Rockies 14, Blue Jays 5: Ah Yes Well Nevertheless

 

well that ain't good

As my friend Andrew recently noted, on my most nights, five runs is really good! Alas that this was not the case here, as, not all that long after Cody Ponce rolled his ankle and hurt his knee en route to first base on what a lot of players seem to just call a "PFP" (even though that stands for "pitcher fielding practice," though I suppose we could consider "practice" more broadly here [fielding does indeed constitute a part of their practice; in fact I withdraw this whole observation]), having already tumbled to the ground ingloriously on an especially awkward balk earlier in that same inning (the third). Not great, especially after having used just about everybody out of the bullpen in these early days of the season. The seven-run sixth was really the killer, you'd have to say, and while nobody acquitted themselves all that well out of the pen (aside from the underhanded Tyler Rogers, in whom I have limitless faith, and would actually probably use to close, were it my call [which it is not {yet}]), things went especially poorly for Brendon Little, for whom things are beginning to look a little grim, maybe? This may be the kind of shellacking that gets you sent down to Buffalo for a little bit, one fears. 

None of this is to say that this lopsided loss to last year's worst team was entirely without its pleasures, though, as dingers were dung by George Springer, Kazuma Okamoto (who looked great in the field, too!), and Davis Schneider, and for the ten-thousand-or-so fans that remained out of the original 35,490 (that's a wild amount for a Monday in April against the Rockies), there was also the true treat of backup catcher Tyler Heineman pitching two full innings (five runs on seven hits, sure, but just one walk, and just one homer). The people loved it! There really is a lot of fun to be had watching bad baseball, even from a really good team—maybe especially from a really good team, as it has the added benefit of novelty?—and the true sickos who stuck it out to the end were clearly alive to these odd pleasures. That the Blue Jays' first loss of the season would come in such a wild blowout to such a bad team, on the same day that all of the other three-and-oh teams in either league took their first loss, too, was a worthwhile reminder that baseball is hard, and weird, and often a little silly.

KS 

Blue Jays 5, Athletics 2: I Say We Run The Table

 

冷たい / tsumetai / [cold]

Eric Lauer may not have quite gone the seven innings we asked of him in yesterday's post (I'm honestly not even sure he read it [it's okay; he's probably a busy guy]), but he did pitch into the sixth, and, by striking out nine, "announced his presence with authority," as Dan Schulman noted whilst also noting that he was quoting a great line from a great film (Dan Schulman: cinéaste? [oh, further to that, the Important Cinema Club boys Will Sloan and Justin Decloux are finally doing a baseball episode [if I am remembering my ICC lore correctly, Will Sloan actually played until he was in high school, and I know he loved Eephus, as did the GUYS guy]), and they plan to record a portion of it from the 500s with the Rockies in town this week! neat!]). There was just the two-run homer to Max Muncy (astoundingly, there are two concurrent baseball-playing Max Muncies [Maxes Muncy?]; what a time to be alive), and honestly I was mostly just relieved it was someone other than Shea Langeliers who'd hit it. I was surprised that we ran four deep out of the bullpen again—Fisher to Nance to Fluharty to Hoffman—but everybody did great, and struck out really any number of guys. As a matter of fact (the only matter in which would ever deal here at Baseball Feeling [no speculation or mere surmise]), Blue Jays pitchers struck out fifty batters—fifty!—this weekend, a truly wild total by any standard. Wilder still, this is apparently only the third three-and-oh start in Blue Jays history, alongside 1992 (a good year!) and 1996 (less good), and it takes the Blue Jays all-time record to 3858 wins and 3856 losses, putting us above .500 (if you go to enough places after the decimal, anyway) for the first time since May of 1995. Let's go! But before we do, I have somehow not yet even mentioned the Blue Jays three fine dingers from yesterday: George Springer's, on the first pitch he saw (his sixty-fourth leadoff homerun, I believe they said, trailing only Rickey Henderson's untouchable eighty one [you know who's third? Alfonso Soriano! just ahead of Hall-of-Famer Craig Biggio! who are perhaps both safe because although Mookie Betts is right behind them both, the Dodgers do seem to like to go with Ohtani in that spot, don't they?); the mighty Jésus Sanchez's first as a Blue Jay (there is something in his aspect that makes him feel like an utterly classic baseball player to me, one that would be perfectly at home in literally any era of Blue Jays baseball; I hope to bring more precision to this observation in the coming months); and the already-well-loved Kazuma Okamoto's first in these leagues we call major (our guy went oppo [taco], even, with that quiet easy stroke of his). As fine an opening weekend as you could hope for! In closing I will note briefly that I was struck by the truly enormous Saturday and Sunday crowds, which I suppose I shouldn't have been, but my thoughts turned to the extent to which, in my own 2001—2006 period of SkyDome attendance, the crowds that followed the Opening Day sellout (or near sellout, and this in a time when that meant north of fifty-thousand in the building) would be super sparse, consisting exclusively of sickos (all of the reasonable baseball enthusiasts having already enjoyed sufficient baseball at Opening Day). The second game of the season was, functionally, Opening Day for Sickos. But no more. Unless there are simply that many more sickos in our current age of Blue Jays baseball? I rule nothing out! 

Anyway, here come the Colorado Rockies, of whom I can never remember much of anything, I'm afraid. The hope here is they still have that delightful Juan Pierre.

KS

Blue Jays 8, Athletics 7 (F/11): Alejandro Kirk, Fastest Man Alive

 

this is Ernie, though, walking it off (more like Ernice, arguably)

I will admit, dear reader, to thinking ourselves entirely cooked when the seemingly unstoppable Shea Langeliers took Brendon Little very much over the centre field wall ("it's deep, but Varsho's got it," I said to my young interlocuter right off the bat in what turned out to be a half-truth at best) for the grand slam that put the Athletics ahead of the Blue Jays 6-2 in the seventh. It felt like a real shame, in that it made a hash of the débuting Dylan Cease's twelve-strikeout, one-run outing over six (or into the sixth, I should say—he pitched five-and-a-third, I see as I check it now). Little had relieved Mason Fluharty, who, for his part, had faced just two batters, each of whom had ripped one back to the mound, the second one injuriously so (right off the knee). All bad stuff! But over our supper hour, the Blue Jays worked their way back into things, at times delightfully so. Have you ever, for instance, seen Alejandro Kirk tag up from second on a fly ball to medium-deep right? And then scamper home on a Jésus Sanchez grounder to third mere moments later? Me neither! Until now! I can report that it rules! By the time the bottom of the ninth rolled around, we were only down one, when Alejandro Kirk (that guy? again?), his baserunning bona fides now firmly established, decided to park one in the the bullpen behind the left-field wall this time around to tie it up (a decision I respect). I have come to fear extra-inning baseball in the Manfred Man era far more than I ever did before, certainly, but the Blue Jays survived several innings of it, before Ernie Clement singled in the pinch-running Nathan Lukes to win it in the eleventh. 

Great game! What fun! Two walk-offs in as many days is a better start than we could have asked for from the perspective of pure Baseball Enjoyment, certainly, but the particular shape of this latter one, in which eight Blue Jays pitchers appeared (your standard Cease to Fisher to Fluharty to Little to Nance to Rogers to Varland to Rule-5-draftee Spencer Miles path to victory) has to make you hope Eric Lauer goes like seven or so tomorrow. And I for one do not doubt him, as he sneakily pitched the fourth-most innings of all Blue Jays pitchers last year (weird, right?). Perhaps he will strike a whole bunch of guys out, even, as his forerunners have been doing at a mighty rate so far: I have read that this is the first time since 1901 that two pitchers (Gausman and Cease, in this instance) have opened the season with consecutive performances of eleven strikeouts or more, but nobody has said who, specifically, did it in 1901, surely a matter of interest to the early-twentieth-century baseball simulationist (or more precisely, I suppose, to the early-twenty-first-century baseball simulationist simulating early-twentieth-century baseball) if to no one else (also to owners of paper copies of The Baseball Encyclopedia, too, possibly? is this a Venn-diagram-is-a-circle situations maybe?). Maybe if Lauer strikes out eleven (or more!) tomorrow, they'll tell us then. Here's hoping!     

KS 

Blue Jays 3, Athletics 2: And Away We Go

 

I would like to thank ginger ale for bringing us
not only this moment, but so many others, too 

Well alright! Well okay! A walk-off win against the feisty young Oakland/Sacramento/Las Vegas Athletics on an Opening Day filled with pennant unveilings and nice video packages and all kinds of neat things and familiar faces (Ernie Whitt! George Bell! Pat Hentgen! Vernon Wells! José Bautista! all there! plus Geddy Lee and Eugene Levy in pretty good seats!) is a huge improvement over last year's dreary 12-2 game-one drubbing where I also got super sick, wouldn't you say? Kevin Gausman pitched nearly as well as one can, striking out ten batters (breaking an Opening Day shared by Roy Halladay [sure] and Esteban Loaiza [what on earth]), walking none, and allowing just one hit in his six innings. It is a shame, sure, that that lone hit was a solo dinger by slugging catcher Shea Langeliers (an ethical alternative to Cal Raleigh?). But an Andrés Giménez "miscommunication bloop triple" (sounds weird, but search your memory; I bet you have seen one) that somehow got the best of not just left-fielder Tyler Soderstrom (fair enough, I guess), but dazzling centre-fielder (a Toronto native! a Naylor-cousin!) Denzel Clarke, too, scored new-fan-favourite Kazuma Okamato (who had walked) and old-fan-favourite Ernie Clement (who had not just doubled, but hustle-doubled), and, after solid work out of the pen from both Louis Varland (first guy in, no matter the situation, it seems) and the underhanded (in a non-pejorative sense) Tyler Rogers, the stage was set for a truly remarkable Jeff Hoffman ninth. For the second straight game, though five months or so apart, Hoffman allowed a one-out, ninth-inning, game-tying home run (curse you, Shea Langeliers!) to a team from California, and I bet that however we might feel about that, Jeff Hoffman probably feels a whole lot worse about it. And while a mere blown save (or, as the French literally call it, le sabotage [I did not expect, but was grateful for, the pregame moment of silence for Rodger Brulotte]) is not in itself a particularly notable occurrence, how about a four-strikeout inning of a blown save for only the second time in MLB history? What company to be in, too: the great Tim Wakefield (the Knuckleball documentary that's on Tubi is well worth one's time, by the way—watched it just this past week!) performed the same strange feat in 1999. But to Hoffman's great relief (wordplay), judging from his reaction in the dugout, the Blue Jays strung together an Okamoto single (his second hit of the day, third time on base), another Clement double (it required less hustle, but know that his hustle stood at the ready nonetheless), and a game-winning Andrés Giménez single up the middle, all with two outs, making it all the more precarious and, in the end, merry. If it sounds like this ruled, it is because it did; it is because it did rule. I thought it was just great! 

When Okamoto, whose reception ahead of his first plate appearance was the loudest any Blue Jay received all night, was asked after the game about Vladdy—who, after Okamoto's first hit, made a typically devilish little show of asking the A's to toss him the ball to be authenticated, and then, with a big grin, feinted tossing it to the stands (before of course handing it off to the appropriate party)—Okamoto said through his translator, "He's kind. He really cares about me." An Opening Day walk-off win, in which the power of friendship remains verifiably strong? Plus we had hot dogs and root beer floats? Ten-out-of-ten Opening Day, man; no notes. Not a one.

KS    

Batter Up; Hear That Call

 

the time has come for one and all

Well here we go! And how are we feeling about it, Vladdy? About the whole state of affairs we find ourselves in as we approach the 2026 season, the fiftieth summer of Blue Jays baseball? "We acquired new players, great players," he said through an interpreter (his English has really come a long way, but I get it; I get it). "I think this is going to be more fun. I’m actually happier than last year. For whatever reason, I’m happier and feeling great. I have good feelings about this year." Oh man, me too, Vladdy! I'm so glad we are in agreement on these important matters! Like you, I am just so stoked! Even this super short offseason (let us note, however briefly, that the WBC was great [Canada, tied for fifth? I will take that just about every time, honestly]) was starting to feel a little long, and I must admit that I have already checked out on a good deal of Preseason Blue Jays Discourse, which has largely focused—understandably, and yet to my light chagrin—on some version of the question, "have they done enough to be better than the team that almost won it all last year?" Of course not! There is no such thing as that! That's as good as a baseball team gets, two outs away from beating the 2025 Los Angeles Dodgers! There aren't other steps you can take! That's as good as we have ever been, in the entire two-time World Champion history of the team, a history of which I am acutely aware (as I am pretty old) in minute detail (as I am a man of focus [not in the John Wick sense {though we both enjoy judo and making friends at work}]), and as good as we're ever going to be, and it just didn't quite happen ("that's baseball," one might well say): you come off a seventy-four-win, last-place season with largely the same guys, win ninety-four and the AL East through the power of friendship, knock the Yankees out of the playoffs on a bullpen day (a bullpen day), overcome our 1977-expansion cousins from Seattle on a Game Seven homer off the bat of old man/certified "unc" George Springer (born anew, it would seem) in the seventh (three straight strikeouts on an infinity of Jeff Hoffman sliders in the ninth [oh my god Julio is swinging at all of these; please just keep throwing them; oh my god he did just keep throwing them) and then play an historically great Los Angeles Dodgers team (the top third of their lineup is going to the Hall of Fame! the top third of it! the very the instant that they are eligible! and that's not their only Hall of Fame guy [Clayton Kershaw for sure too]! what the heck!) to actually eight-plus games worth of innings in one of the greatest World Series that there has literally ever been, and that's it; that's as good a baseball team as you are going to have, guys. Any prolonged experience of baseball (either the baseball of the primary world of our experience, or that of the secondary world[s] of sub-creation [we speak here of simulation and/or simulacra) is that any great season, any truly great season is, if you will forgive the frankness of my language in this instance, an absolute fucking miracle. That's what last year was, and that's what this year will almost certainly not be, and I do not say that as someone somehow insufficiently stoked about Kazuma Okamoto and Dylan Cease and a returning Max Scherzer who is touching 96MPH on the strength of playing piano every day (in my experience, that's fun to do even if the rewards are just the music itself, rather than velo; maybe try it if you haven't!). Last year gave us the most possible baseball, as Ernie Clement compellingly wrote, in any number of senses; it is almost certain that this year will give us less. And yet, to borrow a phrase from Andrew Stoeten, "if I'm the Toronto Blue Jays—and I fucking am," I look at this year like I look at every year since the start of 2021: this is a good enough team to win ninety, if things more or less go our way. And even if they don't, there'll still be baseball, and plenty of it. 

In closing, for now, I wanted to note, if only for a moment, the recent passing of the great Rodger Brulotte, who, alongside his colleague and friend Jacques Doucet, is one of the true legends of French-language baseball broadcasting. The meticulous Doucet (whose Il était une fois les Expos with Marc Robitaille I have mentioned many times before) was the straight-man to Brulotte, who provided endless colour. Brulotte's passing was received in the French-language media as a doubly sad event, as it served as another occasion to lament the loss of the Expos (post-Expos, Brulotte was an essential part of French-language Blue Jays broadcasts until his health no longer permitted it, but he is inseparable from the Expos). There was a lovely video tribute and moment of silence at the Habs game last Friday, and Youppi, appropriately, was front and centre. 

If you haven't heard it before, or even if you have, why not enjoy Doucet and Brulotte call Vladimir Guerrero Jr.'s spring-training walk-off home run in Olympic Stadium? Quite a moment! And in so doing, we can end our time here together in merry gladness, rather than with heads hung low like sad Youppi (seen above, sad).

KS