2021 Game One-Thirty-Three: Blue Jays 11, Athletics 10

 

the boys

We stepped away from this one with the score 8-2, after Alek Manoah lost control of first his two-seamer (Josh Harrison and Starling Marte: both got hit; neither were thrilled?), and then very nearly himself (easy, big fella!), and also after can't-miss-prospect Nate Pearson kept on missing. It was not encouraging! And so we turned to the comforts of not just Star Trek: The Next Generation, but indeed one of the very best ones of it, the one where(in) the Enterprise encounters a highly localized distortion of the spacetime continuum and explodes over and over again. Perhaps the Blue Jays bullpen has encountered a season-long distortion of the spacetime continuum, one might quip were they inclined towards uncharitable thoughts towards this our bullpen, but that is not how I really feel about it, honestly. At the time of our game departure (or "gameparture"), our foremost thoughts concerned how unbelievably æsthetic Oakland looked last night: the uniforms and the colours are just tremendous, as ever, but beyond that, are their better-looking ballplayers qua ballplayers than Josh Harrison with those socks and stirrups, or Sean Manaea with that gorgeous green glove? Even little Tony Kemp out there in left field -- these guys couldn't look better, and they were styling on us in every sense. (More like the Oakland Æsthetics, right?)  After TNG, though, I could not help but notice (with the assistance of social media platform Twitter) that Lourdes Gurriel had tied the game with a grand slam in the eighth -- quick quick, let's get the game back on! Oh, Jordan Romano, of all people, got touched up in the top of the ninth and we are down by two again, was the spirit with which we settled in for the home-half of the ninth, which, as it turned out, went: Breyvic Valera single, George Springer double (on a ball six inches off the plate and down), transcendent Marcus Semien three-run walk-off down the left-field line and into the 200s. 

Throughout all the revelry that followed (how does Hazel Mae stay so consistently dry in these situations? I bet that, like so many things, it all comes down to reps), Tony Kemp stood all by himself out in left field and took it in. 

Someone asked him on Twitter what that was all about, as it was unusual (perhaps unique?) to see, to which Kemp replied: "I feel when you play this game so hard you realize things about the baseball gods and you tend to believe. For Marcus to come up in that situation at that time in the game to do what he did is wild. I wanted to live in that moment for a bit. that’s all." Thoughtful stuff from a thoughtful guy. More than the nine runs in the last two innings, more than the Gurriel grand slam, or even the Semien walk-off itself, Tony Kemp standing out there in the moment for a bit was in its way the most striking part of what happened Friday night, and stands apart from all of it, despite being inseparable from any of it. Thanks, everybody. Great work all around. 

KS