Dodgers 14, Blue Jays 1: It's Dark, And Hell Is Hot

 

Daulton Varsho, styled uponst jauntily 

I can't be the only one who is a little surprised with how often Tyler Heineman has pitched so far this young season, right? Even if it is just three innings over two appearances, that's still more than you'd figure out of your backup catcher over the first ten games, isn't it? Not only is his 15.00 ERA not the worst one posted by a Blue Jays pitcher so far, but it actually suggests (incorrectly, but nevertheless suggests) that we'd have really been no further behind if he'd thrown the whole game Monday night against the Dodgers, who touched up five Blue Jays pitchers before Heineman shut the door (in an admittedly limited sense) in the ninth. Max Scherzer left after just two innings, and Dan Schulman understandably speculated that Scherzer might have caught the virus that had made things difficult for Eric Lauer recently, but no, he is in fact dealing with forearm tendonitis, which sounds appreciably worse as far as it relates to pitching in an ongoing fashion. What a mess! And there were nearly forty-one thousand people there to see it, too; I can only imagine the in-stadium vibe (the vibe on the broadcast was itself ungreat). 

It's true that it's super early, and that things have been super weird for lots of teams so far (only four AL teams are above .500, and you can't even take that all that seriously since one of them is the Angels; the Red Sox, inexplicably, are but two-and-eight), and that the Blue Jays were not super duper better than this to open the 2025 season. All true! But wouldn't it be great to grab a couple against the Dodgers here before things unravel further? It's Gausman and Yamamoto tonight, Cease and Ohtani Wednesday afternoon, so plenty of potentially less cursed baseball ahead (possibly).  

KS     

White Sox 3, Blue Jays 0: Honestly Not An Ideal Week in Blue Jays Baseball

 

sometimes you just gotta pat your homie on the butt and mark XP

"Life moves pretty fast," (fictional?) Chicago baseball enthusiast Ferris Bueller once noted in the (documentary?) film whose title both bears his name and also tells you what kind of day he is having. Too true, Ferris; too true! Just one week ago, whomst amongst us did not thrill to the thrilling thrill of three spirited wins over the Philadelphia/Kansas City/Oakland/Sacramento/[spits]Las Vegas[spits again] Athletics to open a season filled with promise and a widely-held-but-basically-impossible hope for an outcome that could improve (even just by two outs, say) upon the one we had just last year that was both unreal and yet also lightly crushing? (I'm sure you remember it, at least in its broad lines.) And now here we gather, just one win against five losses later, having seen first Cody Ponce (probably gone for the season [wrecked knee]), then Alejandro Kirk (you'd have to think for weeks [broken thumb]), and perhaps now Addison Barger, too (messed ankle [day-to-day, hopefully?]) joining really quite a few other guys in being too-dinged-up-for-baseball at present as we slip to a game below .500 for the first time in really quite some time. Objectively not great!

And yet I must confess that I am having a pretty good time. I am enjoying the baseball games, with our old friend Dan Schulman telling me all about all the things happening in them, and my family checking in on things here and there, and a few texts with an old friend who worries about the pitching, and some light banter about matters around the league with tha boiz in the group chat. I am enjoying this return to Normal Baseball after the unsustainable "pitch and moment" (baseball Hamlet pun! let's go!) that overtook Blue Jays baseball throughout much of last September, literally all of October, and just the one day in November. Though it brought with it many other pleasures—chief among them, of course, a broader appeal to the non-sicko Canadian sporting public than the Blue Jays have ever enjoyed previously, and all the easy fellowship that carries with it—it was altogether too much, too far outside of the usual emotional register of baseball as I have come to enjoy it in this my fifth decade of doing that (baseball-enjoying). I like this better. Old friends may recall that I have long maintained that I am fundamentally a Regular-Season Guy ("One-Sixty-Two: More Than Enough," our banners read), which one could reasonably write-off as sour grapes during a considerable Blue Jays playoff drought, say, of which there have been several over the many years of our blogging together (thank you, as always, for your patience with me), but I have always meant it sincerely. Would I feel differently about this had a couple of innings played out slightly differently last fall? Hey maybe, but I really do remember quite vividly what it is like for the Toronto Blue Jays to win the World Series (twice in a row, even), and to me it all figures as cautionary rather than sustaining, I think.

Dodgers up next, though! Ohtani and Scherzer going tomorrow night at the SkyDome! I remember the last time this was the case! Turned out to be a pretty tight game!

KS 

White Sox 6, Blue Jays 3: I'm Not Even Sure Who I Feel Worse For (Pardon Me: For Whomst I Feel Worser)

 

at least Vladdy got one (great job as always, Vladdy; you're the best)

Should it be Brandon Little to whom we extend our fellow feeling this day, given that he was brought in to face an inning rich with lefties, and allowed home runs to two of them, on what may well prove to be his last appearance before being sent down to Buffalo to figure things out (should that be available to his practice)? Or should it mostly be Tyler Heineman, who not only made the third out (that's all the out they give you in any one inning, which is honestly something we might want to revisit) of a potentially game-changing inning trying to get to third with two out (you will recall that it is nearly meaningless to be on third with two out rather than to be at second with that same number of outs [two]) and—and this is the part that really tears it—Vladimir Guerrero Jr. on deck? Vladdy, who'd homered in his last at bat, is reported to have hit the indoor batting cages no more than fifteen minutes after the conclusion of the previous day's disappointing game, trying to fix whatever it was in his swing that was limiting him to only getting on base a little less than half the time. And sure enough, he got that one today, a true blast to left-centre off of former Blue Jay Anthony Kay, back in the bigs after a several-year stint in Japan that was apparently quite kind to him (though he no longer wears glasses on the field, which saddens me a little). That put the Blue Jays up 2-1 in the sixth, the homer did, but it was the bottom of that same inning that saw Brandon Little just totally cooked by those lefties aforementioned, the very guys he is specifically there to go uncooked by (he is there to ensure everything remains raw, in a sense). Anyway, Heineman's Vladdy's-on-deck-please-no gaffe ended the seventh, and then a ball he just totally sailed in what should have been an inning-ending pickle in the eighth (but instead produced two runs! a two-run pickle!) really settled the matter: for Tyler Heineman, much like Brandon Little, this was just a brutal day at work. 

Unlike Little, who we probably won't be seeing all that much of in the next while (mere speculation on my part, but I would be surprised if Adam Macko or somebody isn't up as a new bullpen lefty for a bit), Heineman will be front and centre, given the news about Alejandro Kirk's thumb: it was dislocated, so they popped it back in after the game, x-rayed it, and, yep, sure enough, that's a thumb that's broken, mister. For now, he's just on the ten-day injury list, but they don't yet know if it'll need surgery or what, so while it is already a bad scene, it could prove to be a far worse one pretty soon.

It's Eric Lauer on the mound tomorrow (today it was Mason Fluharty as an opener ahead of Lazaro Estrado, by the way, and that was all at least totally fine, bordering on really good), and I enjoy his work, but I do not feel that things have gone well in Chicago so far, and I worry that this may continue to be the case tomorrow, too. Prove me wrong, guys! Then it's back home to face the Dodgers, haha!     

KS 

White Sox 5, Blue Jays 4 (F/10): An Objectively Great Game That I Hated

 

peace was less upon me than I'd have liked by the end of this one

Andrés Giménez's two-run homer to tie the game at three in the eighth (the Blue Jays' first run having come all the way back in the second on an Alejandro Kirk hustle-double [they're of course all hustle doubles for our guy Kirky]) felt so good, man. Giménez is such a great defender that he is almost unreasonably valuable as an even slightly-below-league-average hitter, so when he shows flashes of maybe possibly perhaps hitting like he did in his monstrous 2022 season (his 2025 ALCS was pretty happening, too, you'll recall), one cannot help but be like yes please. And yet it did not prove enough on this cold Chicago day that also ended up in a flood warning, according to my people (honestly just one person) on the scene in that presumably fine city (I have never been). It's true that my innate distrust of extra innings had to be set aside, however briefly, after George Springer did not so much beat out a play at first so much as a lightly errant throw across the diamond drew Murakami's foot off the bag at first by like maybe an inch, and the umpire totally noticed, allowing Davis Schneider to scamper on in. But it (my innate distrust) was if anything redoubled in the home half of the tenth, when, mere moments after Alejandro Kirk had to leave the game immediately upon taking a foul tip off his gloved thumb (he looked into the dugout immediately, which seemed like a terrible sign [sure was!]), Derek Hill craftily laid down a bunt that backup catcher Tyler Heineman had to field while both literally and figuratively cold. Field it he did, one would have to acknowledge, but he sure hucked it down the first base line, didn't he? Like way past Vladdy? Rather than the game-winning third out being registered (I like that word a lot when paired with outs), in came the game-tying run on the error, soon followed by the game-winning run (for the wrong guys! the wrong guys!) on (Winkler, Manitoba's) Tristan Peters' single to right field off Jeff Hoffman, who you can't really pin this one on at all, given the error on what should have been the third out, and all. Not great! Except that it was, as a game; except that it wasn't, as far as my enjoyment right at the end of it. Guess which one stuck with me the most! And so we fall to a barely-keeping-our-heads-above-water four-and-three, whereas we were a few mere bounces away from a juggernaut-that-defies-all-sense five-and-two. The strictures of April baseball are demanding.  

KS  

Rockies 2, Blue Jays 1 (F/10): Guys What The Heck

 

hello baseballs my old friend

In his aspect and bearing (to say nothing of his performance), Brandon Little is exuding Charlie Brown energy on the mound these days to an extent not seen amongst Blue Jays pitchers since 2022 Tim Mayza (pictured here, and I really do encourage you to click through to see it), and what can anyone say about any of it but "good grief." This one was definitely on the bats, though, as you've really got to score more than once in ten innings to have a reliable shot at winning baseball games (as you can see from the grasp of modern analytics I am displaying right now, I do go to FanGraphs at all). Kevin Gausman was great again, and the strong bullpen went Rogers, Nance, Fluharty, Hoffman, and poor Brandon Little at the end there to deal with the Manfred Man, but the bats, man, the bats. It would be wrong, though, to say that Blue Jays fans had little to cheer about, because it was Schools Day, where thousands and thousands of kids come to the ballpark on field trips, and so every time a Blue Jay so much as rolls a grounder out to short, the crowd goes absolutely nuts, and has just a great time start to finish ("Boy, they can turn on you pretty quick out here on Schools Day, though," Dan Schulman did note at one point when the a Rockies pitcher made a throw over to first to check the runner, a move that was met with literally unhinged opprobrium). I feel a little silly minding any aspect of a four-and-two start to the season—which you would gladly take to start any and all seasons, right?—but after that best-case-scenario opening weekend, it was a bit of a comedown to drop two out of three to a ([n] in fairness much-improved) team that lost one-hundred-and-nineteen games last year, and to also lose a starting pitcher for almost certainly the whole season (Cody Ponce's knee is thought to be a mess). Not great! We've fallen a full game behind the Yankees for the AL East lead with only 156 games to go (the Yankees "magic number" is already down to 155)! And worst of all, it came before an off day, so we just have to stew about it until the White Sox home-opener Friday afternoon. This is the part that seems most careless of all. 

KS

Blue Jays 5, Rockies 1: He's Scherz-Maxing

 

look at him Scherzing up

Among the many distinctions of Max Scherzer's perfectly obvious first-ballot Hall-of-Fame career, one that surely ranks highly is how, although he is obviously a total psycho, he is somehow only ever a psycho in a way that is only ever charming. He's really threaded the needle on that one! Excellent starting pitchers are often fairly off-putting people, as we know, but Scherzer's game-day-only, conspicuously off-putting persona contrasts with his super intense but affable everyday demeanor in a way that kind of just seems neat. For this reason and also a bunch of others, I'm glad he's back, and would feel that way even had he not been totally dealing Tuesday night against these Colorado Rockies who will probably be bad again this year, but who will not be lifeless; this is not an obviously awful team at all anymore, I don't think, and they are an interesting one for the first time in a while now that they are being run by Jonah Hill from Moneyball (remember how Paul's computer was pretty much its own character in the Michael Lewis original?). Scherzer allowed just the one run, on just the one homer, and was otherwise pretty much unassailable, while the Blue Jays bats, for their part, went a little more nuts than you might think in a game where they scored five, managing fourteen hits, which is really quite a few (literally everybody in the lineup got one, which is something I like all out of proportion when it happens). Good fun all around!

KS