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| that feeling when you realize your "fake" tag-up play at third has actually worked (first time ever) |
If gives me no pleasure to see the once mighty Oakland Athletics (their late-1980s excellence was a major feature of my baseball youth [let's bash]; their Moneyball-era exploits were also fun [who could forget Moneyball Day at the SkyDome? {we were the only ones that called it that and the Blue Jays were crushed}]) brought as low as they have been by ownership and management that is not just frugal, but now, finally, openly hostile towards their few remaining fans and customers, who, it would seem, now number about two thousand or so, if you count how many people are actually showing up to their awful coliseum (the Raiders ruined it before departing for Las Vegas, I guess). (Trading away all the best players while at the same time drastically increasing season-ticket prices? It's never been tried before; let's see how where this takes us.) I have friends to whom Oakland Athletics baseball matters dearly, I want them to be happy. That said, as sympathetic as I may be to their present and seemingly irrevocably lowly position, I have no interest in seeing the Oakland Athletics beat the Toronto Blue Jays 5-1 -- always, but especially today, as we begin the always perilous west-coast swing. The late start time coupled with the necessity of finishing the Stranger Things 4 finale meant that I only really caught (baseball term) the first inning, but it was more than enough: Alek Manoah's first went groundout (hey great); walk (it happens); single (can't be mad about singles); hit by pitch (uh oh); and then a run scored on a popup to shallow centre field, no problem at all for George Springer except that his throw missed Alejandro Kirk like ten feet over and ten feet up in response to a totally standard bluffed tag-up from Ramon Laureano at third (Laureano could not believe it worked; you could tell he could not believe it). A batter later, when Elvis Andrus (hey I remember that guy!) doubled home a pair, the Blue Jays had figured out a way to allow three runs in the first inning against a team that is averaging 2.4 runs per home game this season (AL lows in OBP, SLG, and, if you can believe it, also OPS). Dark, dark stuff for a fourth straight loss.
AND YET where do we stand, where do we really stand with precisely (exactly) half of the season behind us? At a perfectly good 44-37, a game ahead of last year's halfway mark (which ended, you will recall, in the Blue Jays seventh-ever 90+ win season [91]), good for a winning percentage (per-mille) of .542, which, carried over a whole season, would amount to 88 wins, although of course one must allow for the fact that the Blue Jays played the AL's (and indeed all of baseball's) toughest first-half schedule, and plays the AL East's (though not the AL's, full-stop) easiest schedule the rest of the way, and could reasonably be expected to pick up a few more wins in the second half than in the first. So, for all the ups (transcendent) and downs (genuinely crushing), more or less the first half you would expect of a team you would hope/expect (hopespect) to win right around ninety, right? In my efforts to maintain perspective, I revisited Dan Szymborski's preseason ZiPS projections at FanGraphs to find that yes, I was remembering it right: ZiPS projected the Blue Jays at 88 wins for the season (just like the Rays, Red Sox, and Yankees, in fact), and a 58.9% chance of making these strange (not a diss) new playoffs. The midseason ZiPS projections, just posted, have the Blue Jays once more at 88 wins, with playoff odds now at 74.5%, the certainty rising as the most dire scenarios (the Blue Jays losing their first 81 to open the season, for example) fall by the wayside. I accept that, in the face of a pretty dark little four game losing streak, there is an aspect of the "im not owned! im not owned!!" Dril tweet to all of the above ("i continue to insist as i slowly shrink and transform into a corn cob," that august tweet continues), but this is honestly how I feel about it. Are the 2022 Toronto Blue Jays the team that won four out of five against the Red Sox and Rays? Or are they the team that lost four straight to the Rays and Athletics? I would argue that they are exactly both, and that this is neither remarkable nor unusual in any way, because they are, crucially, a baseball team, and this is what baseball seasons are like (like cats, I suppose, all baseball seasons are weird, but weird in different ways, and ways that you can never quite foresee). I am not owned (yet).
KS
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