2024 Games Seventy-Five, Seventy-Six, and Seventy-Seven: Guardians 7, Blue Jays 1; Guardians 6, Blue Jays 3; Guardians 6, Blue Jays 5

 

oh I hear you loud and clear, Yusei Kikuchi

It is with more relief than sadness that I note that this weekend was when I stopped worrying about the Blue Jays' 2024 season: in terms of making a run at the postseason, or even a run at run at the postseason, it is now pretty much a wrap (and in June, no less!). This is certainly not an unfamiliar place to be as a baseball fan in general, or a Blue Jays fan in particular, but these last few years have of course been very different: the Blue Jays have played "meaningful" games (understanding that in the broader context there is of course no such thing [or/also that in the broader broader context, perhaps everything is such things?]) literally every day from the weird (and yet crucial) 2020 season through the end of 2023. With the Blue Jays now in a truly brutal and fairly hopeless slide, there has been much chatter about how ineptly the team has been constructed, and how everybody in charge needs to go, and all that sort of thing, and hey maybe so (there comes a time), but over the last four seasons before this still-unfolding disaster, the Blue Jays have played .556 baseball, which is exactly a ninety-win pace, and have made the playoffs three times. That's about as good as it gets! And I would remind you that, for as much fun as was had in 2015 and 2016, these last few years have been the first time the Blue Jays have been this good for this long in thirty years. Not that they are good now, obviously; now they are in fact quite bad, and this particular series in Cleveland felt legitimately cursed. How can you get swept while hitting eight home runs? That's wild! How do you throw seventy pitches in a single inning? That is perhaps even wilder! (Apparently it hadn't happened to anybody in like ten years.) But it's all fine. There's still baseball on. It'll be nice.

KS