 |
| remember when those condos on the third-base side started showing up in video games? it was, and remains, neat to see |
Even before our ancient, AL East-of-yesteryear rivals the Detroit Tigers made errors on three consecutive plays in the sixth, we were already doing just fine ("Hey, no, listen, listen, I was winning before this guy got here," Matt Damon pleaded truthfully [though it was an incomplete truth] before things went poorly for both he himself and his silly little buddy Ed Norton at the state troopers' poker game). But we'll take all the help we can get! Thanks guys! Those three errors paired wonderfully with the Blue Jays' nine hits and, even better still, with Max Scherzer's five innings of one-run baseball (that is a premium kind of it, obviously). Mason Fluharty, who has appeared in a fairly ludicrous seventy-nine games this season, Rule-5-legend Spencer Miles, and Louis Varland (back on the horse!) took it the rest of the way to salvage all that could be (salvaged) of an on-the-whole somewhat dispiriting series against these Tigers. That first game was a real stinger, wasn't it, and will no doubt prove memorable should we end up precisely a game short when all is said in done in another week-and-a-bit. I'm not sure if I have mentioned this previously, but although my preferred outcome the rest of the way would of course be that we squeak on into the final playoff spot and, by virtue of the the fairly reasonable matchup that would offer us against the underwhelming AL-West-leading Astros, and the strength of the front-end of our rotation (Cease, Soriano [let us not speak just now of how nearly all the rest of our guys are in various stages of rest and/or rehabilitation], away we go into a three-game opening round series that would realistically be a coin toss, the second-best outcome, as far as me and my feelings go, would just be to fully crash out, drop like four or five in a row, and finish like six or seven games back—far enough out, that is, that things end up too far gone to pin the season on any one particular blown game, or on a single underperforming player, or anything like that at all. In the increasingly likely scenario that we miss, I would like the margin of that miss to be such that the culpability must, by necessity, be broadly shared. It's better for everybody that way, and perhaps unaccountably, for me in particular?
I let the above (baseball) feelings just kind of chill about for a bit while I awaited the results from the (Home Hardware) out-of-town scoreboard on the Blue Jays' Thursday off-day, and they indeed broke relatively well from our perspective: a White Sox win (go, Murakami; do it for the pope) knocked the Guards out of first place in the AL Central and cast them back down into the realms of wild cardery (which is where we want them, as we hold the tiebreaker over them [but not, alas, over the White Sox]), and a late Red Sox comeback over the Rangers leaves us tied with them (the Rangers, I mean, not the Red Sox [haha oh no not nearly the Red Sox; oh my no]), two games behind Cleveland for WC3. And so the road ahead is really quite clear: this weekend, in Texas, where the centre-field camera in their new ballpark is just way too high and everything looks bad because of it, it would behoove the heck out of us to take no fewer than two of three, which shouldn't be altogether too much to ask, given that we've got our big three scheduled to take the mound (Cease, Soriano, and "bullpen day"). I honestly haven't even checked who Cleveland will be playing this weekend, though that is of course totally relevant, too; let's just see (we'll learn together!) . . . okay, the Guardians play the league-worst-but-for-the-Angels Athletics, which is not super promising for us, unless perhaps, as losers of their last three, the A's are due? What if the gambler's fallacy is not only real, but in fact a friend to us, one that will engender the realization of our innermost wishes desires? You can't rule it out! Not entirely!
KS
No comments:
Post a Comment