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| good job, Whit, we're gonna need every one of those today |
The realities of Easter Sunday kept me away from Yusei Kikuchi's hard-luck first inning (Daulton Varsho is in my view blameless for losing a ball in sunshine that brilliant), and actually I didn't even check in until it was time to do the dishes, at which point it was 6-0 Angels, and seemingly a laugher. Imagine my surprise, then, that the Blue Jays came all the way back, Matt Chapman's first career grand slam followed a few batters later by a two-run Kevin Kiermaier triple. And then some: the six-run, bat-around sixth was followed by a seventh in which the Blue Jays sent nine to the plate and scored four on a fairly ludicrous sequence of bloops and bleeders. Jordan Romano, who'd allowed nary a run in his four successful saves in the Blue Jays' first nine games, really didn't have it in the ninth, like at all, which, though a little agonizing, sure, nevertheless seemed decorous with the ultimately baffling baseball ordeal we all encountered this fine day? Given this overall baseball-weird happening, could we really mind Alejandro Kirk missing a Mike Trout pop-up behind the plate that would have ended the game? I would submit "not really." To Romano's credit, despite his uncharacteristic troubles, he did strike Drury out to end the ninth, and give us a chance in extras. Which we made the most of! Keirmaier's ground-rule double was followed by the first hit of George Springer's long afternoon, and after Trevor Richards, God bless him, did the best he could, Tim Mayza came in and got Shohei Ohtani on three pitches to end the game with the bases loaded. No complaints!
So where do we stand at the end of this ten-game, season-opening road trip? Well, certainly not atop the AL East, as the Tampa Bay Rays have literally yet to lose a game, and although it is true to say that the quality of their opposition has thus far been quite low, it is no less true to note that they are absolutely whomping that opposition with a truly staggering run differential. But we can't do anything about that, and it seems unlikely that the Rays are going to win all of their games for all that much longer, so how have we ourselves done? I think that by any reasonable standard, a six-and-four road trip has to be deemed a success, in that, first of all, literally all of it occurred on the road, and that, secondly, playing at a .600 clip means a ninety-seven win season when all is said and done. If you can keep on eking out that one win over .500 every ten games, you're all of a sudden one of the top teams in the league, year-in, year-out. It doesn't even sound all that hard to do! I say let's try!
KS
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