2021 Game One-Sixty-Two: Blue Jays 12, Orioles 4

 

everybody up

Just before first pitch Sunday, the television broadcast showed Bo Bichette and Lourdes Gurriel Jr. holding one another in as tender and loving an embrace as you are ever likely to see: it was deep, and low, and real. We should all be so lucky as to be held like that by someone in our lives, someone with whom we share real intimacy, or a deep familial bond. For Gurriel and Bichette, it is that they play baseball together, and are friends. The camera stayed with it an awfully long time, and Dan Shulman seemed legitimately moved; I know I was. It was clear to me long before game time that whatever happened Sunday afternoon, this has been, for me, the most wonderful Toronto Blue Jays season and team I have known, the one that has meant the most to me, in no small measure because I have been able to share it with my family in ways I would not at all have anticipated (the U11 fireballer, charging hard towards U13, and the U5 tee-baller with left-handed power to all fields, alongside the seasoned veterans of the squad [we've been hit by a few pitches, but we're alright]). The long moment between Bichette and Gurriel didn't create this feeling -- it was far from the first of its kind we've seen throughout this lovely summer -- but it brought us into it again.          

When things did finally get underway, and Hyun-Jin Ryu, despite his recent troubles, got a groundout to Bichette at short on the first pitch of the game, and struck out both Mountcastle and Hays to retire the side in order, it felt like, okay: this might actually go pretty well today. Little did I expect that we would be doing tiny home run dances the rest of the afternoon (and into the evening) at what seemed like five-minute intervals: Springer's twentieth in the first, Vladdy's forty-eighth on a rocket to right field in the second, Springer's grand slam in the third, Semien's record-setting forty-fifth in the fifth  . . . in the last few days it had been the bottom of the order that had really kept things going, but in game one-sixty-two it was the biggest Blue Jays bats that were the biggest Blue Jays bats. The Orioles starter, Bruce Zimmerman, was chased in the first. Meanwhile, Hyun-Jin Ryu did exactly what you'd hope he might, with five good innings before handing it off to (I do not mean to be uncharitable when I say) "the secondary relievers," exactly like you would expect if you were setting up for a Game 163, should things break our way, where Mayza and Romano would be fresh-as-could-be, ready to relieve José Berríos when the time came (if the time came). 

But the Yankees walked off the Rays 1-0 in Yankee Stadium on an Aaron Judge infield single, and the Red Sox came from behind in Washington for the second day in a row (our old friend Raven has apologized on behalf of the Nationals bullpen, and I have accepted). I held out some slim hope that the great Juan Soto would run into one for the Nationals in the bottom of the ninth, but instead he made the season's last out. I honestly can't even say I was too disappointed by any of it: by all means, my preference would be for the Blue Jays to have not only made the playoffs, but to have won the whole thing, but it is not my preference by as much as you might think, or as much as would even be sensible. Though I am of course fundamentally and unalterably romantic (an earnest questioner: "Professor Frye, would you agree that your conception of literature as you present it here is somewhat Romantic?" Professor Frye: "Oh, it's entirely Romantic"), I do not mean to be romantic but instead eminently pragmatic when I say in all sincerity that I am very much A Regular Season Guy; that's where the real pleasure of the game lies for me, in the dailyness of it for no fewer than six months out of the year. The Blue Jays were in the playoffs with misleading regularity when I was a kid, and won the World Series twice before I was old enough to work anything other than a paper route; years ago, decades ago, I have already had the maximum possible experience of playoff baseball -- and it's very much it's own thing, and quite a thing, but it's not the promise of it, or even the potential of it, that keeps me here. I'm much more content with the way this season ended, surely, than of the players involved, who seemed, to a man, proud of what they'd done this summer, but awfully sad that this is where it ends for them. "We became the best team in baseball," Marcus Semien told us when it was over. "But it was a tick too late."

KS