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