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| "Josiah Gray" is a fantastic baseball name |
Jose Berrios was pretty good, actually: three runs in five innings is not ideal, but when all three of them came on one swing from Juan Soto, it's hard to find all that much fault, right? Berrios settled in just fine from there, as the Blue Jays made there way back with home runs from Téo (another!), Cory Dickerson, and a pair from Marcus Semien. And so it was 5-4 Blue Jays late when Brad Hand came in and picked up both the blown save and the loss pretty quick. Hand was definitely worth a shot at the deadline (he came over from these very same Nationals, as well you know), but it has not worked out, and I do not think I am alone in suggesting that it would be unwise to continue to use him in high-leverage situations, probably. You only get so many of those! The Blue Jays "bullpen woes" (a phrase that gets tossed around a lot, and perhaps too freely, but these are well and truly woes) are incompletely but provocatively illustrated by the strange fact that the Blue Jays (63-56) have only as many one-run wins this season (just eight!) as the Baltimore Orioles (38-81). Yikes! And yet for all this, and despite a truly disappointing road-trip following the loveliest homestand ever, the Blue Jays are not in especially bad shape as they head home for three against the Tigers (yes!) and then four against the White Sox (oh no): they continue to sit four games behind the final Wild Card spot (Oakland), five behind the first (New York). The AL East title, which did not seem an impossibility when the Blue Jays went on their 9-2 run, seems about as done as done gets, with Tampa ten games ahead now. But that's ok! The Blue Jays have thirteen games between now and what looks to be a crucial Labour-Day-Weekend series against the A's: four against the White Sox, yes, but six against Detroit, and three against Baltimore. I guess the hope is to win enough of those thirteen (and it's gonna need to be a bunch) to make those three games against Oakland really important? This still feels quite possible, though I am for sure given to folly.
KS
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