2022 Game Sixty-Five: Yankees 4, Blue Jays 0

 

not without my Manoah

“Nobody is messing with my Manoah,” is how Charlie Montoyo explained his decision to come out of the dugout and get tossed after Trevino pretty clearly swung at a pitch that he was also hit by (like right in the chest, too! ouch!). Manoah was hot, and correct, though probably not correct to be that hot? I don't think it's easy for Alek Manoah. But it was easy for Montoyo, who clearly saw what needed to happen: I need to get kicked out of this game right now or else we are gonna burn through the bullpen in a game we are not going to win and we will be sunk not just today but tomorrow too. And so he did! Great work on that, honestly. I like Charlie.

The Yankees are just historically good so far, like they have a legitimate chance of having the best season of major league baseball that there has ever been, and as I am sure I have said already (here, I think, though certainly elsewhere, and over and over in my mind), it is actually totally liberating, from a Blue Jays fan perspective, for the Yankees to be not just good, and not just great, but like astronomically great: are you, Blue Jays fan, going to get to the end of a season where the Yankees win 125 games, and be like, I can't believe Shapiro and Atkins didn't build a 126-win team? No, you are not going to be like that; you would be a fool to be like that; do not even call into the as-listened-to-on-slim-radios-on-the-walk-home-up-Spadina-cuz-the-streetcar-is-too-crowded-and-not-much-faster-anyway, Mike-Wilner-era of Jays Talk on the Fan 590 with a "take" that foolish. Instead, you should I think "take" solace in the fact that either the Yankees are going to add a World Series championship to their historically great regular season performance, and so it will have been neat to see the best baseball team ever, or, they will end the best baseball season ever by losing to someone in the largely random (haphazard?) playoffs, which will be hilarious. Are the Yankees way better than the Blue Jays? Yes, demonstrably! Might the Yankees lose to the Blue Jays in the playoffs, should the Blue Jays make it? They sure might, sure! "Building a team that can make the playoffs" and "building a team that can win the World Series" are not two separate, distinct tasks; anyone can win in the playoffs; we have seen this time and time again; you don't even have to go to FanGraphs at all; this has happened and is happening on the level of the text itself; no interpretation is required. The postseason is essentially Candyland, in that anything can happen to you. Even if the Yankees win the AL (which they should, but who can say), imagine if the lost the World Series to the Mets, who have looked so good far (and yet things can turn Metsy in an instant; in fact things are perhaps at their Metsiest when they are turning in an instant; that moment of inflection might be where "Metsiness" is itself contained [where is Metsiness bred?]).  

I am digressing pretty hard but all I mean to say is that it's all okay. As was this game, probably, which I only really followed in the form of occasional check-ins on the play-by-play data, and then passing word along to the other attendees of a lovely barbecue. Everyone who heard: was bummed to hear it. But it led to some good talk!

KS