2021 Game One-Hundred-One: Blue Jays 4, Royals 0

 

Let us bash; let us monster bash
(hit a tater out the stadier [for monster cash])

With the Blue Jays a hundred games in, and four-and-a-half out (if you follow), my brother-in-law and I took to the medium of "SMS Texting" and figured through some fairly rigorous analytics that if it looks as though it's going to take around ninety wins to be in the postseason conversation this year (Buck Martinez says that if you can just win fifteen every month, you win ninety! yet it is actually super hard to do!), the Blue Jays would (and indeed will) need to go something like thirty-eight and twenty-four in their remaining sixty-two, which is a tall order, but consider, please, that Saturday's starting pitcher Alek Manoah is in fact really tall: "a behemoth" is how pleasant and descriptive radio play-by-playist Ben Wagner describes our six-six, two-sixty rookie who thinks Hyun-Jin Ryu is just the neatest guy (he's not wrong [Manoah {but also Wagner}). In the afternoon, we got caught in a long detour through a newer suburb I do not at all know well, and which required the successful navigation of three roundabouts to reach the highway, and this would have been way less fun if we didn't have Ben on the radio telling us about George Springer's home runs. This first proper homestand of the season is the first time this year the Blue Jays have had a dedicated radio broadcast, and while I did not at all mind the television/radio simulcast (as you literally cannot do better than having Dan Shulman tell you about a baseball game, and I have a great deal of affection for both Buck Martinez and, yes, Pat Tabler), Ben Wagner working the whole game without Mike Wilner -- or indeed anybody else at all, which must be a tough go in the booth -- is just great, and I hope Wagner settles into this role for many years to come. Ben Wagner solo is the most I have enjoyed non-Dan-Shulman Blue-Jays-on-the-radio since the heady days of Jerry Howarth and Alan Ashby. Anyway: Manoah continues to be more or less unreal, this time scattering just two hits and a walk over seven innings, leaving not a whole lot for either Borucki or Cimber to do (though they did well!). And although the Blue Jays had but five hits, each one was really good, and here's how: 1) George Springer's home run on the first pitch of the bottom of the first inning is an inherently awesome outcome; 2) we here at Baseball Feelings support any and every success by the æsthetically vital Alejandro Kirk; 3) Springer's second home run came just after we managed to actually get on the high way, and so felt doubly welcome because of that; 4) Vladdy legged-out an infield single that required video replay to confirm and man, there is something about Speed Vladdy that just gets the people going, and in this instance it was super valuable rather than just disproportionately compelling because it meant he came around to score on 5) Marcus Semien's triple. 

And all of this in a mere two hours and nineteen minutes! What a Saturday afternoon of baseball at the Dome, is how I feel about it.

KS