2022 Game One-Hundred-Fifty-Five: Yankees 5, Blue Jays 2

 

I wish I could say this was the worst of it

The "takeaway" that I have chose to "take away" from this dispiriting loss is that even with a full-on panoply of miscues, mishaps, and even mess-ups, the Blue Jays lost to a good team by an entirely reasonable score of 5-2. Sure, the gaffes and lapses were such that they sent Buck Martinez into a full four minutes (people have posted it!) of "back-in-my-day" in the bottom of the seventh, but hey, what can you do? I will note that the level of hustle Buck Martinez described last night in his widely disseminated clip bears no resemblance to the major league baseball played at any time in my life that I am able to remember, and there is significant overlap between the periods to which Buck referred and to those of my experience (he named names, and they were the names of guys I have watched play baseball, and enjoyed that watching, and they did not, to my recollection, do it as Buck Martinez described last night). There was, as there has been so often lately, a lot of talk about what "can't happen," but it plainly does, so what are we even talking about? Another recent occurrence along those lines was when a graphic was assembled that showed how the Blue Jays record under their top three starting pitchers has been excellent lately, whereas their record with the fourth and fifth spots in the rotation has been very poor. "That can't happen," was a not untypical response, but it's like, yes it can, in that it is happening, and while it is happening you can be at eighty-seven wins with seven games to play, and therefore one of the top teams in Blue Jays history. Right? And then in the playoffs you're pretty much running the top three out an awful lot of the time? These baseball takes have me feeling like Dr. Manhattan! Whom some astute observers have noted looks a whole lot like Aaron Judge! Who sure didn't get a lot to swing at last night, did he? Didn't keep the Yankees from clinching the AL East, though, which they extremely did. What took you so long, one might well ask, given their first half, but this is kind of an "events, dear boy; events" kind of situation (I guess they all are). Mitch White against Gerrit Cole for the series win, let's go! Let's . . . go?

KS