ALCS Game Seven: Blue Jays 4, Mariners 3

the last instant before he knew for sure? or the first one after?

I watched it as it happened, of course, and I couldn't even tell you how many times since. I've also spent a good deal of time just sitting with it, like Tony Kemp (out in the left field of the human heart). George Springer's seventh-inning, three-run homer to flip a 3-1 score around and give the Blue Jays their only lead of the night in this, their first ALCS Game Seven (or Game Seven of any kind) in forty years, felt enormous in the moment—how could it have been bigger?—but it occurred to me nearly simultaneously (and not even in an especially doomed, fatalistic sort of way) that unless we got those last six outs, it would be forgotten pretty quickly, almost out of necessity (we can only bear so much). Experience teaches us that this is so. Who remembers Téo's two home runs against the Mariners in 2022 with anything like the clarity with which they recall Springer and Bo colliding amidst the hours-long bullpen implosion that followed? Is that even a part of how you think of that game? Those home runs? "If this holds up, they'll call this the Téo game," I definitely said aloud at the time, but it didn't, and so we don't. And without Bassitt's crisp ten-pitch eighth inning Monday night (find me another 72MPH curveball that clips the top of the zone like that, and then I will have seen two [maybe three]), and white-knuckle/lights-out closer Jeff Hoffman's ludicrous three-up, three-down, all-swinging-strike-threes ninth (poor Julio Rodriguez) to leave Cal Raleigh in the on-deck circle to end the Mariners' season (and need we even note that Hoffman allowed more home runs this season than any other relief pitcher in all of baseball? and that Raleigh had already homered this game against workhorse Louis Varland's 94 MPH change-up? the on-deck circle was the perfect place to leave him—great call on that one, Jeff Hoffman!), what is now rightly celebrated as the second-biggest home run in the Blue Jays' forty-nine seasons wouldn't have been that at all, would it? It's the precariousness of the whole thing that I'm left with, and not just of everything that came after, but of what came before, too: Barger works his five-pitch walk to open that crucial (we say now) seventh, as the very fine Bryan Woo could only find the zone once in the at-bat, but the thing that in a way I found even harder to believe than Springer's home run—both in the moment, and even more so afterwards—is Isiah Kiner-Falefa's ground-ball single up the middle, just past a diving J. P. Crawford, on an 0-2 Bryan Woo sweeper. That IKF was picked up late this season for his glove—off of waivers from the Pirates, mind you, and I say with no ill will that "waived by the 2025 Pirates" had to be a fairly low point for him professionally—is self-evident, and in that respect he's delivered throughout this series for sure. But how many times out of a hundred do you think IKF gets enough of that 0-2 sweeper to get it past Crawford? Consider the initial conditions right off the bat (both literally and figuratively) that kept that ball a hair to Crawford's left, rather than sending it right into his glove for a tailor-made (I think we should start saying "bespoke" more in this context) double play to turn a promising and ultimately season/team/career-defining inning into nothing at all—at least nothing good (for us). Or what about the Shane Bieber innings, as he pitched his way around a slugging Mariners lineup without the benefit of the usual break and depth on either his curveball or his slider? (They curved some; the slid a little.) And what about Gausman coming out of the bullpen, a rad move in the truest spirit of Game Seven—he didn't really have it either! But he turned a leadoff-walk into a double play, and after two more walks (one of them intentional, to Cal Raleigh), another groundball ended his seventh. Even Varsho's RBI single in the first came on an off-speed pitch he was clearly fooled on, and was way out in front of, but he stuck with it just enough to push it through the infield and tie the game. All I mean to say with all of this, I suppose, is that, once they've happened, Big Events (in the baseball sense) seem to take on an aspect of inevitability pretty quickly, but I remain low-key haunted by their contingency.

Even that fateful sinker! On the Springer home run, I mean! (I swear I will stop soon, just one more.) The great Trevor Plouffe, foremost among his generation of players-turned-analysts (and by a lot, in my view), said of Eduard Bazardo's sinker that caught too much of the plate and ended up more "middle-in" than "in," that "you know what George Springer does with pitches like that: he puts them in the fucking seats." A great way to say it! And certainly sometimes true! And of course I couldn't be happier that it was the case in this particular instance. But this was the third time Springer had seen Bazardo this series (should it have been the closer Andrés Muñoz, seen in a lovely photo here supporting Seattle Feline Rescue, in his stead?), and a study of postseason series over the last ten years has shown a discernible jump in OPS when a hitter sees a relief pitcher for the third time in a series (recall, if you will, John Schneider's explanation for bringing Little into his ill-fated game-five appearance: he was trying to give the Mariners' bats some different looks). The first two times Springer saw that same pitch, from that same pitcher, he rolled over it, and grounded out. Not this time, he didn't, but those first two times, which were no less actual. And so here I am, totally caught up in the wonder of the thing that has somehow happened, but at the same time I find myself, more than anything else, lingering in the several/many/endless ways in which it nearly didn't. This is perhaps a question of temperament, or disposition.

So anyway, now that we're here—in the 2025 World Series, against a Los Angeles Dodgers team that has three surefire Hall-of-Fame players at the top of its lineup (one of those three, the greatest talent the sport has ever seen, will also be the game-four starter, looks like), and that has another definite Hall-of-Famer who they might not necessarily even roster (Clayton Kershaw [oh okay, just checked, and he made it {will he even pitch, though?}]), and that could not have dispatched the ninety-seven-win Milwaukee Brewers with greater ease in the NLCS—how might we proceed? Fundamentally, I think we look to bash, and, indeed, to monster bash. As a team, the Blue Jays' 143 wRC+ (weighted Runs Created+, in which league-average is by definition 100) is far and away the best in this postseason, with the Dodgers' 113 the next best. Let's just go straight-up OPS, and look at the extent to which our boys have been boppin':   

Vladdy 1.440

Ernie 1.063

Springer .930

Barger .889

Varsho .804

Lukes .791

Gimenez .764

Kirk .753

IKF .571

League-average OPS was .719 this season, and so you will note that in addition to ALCS-MVP Vladdy putting up an all-timer of a run, Ernie Clement being unreal, and George Springer springing as georgily as he has ever sprung in his long, excellent, postseason career, our only starter whose OPS is below regular-season average (please keep in mind these are the numbers we're putting up against excellent pitching, too!) is the previously discussed (see above) Isiah Kiner-Falefa, whose bat, it seems, is about to be replaced by that of Bo Bichette, ready to play in some capacity (DH? SS? 2B, where he has been taking ground balls for the first time since minor-league days?) for the first time since that ruinous slide directly into the catcher's shin-guard just ahead of a rain-delay in Yankee Stadium weeks and weeks ago. The Blue Jays have been hitting so well, and Andres Gimenez has been so impressive at short in Bo's absence, that I had been half-thinking, why mess with any of this? But if Bo is ready to go, or even not-really-ready-to-go-but-let's-find-him-some-ABs ready to go, just out of basic human decency you've got to give him a chance to play. Bo Bichette has been an enormous part of these last six years, as important to this team as anyone, and I will go so far as to say that even if it slightly hurts our perhaps-slim-yet-discernible chances of winning the World Series, I want to see him at least given a shot. As one wag on the boards had it earlier this year, Bo and Vladdy are a bonded pair! They need to be out there together. (As an aside, would you believe that Bo and Vladdy are within 0.7 fWAR for their whole careers so far? That's pretty remarkable!) At a certain point—as John Schneider asserted after the game-five loss led to all kinds of nonsense—your guys are your guys, and those are the guys you play. How fortunate, then, that one of our guys is Bo Bichette, one of the best pure hitters in the game.  

Kind of to my own surprise, I hadn't checked the updated FanGraphs World Series odds until just now, halfway through the composition of this very sentence, in no small part because, what does it even matter? This is all amazing! I love it all already! If the Blue Jays get smoked in four games, this would still be a banner year (literally! they'll put up a banner for it!), no worse than the third best we've ever had, and my own personal favourite one for sure, no question. It's been thirty-two years since the Blue Jays were last here, and without getting too heavy about my own mortality, I'm not sure precisely how many more thirty-two year intervals I have left in me (can't be more than a few). We all know the Dodgers are the more imposing team, the defending champions, looking to join the Yankees, Blue Jays (thank you), and Reds as the only teams to repeat as World Series champions in the last fifty years (the A's did it just before that, too). But there's a reason games one and two (and maybe even six? how about seven?) will be played in Toronto, rather than in Los Angeles, and it is that the Blue Jays were actually the better team in the regular season by one game—just one!—and I have chosen as that one game (it could be any) a Sunday afternoon in August, at Dodger Stadium, in which Mason Fluharty got both Shohei Ohtani and Mookie Betts with runners on to seal a 5-4 win that turned on late homers from Vladdy, Addison Barger, and Ernie Clement. The Blue Jays took just one of three that weekend, and I see here, coincidentally, that the FanGraphs projection has the Dodgers at 65%, the Blue Jays at 35%, a perhaps rare instance where the model corresponds almost perfectly to the general sense of thing. But let's go. "I actually love that the Blue Jays are playing a seemingly impossible foe," I wrote to some longstanding pals in a chat the other day, "because i) failure is more romantic than success, and ii) if something weird happens, and we win, it will be insane." 

KS