2022 Game Fifty-Nine: Blue Jays 6, Tigers 0

 

that's a double, or is about to be

Hyun-Jin Ryu is, as I have noted previously, as interesting to watch pitch as any pitcher in Blue Jays history (to me), and so I am always saddened when he becomes inflamed (in whole or in part) and must step away from those duties, but on the level of pure performance, it is hard to imagine Ryu pitching any better than Ross Stripling has in his stead. I think it's thirteen-and-two-thirds consecutive innings of scorelessness from Stripling at this point? Sunday's outing was one hit and no walks over six complete innings. And looking at the box score now, it would seem the only other Tigers' hit all day was the single off Thornton in the eighth (Yimi Garcia was awesome in the seventh, Jordan Romano likewise in the ninth). Vladdy hit his fourteenth home run of the season on one of the vladmost swings you'll ever see, and every Blue Jays batter had at least one hit, except for their hottest hitter, and in fact the hottest hitter in baseball over the last little while, our short king Alejandro Kirk. Hey you know who else has actually been raking, but like low-key raking? Cavan Biggio! Second-highest OBP on the team (that can't be right) behind Alejandro Kirk (that can't be right). A reasonably brisk pace to this one, too, at two-hours, forty-three-minutes. And so we bid adieu to my favourite ballpark for a time (I cannot bear to check if we are back again this season though I doubt it, as I think this is our second trip), and as nice as it would have been to get the sweep, dropping the middle game of a weekend series is definitely the best way to take two-out-of-three: Friday night, one is left with all the optimism of a weekend sweep; a Saturday loss leaves one slightly deflated, certainly, but with the hope of the Sunday series win very much intact; and then it happens! The regular-season series is, certainly, a fake idea, and yet we must organize our time, and indeed our thoughts regarding time, and, perhaps more crucially still, our feelings about time, somehow, lest we succumb pretty bad.    

KS