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| Take a knee, boys |
Well, they sure had their chances: Bo Bichette doubled in the first, and Gurriel was aboard behind him after having been really quite smoked by a 98 MPH fastball from Luis Severino (Alek Manoah got [unduly] mad about it) but it didn't turn into anything; the bases were loaded in the second (Kirk on a[n infield!] single, Biggio a walk, Bradley Zimmer an error), but likewise. It wasn't until the eighth that the Blue Jays really threatened again, with Guriel and Raimel Tapia aboard, and the ninth, wherein Aroldis Chapman (who I guess we don't still talk about like he's a bad guy? except that I do?) walked the bases loaded, which seemed super promising until Matt Chapman misread a little Bo Bichette flare into very shallow right (more like "deep second base," as it turned out) and was doubled off to end the game, his head hung low (it wobbled to; and fro). Throughout it all, it was super rainy, and started late, so probably not a lot of fun.
Kevin Gausman, it must be said, looked really good again, with two earned runs on six hits and nine strikeouts (no walks) pitching into the sixth inning. The splitter was splitting!
Perhaps most notably, and indeed perhaps most instructively, Vladimir Guerrero followed his semi-mythic-already three-homer-(plus-that-sweet-double)-despite-getting-stepped-on game by going oh-for-four with four strikeouts. Baseball's weird! And, as Marcus Semien told Hazel Mae in a characteristically pleasant post-game interview last year, "baseball's hard."
With that four-game split in New York (never a bad outcome, though we'd hoped for better), let's take a quick look at the AL East standings as the Blue Jays head home for three against the pretty-good-so-far Oakland Athletics, okay, looks like we've got a Blue Jays/Yankees/Rays three-way tie for first, with the Red Sox a half-game back. Checks out! The first thirty games are a really tough stretch on the Blue Jays schedule, the toughest part of the whole year, arguably; if they can just stay with the pack through this first month or so, even just a game or two about .500, we will be "super in business" (somewhat non-idiomatic but that is how I feel about it).
KS
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