it. Last game of the season. I am, as always, genuinely sad to see it end." That is what I am like for now. But I had fun! 


To return, finally, to the dramatic stuff from last night, I've got a few things I'd like to share with you, the first a .gif that shows pretty clearly that Dan Johnson's game-tying solo blast totally bag tagged some guy. Here you go:

Next, here's a graph from FanGraphs (where else?) of AL wild card probabilities throughout the evening (click here for more):

Here are Harold Reynolds and Dan Plesac of MLB Network losing their minds, a little:

And finally, here's a pretty terrific video timeline that MLB put together, definitely worth ten minutes of your time on this, a night without any baseball:






Enjoy!


KS