2021 Game Eighty-Six: Rays 5, Blue Jays 2

 

Brett Phillips is still having a high old time!

Four home runs in a 5-2 game seems like a lot. That two of them (that's fully half!) came off the bat of Brandon Lowe was not great news for Ross Stripling, who, much like Alek Manoah in the series opener, went only 3 2/3 innings, which is quite poor unless you are employing the relatively novel pitching concept of "the opener" (this was not the case). The Blue Jays bullpen was fine, but for the second day in a row, nobody was really hitting (though Marcus Semien's twenty-second home run of the season must surely be acknowledged). I heard a few innings of this one on the radio, but the early innings I took in solely through play-by-play data on the MLB application "for phones," and I was again struck by the softening effect (and perhaps affect) experiencing a game through play-by-play data offers: were I to have experienced the visual or even auditory fact Vladimir Guerrero picked off of first, I am pretty sure I would have minded it much more than simply seeing that information pop up in text, which really just had me like, "he's irrepressible!" 

A drag to lose the last series before the All-Star Break but series, though a natural way of organizing one's thoughts and experiences throughout a long season, are totally fake, and have no bearing on anything -- except, of course, on one's {baseball} feelings.

KS