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| 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
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