2022 Game One-Hundred-Twenty-Three: Blue Jays 6, Red Sox 5 (F/10)

 

I can appreciate where Red Sox pitcher John Schreiber
is coming from, but in fact Cavan Biggio was safe

When Bo's throwing error extended the fifth inning and eventually came around to tie the game at five, I figured two-out-of-three in Boston (and a five-and-two road trip) would be fine, and decided not to worry about it. So I was relatively carefree when the home half of the ninth opened with a Reese McGuire (remember him?) triple that Téo probably should have cut off before it got to the wall. But, bizarrely, the Red Sox did not score: Adam Cimber struck out Bobby Dalbec, hit Jarren Duran (after getting him to two strikes!), and struck out Tommy Pham before Tim Mayza came in and, on the first pitch, got the troublesome Rafael Devers to ground out to Vladdy, who booted it, but directly to Cavan Biggio, so it all worked out. A leadoff triple that doesn't score in a tie-game in the eighth? Wild! And yet that turned out to be nothing, as Jordan Romano worked his way into, and then out of, a bases-loaded, nobody-out jam in the bottom of the ninth (the FanGraphs win probability [fan]graph had the Red Sox at 93.8% at that point, if I am remember that right). It's really not that complicated, when you see it done: first you strike out Francy Cordero, and then you get Kiki Hernandez to rip one pretty much directly to Matt Chapman, who'll step on the bag at third for out number two and then fire it across to Vladdy to end the inning. If Cavan Biggio can slide in scarcely home on a "contact" play in the top of the tenth, and you can retire the Red Sox in order from there, so much the better! 

And so the Blue Jays return home to face the Angels having won six of seven on their trip to Yankee Stadium and Fenway, which turns out to have been a super important thing to do, as everybody around them is winning all of a sudden, too (the Rays have won six in a row, which is particularly unnerving). After back-to-back ten-inning games, we're going to need some real innings from Mitch White tonight, as aside from Yimi, the bullpen is pretty much cooked.

KS