2023 Game One-Hundred-Six: Angels 3, Blue Jays 2 (F/10)

 

blue would be a nice colour for him 

Yimi Garcia got some important outs for the Blue Jays both Friday night and Saturday afternoon, but found himself badly Hunter Renfroe'd in the tenth Sunday. So it goes! Vladdy knocked in Bo in the bottom half, but things petered out a little after that. A sweep would have been great, obviously, but those are tough to get. This one just felt like a baseball game that we lost; nothing seemed doomed or fated or to auger of horrible things to come. The news that Jordan Romano has been placed on the fifteen-day IL is bad, but the news that the Blue Jays had traded for flamethrowing Cardinals closer Jordan Hicks is quite good! Plus Hyun-Jin Ryu is coming back, and potentially-rad bullpen arm Chad Green should follow soon thereafter, so we are pretty much set for the stretch, probably, right? It would be great to add an outfield bat before the Tuesday trading deadline, but word is there are not that many to be had? Maybe Tommy Pham?

Anyway, on the whole, a pretty good weekend of Blue Jays baseball, aided (abetted?) by several of our rivals playing each other, leading to a solid "let the fools destroy themselves" phenomenon. And so we remain tied with the Astros for the second/third Wild Card spot, four games back of Tampa Bay, two-and-a-half ahead of the Red Sox. Perhaps most interestingly, we begin our four-game series against the AL East-leading Baltimore Orioles (they're obviously good but their run differential does not support their win-loss record! maybe they will regress! to the mean! a little!) five-and-a-half games back. A split feels important, I think, and taking three of four would be a like a wildly encouraging outcome at this point. The pitching matches up pretty well!    

KS  

2023 Game One-Hundred-Five: Blue Jays 6, Angels 1

 

hustling out of the bo(x)

Two home runs from Alejandro Kirk! That's nearly as unlikely as any home runs at all from Santiago Espinal! And yet both of these occurrences occurred, right alongside a fairly strong outing from Alek Manoah—an outing, though that ended with a deeply unfortunate and upsetting pitch that sailed up and in and struck Taylor Ward in the face. The word is that Ward suffered no damage to his vision, which is a relief, but his season is understandably over after what are said to be "multiple facial fractures." Awful stuff.

KS  

2023 Game One-Hundred-Four: Blue Jays 4, Angels 1

 

hey fair enough

That Shohei Ohtani homered (Matt Chapman lightly discussed this outcome with John Schneider soon thereafter) and yet the Blue Jays won a tenser-than-it-might-sound 4-1 game to open a pretty big series is probably the ideal outcome here? Less ideal, of course, is that Jordan Romano's back is weird again, and Yimi had to come in to get the Blue Jays out of a ninth-inning jam (he did it! Yimi came through!). Homers from Chapman and Jansen and another strong start from Kevin Gausman had me feeling like it might be neat to sweep all three and knock the Angels out of the Wild Card race a day after they added pitching (this suggests I am mean).

KS

2023 Game One-Hundred-Three: Blue Jays 8, Dodgers 1

 

Two-Hit Whit

The dueling "Let's Go Blue Jays"/"Let's Go Dodgers" chants that took off after Whit Merrifield's three-run home run in the fifth to put the Blue Jays up 5-0 in a game where the bats didn't actually need to do anywhere near as much as they did given that Yusei Kikuchi struck out eight whilst cruising through six innings of one-run baseball? To me? Those were great! It is weird to feel like a series win against the Dodgers (on the road, too!) is in any sense a disappointment, but that Tuesday night meltdown does make this feel like something of a missed opportunity for a sweep at a time when the Blue Jays could really use every single win (this is never not the case, but one feels it more acutely as the playoff races tighten and the trade deadline nears). Back home for the Angels! Who will have Shohei Ohtani I guess unless he is traded before then! Which probably won't happen! But what if it did. 

KS  

2023 Game One-Hundred-Two: Dodgers 8, Blue Jays 7 (F/10)

 

same

I was so deeply in bed by the time the worst happened—a defensively questionable four-run bottom of the ninth off Erik Swanson, laying waste to the 7-3 lead Danny Jansen's bases-clearing double offered us in the top of that same, ultimately doomed inning—that I can't even really complain about any of it, except for in the broadest, most generalized come on guys! sort of way. But this is objectively pretty bad!

KS

2023 Game One-Hundred-One: Blue Jays 6, Dodgers 3 (F/11)

 

of all the guys!

I went to bed with the game tied at two through seven, as this extremely west coast road trip rolls on, and so missed the home runs from Matt Chapman and Max Muncy (that funky Muncy) in the eighth, and, most crucially of all, Daulton Varsho's three-run double in the eleventh to win it. Hey let's hear it not just for José Berrios and his fine start, but for what turned out to be six full innings of very nearly scoreless relief from the bullpen, two of them from Jay Jackson, who has really done great!  

KS 

2023 Game One Hundred: Blue Jays 4, Mariners 3

 

yay

Given recent events, I would not say that I had perfect faith that the Blue Jays one-run lead—Santiago Espinal's seventh-inning squeaker through the left side having built upon the earlier boppings of both Brandon Belt and Vladdy—would necessarily hold up; I did not believe it with my whole entire being. And yet! After an uncharacteristically rough couple of days, the bullpen returned to being kind of great, and ably closed out what I think we would probably all agree to have been a pretty encouraging start from Alek Manoah (better than the last one, not as good as the first one?). And so the Blue Jays salvage a win to wrap this super-tense series of one-run games that felt every bit like playoff baseball, which is to say that I sorted of hated every inning of it? And yet could not look away? Even a little?

Although it is obviously not ideal to have dropped the first two series coming out of the All-Star break, I really feel very good about the Blue Jays' 55-45 record through the first one hundred games of the season (only sixty-two to go!). This is the same record through one hundred that they managed last year, and, to my surprise, there have only been six seasons where the Blue Jays have fared better (the 2016 and 1993 teams won 56; 1991 won 57; 1992 won 59; and perhaps unsurprisingly the 1985 Blue Jays are at the top of list with 63 [which is so many]). We currently sit in a playoff spot, and, barring something weird happening out west, will hold one the rest of the way should we be able to play slightly better than both the Yankees and Red Sox, which, though not a sure thing, certainly seems like a possible thing. I'm all for it! Let's really try!  

KS

2023 Game Ninety-Nine: Mariners 9, Blue Jays 8

 

Téo, you're killing me, buddy

This game was bananas! Two three-home run innings? The Mariners hitting home runs on the back-to-back pitches, and then the Blue Jays doing exactly the same? A five-run Mariners seventh (that spelled the end of Nate Pearson's run on the big league roster)? Guess which one of those occurrences was an enormous drag to me and to my enjoyment! It is nearly ludicrous that it was Téo once more who dealt the final blow, but here we are, happy for Téo but also fairly miffed about this one more broadly.

KS

2023 Game Ninety-Eight: Mariners 3, Blue Jays 2

 

how it started . . .

. . . and how, alas, it is going

Good for Téo, is I guess the best I can say about this one? When I went to bed midway through the seventh (the game started just after eleven here—just after eleven), I would not say that the game seemed well in hand, but it did seem, well, in hand. But not so much! Much has been made of bringing in Kirk to pinch hit in a spot where a double play would have been a killer (as indeed it ended up being!) but I don't think you can approach a pinch hitting situation in any other spirit than "who do I think is likeliest to get a hit?" (as I have no doubt mentioned previously, managerial second-guessing is just not my favourite anyway). That Téo, whose last game as a Blue Jay saw him hit two home runs in what I was so sure we were going to end up thinking of forever as The Téo Game, ended up walking this one off with a ringing double over George Springer's head and off the wall in right, is an objectively neat thing to have happened, not unlike Marcus Semien walking off the A's at the SkyDome in what I suppose must have been late 2021, as the thoughtful Tony Kemp stood out there in left field for a little while to take it all in, and just be with it all for a moment or too extra. Blessings of the universe, I suppose. 

KS

2023 Game Ninety-Seven: Blue Jays 4, Padres 0

 

I love it when Vladdy gets "fielding psyched"

Late home runs from both Vladdy (he's heating up!) and Alejandro Kirk (maybe him too! 3-3 on the day!) paired just wonderfully with another excellent home start by Chris Bassitt, and a combined three nifty innings from Mayza, Swanson, and Romano. It was a pleasure to see the Padres, who we have not seen often, and all their cool young stars in their excellent team colours. Would I have preferred a series win? Sure I would have. But a regular season "series" is kind of a fake idea, isn't it? And yet how else are we to organize our thoughts throughout the one-hundred-and-sixty-two gameness of the season? How indeed. How; indeed. 

KS

2023 Game Ninety-Six: Padres 2, Blue Jays 0

 

Yu Darvish: a longer guy than I had previously appreciated

A tough one, to be sure, as the only runs came in the fifth after José Berrios seemed to have the runner hung up between second and third to end the inning. But Bo's throw from second (he'd snuck in behind the runner) to Chapman at third, while not a disaster, was not what it needed to be (I wonder if Bo himself has had any self-recriminations about it at all?). Either way, obviously, there was nothing doing here for the Blue Jays bats, so a tough one, like I say. One looks at this Padres lineup and wonders why they're not like ten games or so better than they have been so far? We have dropped the series to them now, though, so we're doing our part. 

KS 

2023 Game Ninety-Five: Padres 9, Blue Jays 1

 

you know what, fair enough

It really didn't matter who was pitching, or how poorly, because for the first time in a week or so the boys truly did not bop, but it is hard not to be discouraged that Alek Manoah's second start since he's come back up was such a mess. Ninety-two pitches to get through three? A forty-one pitch first? Five walks against no strikeouts? It is true that he was getting low-key squeezed in the first, but you can't expect to get a lot of close calls when you are basically not throwing strikes. Maybe Manoah gets another start or two, but with Ryu quite possibly coming back in as little as a week, that might be about it? I do take some consolation in the fact that all five AL East teams lost on this night (for only the second time this year!), so the Blue Jays gave up no ground, but what a drag. Coming into this one, the Blue Jays had won eight of their previous nine (everything but the no-hitter), and yet there I was, exchanging dire texts with my two pals with whom I text about the Blue Jays, as early as the second inning. We did not do a good job of keeping things in perspective.  

KS

2023 Game Ninety-Four: Blue Jays 7, Diamonbacks 5

 

this is exactly how you do it

With his fist-pumping sac fly in the fifth, the sixth-inning pickoff play where he snuck in behind the runner just in time for Danny Jansen's slick throw, and the eighth-inning double wherein he started his slide what felt like several body-lengths too early, Vladimir Guerrero Jr. seems to have maybe had his most fun day ever? Danny Jansen—he of the slick throw in the sixth—cleared the bases with a double in the eighth (that same eighth of Vladdy's truly baffling and wonderful slide) to put this one away, and really, he's been hitting so well that it hasn't been that big a deal that Alejandro Kirk has struggled (he'll come around, maybe?). Kikuchi pitched a good one, just as Berrios and Bassitt before him this series, and there you have it: a three-game sweep against a good team to start the second half as well as you could hope. The Blue Jays have closed the gap on both the Orioles atop the Wild Card standings and the Rays atop the actual AL East to such an extent that all things feel possible, if not quite likely. This is a good place to be.

KS

2023 Game Ninety-Three: Blue Jays 5, Diamondbacks 2

 

touch 'em all, Bo

A two-run, eighth-inning homer Bo Bichette home run gave the Blue Jays a little room to breathe in this one, which is good, because Jordan Romano is still experiencing a little lower back tightness, and so the ninth fell to Yimi, who is largely back on track, to my great relief (slight pun), as I am as ride-or-die as regards Yimi Garcia as I have ever been about any Blue Jays reliever ever, for reasons that remain enigmatic even to me. And yet here we extremely are.

KS

2023 Game Ninety-Two: Blue Jays 7, Diamondbacks 2

 

what like that's hard?

After winning the All-Star Home Run Derby in sikk fashion (tended to throughout by the friendful caretaking of Bo Bichette, and aided by a crucial late video chat with Teoscar Hernandez [Téo!]), Vladdy elected to homer in his first at bat of the second half. I am told that this is the first time that anyone has done just that (homered in their first AB after winning the derby), which is surprising, given how cool of a thing it seems to do? It was just one of several excellent Blue Jays ideas on this night. The Diamondbacks are a surprisingly good and fun team this season, and it was nice to see the returning Lourdes Gurriel Jr. receive such a warm welcome (I don't even mind that Gabriel Moreno threw a guy out and homered [and he never homers]). Lots of fun all around!

KS  

2023 Game Ninety-One: Blue Jays 4, Tigers 3

 

Daulton Varsho, just as merry as you please!

In the end—this is to say, after Danny Jansen's two-run homer tied the game in the ninth, Daulton Varsho's scurrying scurry home on a surprising (even to him!) Nathan Lukes double (George Springer is on paternity leave [congratulations!]) brought the Blue jays first lead of hte game in the tenth, and Jordan Romano's high-wire act closed it out in the bottom half—this felt like the best possible way to head into the All-Star break. At the end of the eighth, though, I was pretty miserable! I felt like we were really blowing it! Everything in baseball happens to so slowly and then it happens all at once, though (as has been observed).

So where does this leave us, then, at the break? Honestly in a pretty good spot, all things considered: the Blue Jays are tied with the Astros for the second wild card spot, five games behind the Orioles for WC1, but only seven (that's really not that many more!) behind the AL East-leading Rays, who have of late struggled for the first time all season (I don't feel bad about it). It would certainly take quite a run to pass either Baltimore or Tampa, but neither seems nearly the obstacle they did a month ago, and the teams lurking just outside the playoff seedings—the Aaron Judgeless Yankees; the Red Sox, who play mediocre baseball against seemingly everyone but the Blue Jays—do not seem especially menacing right now? Ah, I see that the Red Sox have in fact won their last five, which is no mean feat, so maybe I should feel at least a little menaced. But I honestly don't! Ninety-one games into the season, I still feel like the Blue Jays should probably have about ninety wins at the end of it all, and that should probably get them in? To the playoffs I don't really enjoy watching? Fingers crossed!

KS

2023 Game Ninety: Tigers 2, Blue Jays 0

 

in which Kevin Gausman's run-support
issues officially bottom out

I choose not to be bummed out by the Blue Jays falling victim to only the twentieth combined no-hitter in MLB history, and instead have chosen to welcome the Blue Jays being blessed with only the twentieth combined no-hitter in MLB history. We're going to lose like what, seventy games this year if everything goes really well? And none of them will be any more interesting than this, right? I thought it was kind of neat. 

KS

2023 Game Eight-Nine: Blue Jays 12, Tigers 2

 

welcome back, Big Puma

Definitely to my surprise, and also slightly to my concern, Alek Manoah returns! And yet my concern is demonstrably misplaced: a run on eight hits, no walks, and strikeouts in six complete? Even against the somewhat slight lineup like the Tigers are fielding this year, that is super encouraging. And he didn't even need to be all that good, given the extent to which the boys elected to bop: Merrifield's third homerun in two days! a Springer dinger! three more hits for Bo! What a lovely ballpark, too. Just a really good and nice game of Blue Jays baseball start to finish. If Manoah is even fifth-starter-good the rest of the way, it will be a huge boost in the second half, and if he's anything more than that, we could really "make some noise" in the rapidly tightening AL East (the Rays are losing sort of often now). 

KS

2023 Games Eighty-Seven and Eighty-Eight: Blue Jays 6, White Sox 2 (F/11), Blue Jays 5, White Sox 4 (let's play two!)

 

it's like anything else: you get low, and you dig

Not a whole lot of 6-2 games go scoreless through ten, I bet! I can't think of any that I've seen, for example, and I have seen a bunch of baseball games; like a bunch. José Berrios was about as good as he gets, and Lance Lynn, who has really had quite a career but who had fallen on Manoah-level hard times so far this season, all of a sudden was amazing again? And when the Blue Jays finally scored, it wasn't like they were pounding the ball off the White Sox relievers: it was ground ball, ground ball, ground ball . . . just pitiless, relentless BABIP stuff. Sounds good to me! The evening game had Kikuchi giving what seems like the median Kikuchi performance (emotionally, perhaps not statistically): four runs over five innings, which is obviously less than stellar, but just enough to keep you in it, so long as "Two Hit" Whit Merrifield's two hits are both home runs, and Bo goes four-for-five like it was normal to keep doing that. We're gaining! Things are looking up! 

KS

2023 Game Eighty-Six: Blue Jays 4, White Sox 3

 

attaboy (attaboy [attaboy])

The Blue Jays winning on a two-run Vladdy homer in the eighth after a nice start from Chris Bassitt and a scoreless three innings of Pearson, Swanson, and Romano in relief was honestly exactly what I wanted out of this one. So imagine my delight! The other Blue Jays runs came on a two-run double from Whit Merrifield, who, true to his excellent "Two Hit Whit" nickname, singled, too. Only six Blue Jays hits all night, but they were unusually well timed.

KS

2023 Game Eighty-Five: Red Sox 5, Blue Jays 4

 

hooooooooooo boy

At this point, why wouldn't Jordan Romano give up a go-ahead solo home run in the top of the ninth in a game made close only by the two runs Eric Swanson allowed on three hits and a walk in the seventh? Seems about right! Brandon Belt homered twice, and Kevin Gausman was good again (no surprise there) but only went five, leaving a decent amount of work for the bullpen. Yimi proved nails in bailing out Tim Mayza, and Trevor Richards (everybody's favourite guy now) struck out three, but Swanson, after being fantastic his first twenty or so appearances, has struggled in the twenty or so since, and it has been a genuine drag to behold. The Blue Jays have now lost all six games they've played against the Red Sox this season after going I believe 16-3 against them last year, and the Red Sox are now 12-1 against the Blue Jays and Yankees, but ten or eleven games below .500 against everybody else. This is all pretty weird! A quick glance at the standings reveals that things are not nearly as bad as they could be after getting swept at home on Canada Day weekend, as none of the other teams in or around the wild card scene were able to string any wins together.  A-game-and-a-half out of the last two spots, and five-and-a-half out of the top spot is by no means insurmountable, unlike the division, which has felt a done deal since about the third week of the season (Tampa was very reluctant to lose any games!). Six games on the road against the AL Central (three in Chicago, three in Detroit) gives us a chance to pull into the All-Star break in decent shape, and I'd like to think that's how it'll go! 

KS 

2023 Game Eighty-Four: Red Sox 7, Blue Jays 6

 

it was significantly less close than this photograph implies

I was pretty sure Cavan Biggio's eight-inning liner that landed foul by about a foot and would have scored two more runs in the Blue Jays' seemingly endless two-out rally was going to be the thing that haunted me (and indeed us all) about this one, but no, it was actually Bo Bichette thrown out at home to end the game just after Vladdy delivered a sharp single to right with two on and two out in the bottom of the ninth, down by two. Bo was out by kind of a lot, which is generally speaking not the runner's fault but the third-base coach's, and Rivera, to my eye, really didn't offer Bo a whole lot of help here: Springer, scoring ahead of him, was urging Bo to follow, and Rivera changed his go go go sign to a woah there far too late for Bo to have actually held up (this is, to me, the worst kind of counsel a third-base coach can offer), and the result was a kind of halting half-step about twenty feet or so from the plate, which isn't going to help anybody or anything. It was kind of a mess! And yet I don't really mind that he went for it. Sending Bo—or Bo going, however you want to think about it—forces the right fielder to make a good throw, and the catcher to field it well, and you see mistakes on either end of that all the time. I don't think it was a bad decision, so much as bad execution, but really, had Rivera not been weird about it, Bo probably would have been out anyway, because the Red Sox did everything right. Sometimes you play aggressively to put pressure on the other team's defense, and sometimes the other team's defense proves up to the challenge, and that's that; that's just one of the ways baseball can go. I'm really not upset about it, just lightly haunted. 

KS

2023 Game Eighty-Three: Red Sox 5, Blue Jays 0

 

fiddlesticks

José Berrios was actually kind of rolling right along until those three home runs came sort of all of a sudden. I know three home runs seem like a lot to just kind of a lot to occur all of a sudden but that's really what happened! I was as surprised as anybody. He might as well have given up ten, if the Blue Jays were only going to manage three hits (that is how many they managed, just the three).

KS

2023 Game Eighty-Two: Blue Jays 2, Giants 1

 

so important

I will set aside my objection to Thursday's game being played in the evening rather than the afternoon (it's always getaway day for somebody!) and instead focus on the very hanging curveball Vladdy hit a very long way in the sixth to score the Blue Jays only runs, fortunately the only runs they would need given Chris Bassitt's three-hit, three-walk, twelve-strikeout six innings of work (Swanson and Mayza added clean innings; Romano less so). Santiago Espinal really bailed out Kirk's throw down to second on a stolen base attempt in the ninth, scooping a somewhat errant throw and applying the tag for a crucial out in an inning that was getting away from Jordan Romano, and it is always a pleasure to see Espinal make a nice little play. He is A Liked Guy.

KS