2021 Game One-Forty-Nine: Blue Jays 5, Twins 3

 

beautiful light Saturday, or the beautiful absence of it

You jump out to an early five-nothing lead on the strength of Bo Bichette's twenty-sixth home run of the year and plus a bunch of other stuff, and you hold onto it, you just get out there and you hold onto it; that's what you do. I couldn't be happier with the way this went: Berrios looking like a wonderful pickup not just for the rest of this season but for all of next, Richards and Romano holding it down in relief, lots of steady to slightly-above-steady play in the field, good at-bats up and down the lineup . . . there is nothing not to like! After the game, I turned the radio (in the sense of the radio that I pay to listen to on my computer phone [it is not a bad deal and I am not complaining]) over to the WFAN Yankees feed, which featured Suzyn Waldman marveling over just how "brutal" Cleveland reliever Sam Hentges' stats are this season, and then growing utterly disgusted as he struck out the side on not even all that many pitches to finish the 11-1 romp. John Sterling, who will forever remain the voice of All-Star Baseball 2001 for N64 to me, was no less thrilled about it. And why would he be? Whilst the Blue Jays took two out of three from the Twins this weekend despite a disastrous outing for Hyun-Jin Ryu, the Yankees lost both games they played against Cleveland, and allowed eleven runs in each. Gerrit Cole, who has probably now fallen from contention for the AL Cy Young, was seen cursing loudly as he looked up and saw the (Home Hardware?) out-of-town scoreboard. And yet the Yankees, for all their listlessness, remain very much in this thing: the Blue Jays are only a game and a half ahead, and we're into Tampa for three starting tonight. Would it be too much to ask for two straight series wins against the Rays? Probably! And yet we've got Robbie Ray (he is himself a Ray, giving him a certain measure of insight here?) and Alek Manoah in the first two games before a "bullpen game" (or perhaps a "Ross Stripling game") on Wednesday, owing to Hyun-Jin Ryu's trip to the injured list with a sore neck (hey no jokes: it is not from all the home runs [or maybe it is, what do I know]).  

KS