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| oh no |
The last time a seven-run lead fell apart in a jam-packed SkyDome, before God and Geddy Lee, it was Opening Day, wasn't it? When the Blue Jays bats bailed José Berríos out of an improbably and distressingly poor start? Turnabout is fair play, as they say, and yet it is simultaneously a huge drag (that part is implied, possibly). I contend that Saturday's game offered us in microcosm the complete experience of watching any and every postseason run that ends in anything less than the World Series championship itself, regardless of how long it lasts and how close it all comes: the initial tension that so far surpasses what we're used to in baseball that it barely feels like baseball anymore (watching playoff baseball, a Phillies observer noted, is like watching a loved one try to defuse a bomb), followed by the "surprised by joy" period in which you can't believe this is actually working out, and then the final fairly crushing realization that no, it's totally isn't, is it (no [it is not]). This can take weeks, but, saving us all a lot of time, this took just the one day. It is like Mrs. Dalloway! I think Virginia Woolf is good but I don't think I have read that one! And yet I am sure of it. Kevin Gausman's splitter was splitting, Téo hit two home runs that had me projecting a future, decades hence, in which we all referred to this as The Téo Game (I got a little ahead of myself arguably), and then the first of the Mariners two four-run innings got extremely in the way. If nothing else, this game confirmed that I have been correct to extremely uneasy around Carlos Santana all these many years: he really got ahold of that one off Tim Mayza, didn't he? Yimi Garcia's two outs in the seventh settled me right back down, and of all the various decisions that have been second-guessed in the days since, the only move that really struck me at the time was John Schneider sending Anthony Bass out to start the next inning, rather than let Yimi keep on rolling, but I quickly brushed those thoughts aside in the moment, remembering first that I have a disproportionate level of faith in the abilities of Yimi Garcia, and that Anthony Bass has been very good since coming over from the Marlins. But Bass couldn't get anybody out, like literally anybody, and from there, we were really in it. And yet had that little two-out bloop bases-clearing double not landed just between Bo Bichette and George Springer as they barreled towards each other, we'd have been out of it, too. You can't really blame Jordan Romano, who got a soft pop-up; you can't really blame George Springer, as, with two outs and everybody running on contact, those three runs were going to score even if he holds back and plays it on a hop rather than laying out for it; and you can't really blame Bo (at least I do not) for trying to make a play on a ludicrously well-placed pop-up until the moment he is called off by Springer, which he did not appear to be (could he have heard it even if he had been?). Bo is taking it on the chin in a lot of the commentary on this game, but to me, that ball was dropping either way, and imagine what they would have to say about it if it did so right after he peeled off (had he peeled, I mean)? That ball was set down in precisely the spot where it landed by either a vengeful god or the immutable laws of the universe but either way it was dropping (how many times were the rueful words "that's down for a hit" uttered in my home on this day? some say we are uttering still). And so why wasn't Jackie Bradley Jr., the far better fielder, in the game for Springer at that late stage, some have asked, for the obviously ailing Springer (three strikeouts, and not quite able to snag a tough ball at the wall earlier on)? This is probably a reasonable question, but I think the long and the short of it all -- of all of it! at least for me! -- is that in Game One, the bullpen was good but the boys did not bop, and in Game Two, the boys bopped as noisily as one could ever hope, but the bullpen, which had been good throughout the second half of the season (when it had attained its final form), and had helped the Blue Jays win the second-most one-run games in MLB (second only to the Dodgers), just couldn't get anybody out. To me, it's not a question of managerial strategy: John Schneider went to a number of relief pitchers who have pitched well, and they did not pitch well.
The long faces (and e-faces, of which I mostly speak right now) about this game are all entirely understandable, and yet I do not at all share the (to me) hyperbolic view that this is the worst loss in Blue Jays history. I feel that this view is ahistorical and lacks a sense of proportion (there, I said it). This was the second game of a three-game series in which we were down one game to none; this was not the third straight loss in the 1985 ALCS we'd been leading 3-1; this is not the seventh straight loss to end the 1987 season (Tony Fernandez, his wrist fractured) and cost us the AL East; this is not even the 1991 ALCS that we dropped 4-1 to a Minnesota Twins team that we had precious little business losing to; this isn't 2015, when the Blue Jays really did seem to be the best team in either league at the end of the season, only to get Kansas City'd in the ALCS again (happens every thirty years, like clockwork; I am already a little sad about 2045). Take a look around the rest of this Wild Card weekend and we will find a Mets team significantly better than this year's Blue Jays, who just lost to a Padres team that is no better than the Mariners, and got one-hit on the way out the door (Buck Showalter even had the umpires feel Joe Musgrave's super wet but otherwise faultless ears; complete Mets humiliation); a Cardinals team that allowed the Phillies a six-run top-of-the-ninth to lose Game One and then went quietly in Game Two to end the careers of both Albert Pujols and Yadier Molina; and a Rays team that, though the sixth seed, everyone was still totally worried about, eliminated in the fifteenth inning on a home run by Oscar Gonzalez, of all people. That's three home teams -- which is to say, higher seeds -- out of four that are gone, and the only home team -- that is to say, higher seed -- that won is probably the most lightly-regarded of any of the twelve teams that made this new postseason (prove us wrong, Guardians! get those Yankees, you guys! for real please do!). "My shit doesn't work in the playoffs," Billy Beane famously told us, and as these series get shorter (and yet longer than a single-game play-in, obviously [which may be better emotionally or worse, I can't even say yet]) we would be mistaken to take them any more seriously or to hold them to be any more revealing than we would a three-game series at pretty much any other time of year, despite the fact that we have ordered take-out for these ones, and have assembled special snacks for them.
In the final analysis, I have had a super fun summer of Blue Jays baseball, and hope that you have as well. I would argue, in all seriousness, that there is a very real chance that we will get 'em next year, should we be spared. Let us reconvene then! And see!
KS
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