Blue Jays 6, Rangers 3: Righteous Conquest, Like Henry V Riding into The Battle of The Hornburg Atop, Like, Rainbow Dash

José's got a really big team, and they need some really big rings, etc ps think about how Drake must feel 

Like so many of us (arguably most?), I listened to several innings of Game 5 sitting in a car parked in the lot of a church of which I am not now nor have ever been a congregant; around the time José Bautista ripped a double down the line to drive in Ben Revere, I went for chicken. This kept my streak of doing all kinds of other things while these games have been going on very much intact: Thanksgiving weekend, and so pumpkin pies to make (they came out tremendously, and kind of tasted like ginger snaps, thank you for your interest), and many feastings to partake of, and so just lots of checking in, you know? If you follow it on your phone it feels a lot like Baseball Mogul, except you don't have Carlos Delgado and Tony Fernandez both signed to deals that are literally killing you and you have literally died from them in your game. 

I legit felt like the Blue Jays were probably finished after Price pitched not-so-hotly in Game 1, and said as much in this very place of Feelings, and didn't feel a whole lot better about things as Game 2 unfolded over the course of pretty much forever, but actually during what I think all would agree was an impressively unobtrusive and considerate portion of a Thanksgiving dinner conversation, a brother-in-law and I managed to convince each other that the way the pitching lined up, there was every reason for guarded optimism that the Blue Jays could get it back to Toronto for Game 5, and then, coin flip, right? At its heart this line of reasoning was probably at least fairly dumb, a subtle variation of my self-deluding (but handy!) Game Six At Home theory of playoff hockey, which is when the team you like is getting creamed, but you convince yourself that all they need to do is get it to Game Six At Home, win that one, and then anything can happen in a seventh game, right? And usually does, haha! (Note that this never works.) I also have a micro version of this macro argument, which is when the other team scores first (any sport, doesn't matter), you are just like, well, we knew we were going to have to score one, so this is of hardly any import at all, old fruit. (This never works either, and my old friend Matty denounces all of it as "loser talk," which it self-evidently is, yes.) And yet! We had ourselves/each other pretty much sold on it.

There was much discussion, and rightly so, about whether or not John Gibbons was being prudent or in fact a dink when he brought David Price out of the bullpen with a big lead and shut R. A. Dickey down early in Game 4, but given the way Price pitched in Game 1, I wasn't overly eager to see him in Game 5, and felt much better with the idea of Stroman getting the start, so I am without complaint (everyone is without complaint now, of course, but I started that way, and so have felt a greater measure of peace). I was pleased to see on Twitter that Stoeten shared this view; I was displeased to see he got sick and couldn't go to Game 5 and chose to give up his ticket, which is brutal, but I will remind you here that I went to games with food poisoning and scored several innings from the bathroom in the 500s listening on my slim radio with nothing other than my 2003 perfect attendance record on the line, which also meant an autographed Vernon Wells baseball and an on-field presentation on the line, and so kind of everything on the line, actually, and so I now renounce the way this sentence began, and just want us to think about poor Stoeten here (Drunk Jays Fans forever, obviously). 

IN SHORT we were just getting home when E5 hit the home run that tied it in the sixth and Mike Wilner on the radio just started hollering indistinctly. I have watched the clips of everything now, and I think they confirm that, maybe weirdly, the crowd reaction to the E5 home run to tie it was even bigger than José's to go ahead? I know this sounds strange, especially given all that, like, transpired, but go check and see. Perhaps emotional exhaustion and terror are factors here?

About all the stuff that happened: Russell Martin winging it off (Big League) Choo, while insane, should totally have been a live ball, obviously, and Dale Scott blew it when he waved it dead, which made everybody stop, not that they would have had a play anyway, so really who cares,and Dale Scott has since admitted he messed it up, so what do you want? The mere anarchy that was unloosed upon the world, mostly in the 500s, actually made me really anxious as it unfolded, because it can get really bad up there even without blown calls in decisive playoff games. In truth, any time there were like 35k+ people in the SkyDome I disliked the feel up there pretty severely: the angle of the seating is so severe that the one-row-up advantage in blows being visited upon on those below is pronounced, and people get wrecked, and all it takes to get it started is one person to throw something, another person to say hey don't throw things, and then everything becomes terrible for everybody. All of this was uncomfortable. 

The bottom of the seventh is not a thing I am probably even really able to fully dig at present, and who can say when, if ever, I will be able to openly and honestly and truly dig it, but let me just say for now that we should all probably feel as terrible for Elvis Andrus as we do exultant and swept away in José Bautista's apex glory. That reliever, Dyson, just seems like a dick, so who cares that much, except that we have probably all been dicks and so should probably be more charitable than I have just been, but poor Elvis Andrus: that's as bad as that could have gone for him, and given the reviews and stuff, it unfolded over the course of a while, and was just punishing.   

The Bautista home run itself seemed then, and seems now, and will probably continue well into the future to seem to be, Just The Thing To Do. José was asked right after the game about Joe Carter's home run, and you can see why, but right away he was like no, that was the World Series, and it was a walk-off, and that's just a completely and totally other sort of thing, and he's right about that for sure, but given the insane emotional pitch at which that hour-long yeah it was pretty much an hour long seventh inning was played, in a game where the Blue Jays could be eliminated (not so in 1993 Game Six, you will recall), this was more cathartic, although not in the fullest original sense of "cleansing" or "purifying" because it didn't make me feel less gross about people having to physically shield their tiny children from shit hurled down from the 500s (however even before this particular episode I would have strongly advised against bringing tiny kids to games when the place is going to be full: a Junior Jays Saturday where kids line up behind section 129 to run the bases is one thing; this is quite another).

Hey one thing I will say on the subject of the bat flip, which is a thing people are talking about like it was An Issue for Takes (and obviously this is not a forum for Takes but for Feelings, which are radically and crucially different), is that I am super glad I am not part of any conversation where one's position on bat flips stands as a proxy for their politix, particularly in the context of Amerikkka, because that is the most tedious possible thing a person could want to talk about after that home run and yet such talk is rampant. I guess I can understand reporters asking players dumb questions to get dumb answers to write their dumb stories (the only daily beat team sports reporter I ever kind of half-knew was of the view that every reporter hates standing there asking idiotic questions and every player just holds them in complete and unfailingly contempt, and I believe every part of this very strongly), but it is not undumb because it is their job; maybe their job is dumb (many are; I have had some). If that is a thing you do for fun, I don't get it, but that's OK too probably. Anyway, please know that your efforts to corrupt and attaint this by making it emblematic of Whatever Your Shit Is will ultimately fail and all that will remain is the sikkest dinger of the age.      

To conclude, Jerry Howarth was really happy on the radio, and I am pretty sure Joe Siddall (Jerry Howarth's non-Mike-Wilner little buddy) was crying on air after Osuna got the last out. And hey George Bell threw out the first pitch! Remember when he came back to Toronto for the 1991 All-Star Game as a Cub and everybody hated him? I didn't understand why!

OK, Blue Jays,

KS

Rays 2, Blue Jays 1: It Might Also Have Been Possible to Not Send Jose Right There

nooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooo

Ah, the home opener, I know it well: you get your whole squad together and show up like twelve-deep in the 500s and listen to a bunch of drunk bro assholes start chanting "Go Leafs Go" by the fifth inning while the Blue Jays blow it to, like, the Twins, or something, and then there are fights. Maybe it doesn't happen like that anymore, exactly, who knows, as I have not been to one of these in holy shit nine years, but I expect the broad lines of the occasion remain largely unchanged; the camera seemed to luxuriate in the fresh faces of whole vast crews of dewy maidens adorned in their team-apparel finery and those too of the young suitors who suit them, which is much of what I recall of these home openers d'antan. By the second game of the season, all of these youthful funseekers will be replaced by the miserabilisit horde of fierce old ladies still mad at Homer Bush for a baserunning mistake in like 1999 and deliberately unfun young men with scorekeeping books and resolute viewz on advanced metrics; both with have little radios; neither will find any real joy. A crowd of 12 000 will be announced, but it will be a damnable lie.

BUT NOT ON OPENING DAY where a cheerful crowd north of 48 000 watched R. A. Dickey walk in the two runs that were all the Rays needed because nothing else ever really got going! Hey! You don't often say this about somebody who walked in a couple runs, but Dickey was really pretty OK, and has looked fairly good in both of his starts so far, actually. Down 2-1, Jose Bautista, who I see has a bobblehead day coming up (in a way it is strange that as a people we have not wearied of the bobblehead yet), drew a walk to lead-off the bottom of the ninth and I was like OOOOOOH SHIIIIIIIIIT and I was certainly no less that way when E5 started taking these huge rips up there as though he had fully considered how raw it would be to win the home opener with a walk-off home run and had decided this was a dare-to-be-great moment (not wrongly) that he could not let pass him by without taking mammoth fvkkn rips. 

But alas, he whiffed on a what looked like a pretty decent 3-2 fastball to hit, and Bautista, who had been sent, was out by a mile at second (or at least a quarter-mile, the length at which deeply-felt lives are sometimes lived), and that was pretty much that. 

But that's baseball, friends! It is often very much like that! And yet here we remain.

Oh hey also, since we were going to do an Old English word every R. A. Dickey start, to celebrate his Beowulf enthusiasm, let's do wealcan, which is where "walk" comes from. (I am not doing this to be mean about R. A. Dickey, because whether the runs were walked in or not [they extremely were], that was not a bad start, and Dickey has been better than a guy at work and I had decided he would be this year, and so is entitled to his propers.) 

wealcan

From Proto-Germanic *walkaną, from Proto-Indo-European *wolg- < *wel- (“to bend, twist, run, roll”). Akin to Old High German walchan, Old Norse valka, Old English ġewealcan "to go, go about, walk", Old English wealcian "to roll up, curl, twist", Old English weallian "to roam about, ramble", German wallen

Verb[edit]

wealcan

1. to move around
2. to revolve
3. to roll, roll around, be rolling
4. to toss
5. to fluctuate
6. to revolve in one's mind; scheme; reflect
7. to discuss

(That's from wiktionary.)

I don't know about you but I am already kind of excited about the next R. A. Dickey start because of all that etymology! 

KS

Blue Jays 12, Marlins 4; Blue Jays 7, Marlins 1: lol the Marlins suuuuuuuuuuuuuuuck right now

you're that is totally sad john buck back there

The scores here would suggest that these similar kinds of games, but really they weren't at all. Friday night, Ricky Romero continued to not pitch all that bossly, while Bautista et al. wilded out on that ridiculous(ly awesome) new ballpark in Miami. Today's game, despite the score, was a full-on pitcher's duel most of the way, featuring, for the Blue Jays' part, this new version of Brett Cecil who is not all that bad but about whom you cannot help but have continued concerns re: velocity. The game's duelishness outlasted the starters, and carried right into the ninth, where an E5 solo home run looked as though it might well be enough to win it but then the Marlins totally kicked it around literally balked and before you know it we are looking at a 7-1 fiasco after a Colby Rasmus grand slam rather than the 2-1 nailbiter it had seemed only moments ago. Also notable: Darren Oliver being his bad self throwing breaking balls for strikes even when he's behind because he can. 


KS

Blue Jays 11, Red Sox 10: This Game was Bananas

B-A-N-A-N-A-S

With the Red Sox up 8-4 through five innings, and Tim Wakefield in line for the two-hundredth win of his insanely long career, it looked to me like the story of the game was going to be the contrast between Brandon Morrow, a young guy with all the stuff in the world who has yet to truly figure it all out, and Wakefield, a guy with no arm and basically one pitch but who is, you know, the awesomest. But then everything got crazy, leaving the clear-cut narratives that seemed to have been developing in this contest obscure and, in the end, undiscernible. But that's probably OK.  


Actually, it was kind of weird from the first, really. Morrow scuffled from the outset, and it's not like Wakefield was exactly rolling, either: Thames came in on an E5 sac fly in the first; J. P. Arencibia set the Blue Jays mark for home runs by a catcher with his twenty-first in the second; and Bautista doubled in Thames in the third. But the first real sign of the madness that was to follow came when Brett Lawrie and Jose Bautista pulled off the double steal of second and home, with Bautista beating Marco Scuturo's pretty dang errant throw to the plate. The usual Red Sox bludgeoning followed, with home runs by Ortiz and Ellsbury, setting the stage for the Blue Jays' eighth, possibly my favourite inning all year. I mean, just look at it:

Bottom 8 (Daniel Bard pitching)

• 
  

  1.Brett Lawrie hit by pitch.




• 
  

  2.Adam Loewen singles on a ground ball to right fielder Josh Reddick. Brett Lawrie to 3rd.




• 
  

  3.J. P. Arencibia walks. Adam Loewen to 2nd.




• 
  

  4.Dewayne Wise strikes out swinging.




• 
  

  5.Yunel Escobar called out on strikes.




• 
  

  6.Eric Thames walks. Brett Lawrie scores. Adam Loewen to 3rd. J. P. Arencibia to 2nd.




• 
  

  Offensive Substitution: Pinch runner Chris Woodward replaces J. Arencibia.




• 
  

  Coaching visit to mound.




• 
  

  7.Jose Bautista walks. Adam Loewen scores. Chris Woodward to 3rd. Eric Thames to 2nd.




• 
  

  Pitcher Change: Matt Albers replaces Daniel Bard.




• 
  

  Coaching visit to mound.




• 
  

  8.Edwin Encarnacion doubles (34) on a line drive to center fielder Jacoby Ellsbury. Chris Woodward scores. Eric Thames scores. Jose Bautista scores.




• 
  

  9.Kelly Johnson strikes out swinging.

  
  

To the above I would add only that E5's double to the wall came on a 3-2 pitch, making it all the better (runners on the move!). Even Frank Francisco's insistence on allowing two runs in the ninth did not dampen my spirits, especially since the game ended on Jose Molina's throw to second, catching Mike Aviles stealing, an awesome way to end a baseball game, I trust you will agree.


I hope Tim Wakefield gets his 200th before the end of the year, because at forty-five years old, there's every reason to believe he won't be back. Like literally everyone else, I have a soft spot for knuckleballers. Maybe it would get old if he actually pitched for your team, and you had to listen to all the same old knuckleballer stories every five days instead of a couple of times a season, but in small doses it seems like the best of things. Alan Ashby, who caught Joe Niekro (presumably in the Niekro Leagues), had plenty to say on the radio last night. Jerry Howarth, totally enamoured with the knuckleball, eventually asked Ashby why so few players throw it. "I think it's because, for the time being, anyway, sanity prevails on the planet earth," was Ashby's reply. 


Kind of, but not really, because last night was crazy, man, it was crazy.


KS

Orioles 6, Blue Jays 5 (F/10): Try Not to Blow Another Save On The Way to the Team Bus, Bullpen

Kevin Gregg: still loathsome.

First, the good (don't worry, this won't take long): Brett Lawrie continues to absolutely rake his first time around the league, last night adding a three-run homer to his completely awesome line so far (.329/.380/.682, 6 HR, 4 2B, 4 3B) in the second inning. And then much, much later -- in the ninth, in fact, when the utterly loathsome Kevin Gregg took the hill for the O's -- Dewayne Wise went into crafty veteran mode and stole third when the base was left undefended after a bunt attempt. Yeah, a bunt attempt: there was no bunt, but everybody charged, and nobody covered third, and Dewayne Wise dared to be great. Have I mentioned Kevin Gregg threw five straight balls to dudes clearly trying to bunt? Totally happened. Anyway, the Blue Jays, trailing by one at the time, only managed to plate the tying run before E5, who looked totally lost up there, grounded out to end the inning. 


After Casey Janssen pitched a solid bottom of the ninth, Kelly Johnson led off the tenth with a triple, and came home on a wild pitch, you would think everything would be cool, right? Run Janssen back out there, and seal the deal, n'est-ce pas? But no. Instead, we were treated to one of these:

The only difference here is that rather than Cito, the man we must blame is acting manager Dan Wakamatsu, subbing for the pneumoniac John Farrell. But yeah, Brian Tallet. So that was that, Orioles 6, Blue Jays 5, walk-off win. "I know they had to take Brian Tallet, but to use him," my wife trailed off from the other room as she overheard this nonsense. 


This is easily the worst Toronto bullpen I have ever seen, and I hate it. Everybody but Casey Janssen should be catapulted. I miss Jason Frasor and Scott Downs. That is what I have been reduced to, my friends: missing Jason Frasor and Scott Downs.


KS 

Blue Jays 7, Rangers 3: Blue Jays Spit In the Faces of All Who Would Oppose Them on Roberto Alomar Hall of Fame Day

A Good Day

Say what you will about the historically low esteem in which the public holds the once venerated Royal Canadian Mounted Police after recent years of scandal ranging from the petty to the rather severe, but being led through the crowd by a couple of Mounties is an absolute motherfucker of a way to make your way onto the field to have your number retired in front of 45,629 people packed into the building I can only call the SkyDome. I mean:

That just straight up works, you know? I have already more than said my piece on Roberto Alomar in recent days, so that is not ground that I will revisit with you here today. Instead, let it be said that Brandon Morrow pitched a heck of a game, striking out eleven over seven innings of two-run, six-hit ball. Early on, Alan Ashby noticed that Morrow had "the good slider" going, and predicted a long day for Texas bats, and he was totally right. There was no shortage of offense on the Toronto side, the highlight coming early, as the streaky E5 -- notably the last player to wear Alomar's number twelve, now the first number retired in Toronto Blue Jays history -- launched a shot into the second deck with Bautista aboard (on a walk, naturally). 


A really, really nice day of Blue Jays baseball, is all I really have to say about this one. It gave me a real good feeling, the kind of feeling you get when you look at a picture of Otto Velez talking to Roberto Alomar and Sandy Alomar Jr. in Anaheim in 1977, you know?

KS

Blue Jays 11, Mariners 6: Kind of feeling bad for the Mariners, actually.

Such mustache.

I am pretty jazzed yeah that's right jazzed that Brandon Morrow turned in a solid start at home, where he has struggled this year, and I am equally jazzed that Travis Snider (2-4, HR, 5 RBI) is hitting .357 since being recalled from Las Vegas, that Jose Bautista looks fine (1-3, 2B, 2 BB) coming back from his ankle sprain, and that the streaky E5 is raking right now and stole second and third in the fourth inning. But I am also kind of sad about the Mariners, our 1977 expansion cousins. Eleven losses in a row, that's rough, especially when the team you were only a couple of games behind in your (joke of a) division rattled off a dozen straight wins. 


And it is painful to watch Ichiro struggle through his first truly bad season. It's not just that he isn't going to end up with his customary 200 hits; it's that he has been legitimately bad: he's hitting .260 with a .306 OBP. It's brutal. He still steals bases with an amazing rate of success (he's 23 for 27 this season, and an unreal 406 for 498 in his career), but he's not getting on enough to be a respectable lead-off hitter. Hopefully he gets crazy hot in the second half, but at 37 he might just be done. 


This would sadden me greatly, because that guy was awesome.


KS

Red Sox 3, Blue Jays 2: Look, He Was Safe.

Come on.

I have no special love for E5, though I do have a kind of sympathy for his plight, generally (a man who simply cannot throw who is sometimes asked to throw). I have an active dislike of John Farrell's insistence that the Blue Jays run run run at every opportunity and try to take every extra base possible, and thus get picked off, caught stealing, and run into outs at a maddening pace. But let's be real here: when Encarnacion tried to score from second on John McDonald's single with two outs in the bottom of the ninth -- in a game they shouldn't even really have been in, except for Jose Bautista's two-run shot that same inning -- he made it. He was in there. There's just no question. It was a very nice throw by Darnell McDonald. But Veritek missed the tag by about a foot as Encarnacion's right foot touched home. I appreciate how difficult it is to umpire, and I know it all happened pretty quickly, but Brian Knight missed the call. Watch it here and see for yourself. It is horseshit.


In the end it is whatevs, because there's every reason to think the bullpen would have blown it eventually. But Encarnacion was safe. There's no question.


The other reason I am not going to let that blown call take the spring out of my step is that the Blue Jays have finally heeded my persistent calls to cut Juan Rivera! I have, like, an extra good summery feeling because of that. 


KS

Blue Jays 7, Phillies 4 and Blue Jays 9, Red Sox 7: Jays Break Out the Bats on Mr. Sub Sports Bag Day, Keep Them Out For Lesser Holiday A Day Later

Have never liked the black uniforms; have always liked dingers. You can see the bind I'm in.

Cliff Lee's utterly ridiculous streak of thirty-four consecutive innings without allowing a run -- the man allowed a grand total of one run in June, by the way -- came to an end in pretty dramatic fashion yesterday, as the Blue Jays thundered to a 7-4 win powered by three home runs in the eighth, from Eric Thames, who fills me with hope, Jose Bautista, who fills me with pride, and Edwin Encarnacion, who fills me with stomach cramps but it's not his fault. Had Jo-Jo been able to keep it together for like a second longer, he totally would have picked up a win over Cliff Lee, which would probably have been the coolest thing ever, but nevertheless, a big day! And even bigger because it all came on Mr. Sub Sports Bag Day. 


Mr. Sub Sports Bag Day has been an annual occurrence for pretty much as long as anums have occurred. For those of you not familiar with this whole situation, Mr. Sub are the purveyors of seriously the worst possible sandwiches, and I am not being stuck up about that. I enjoy Subway. Quizno's can be good. But Mr. Sub can never, ever be good. In my experience, Mr. Sub is a dank pit of strangely wet meat, genuinely questionable vegetables, and injudiciously applied condiments. I hate it and it is awful. But their sports bags, given away at Blue Jays games annually, serve a pretty interesting social function in the city: if you see someone on the streetcar or wherever, and they're rocking a Mr. Sub Sports Bag of any vintage at all, it is like "woah ok we've got a 500 here," which is to say, a citizen of the 500-level upper deck seats. I'm not hating, because that's where I usually sat, too; but generally speaking the 500s are a place for oddballs, drifters, and broke fanatics. The term "500s" applied to people outside the context of the stadium itself is a useful classification for, say, the kind of not-entirely-together but certainly not-entirely-untogether kind of slightly odd person you not uncommonly encounter at the public library, say. You know what I mean? Anyway, these people, this broader meaning of "500s," very, very often are in possession of Mr. Sub Sports Bags when you see them doing their thing, and yesterday is the day all those people got new ones. Somewhere, I have like five.  


Then today things got pretty rad in Boston, too! Brandon Morrow was pretty OK for a bit; Jason Frasor wasn't, really; and "The Closer" Frank Francisco had me uttering foul oaths but ultimately struck out three in the ninth after allowing a leadoff single and a stolen base. Aaron Hill went three-for-five with a home run, and please please please let this be the start of a torrid second-half pace for Aaron Hill, because this has been brutal. Also, Travis Snider is back up, and he too went three-for-five with two doubles. Let this be real. OK?


KS

Pirates 7, Blue Jays 6: So it has come to this, then.

No doubt intended as good-natured ribbing, I actually agree with the sign.

I know that the Pirates stubborn refusal to drop below the .500 mark is one of the nicer stories in baseball this year, given the extent to which they have awfuled their way through the better part of two decades now, but come on. Much of the blame, sort of, falls at the feet of Jo-Jo, who gave up six runs and didn't get out of the fourth, but as we have discussed previously, there is really no faulting Jo-Jo for anything, as he is only what he is. The bullpen only allowed one run the rest of the way, but that one run, Andrew McCutchen's solo shot in the seventh, ended up being the killer, as the Blue Jays otherwise potentially rad four-home-run comeback fell short. E5 hit a pair,  Corey Patterson had another, and Jose Bautista hit his league-leading/hater-smashing 24th, but in the end it was nothing but a loss. At home. To the Pirates.  


This is not, nor cannot come to good.


KS

Royals 3, Blue Jays 2 (F/11): Et tu, Mark Rzepcynski?

Juan Rivera, feeling about this game like I feel about Juan Rivera

Before I get into minding last night's extra-innings loss to the Royals, there are a couple of other things I would also like to mind. First off, I know Alan Ashby is covering for Buck Martinez on the TV side of the broadcast right now, but do they have to replace the absolutely first-rate Ashby with Gregg Zaun as Jerry Howarth's number two in the radio booth? The drop off from Ashby to Zaun is the difference between listening to an insightful adult or a smug bro. I enjoy insightful adults. I do not enjoy smug bros at all. Also, I think part of why I fail to care at all about the plight of the Royals -- in addition to lingering bitterness over the 1985 ALCS, plus the obvious fact that the reason the Royals have been almost entirely bad since then isn't about economic problems plaguing the game so much as utterly inept management that can't seem to develop enough talent to be competitive in the straight-up embarrassing AL Central while Tampa managed to surpass four teams with vastly larger payrolls in the AL East -- is that the games start an hour later when the Blue Jays are in Kansas City and I always forget, so when I turn on the radio at the appointed hour I get nothing. All of these things need to stop but I worry that they won't.

To last night's game, then: a really crisp affair in the early going, with both Morrow and Paulino throwing very well. When the Blue Jays scratched out a lone run in the fourth on an error, wild pitch, and two ground outs, it looked to me like that might be the difference. Not so, of course, as  Eric Hosmer reached on an error in the bottom of the inning, and came in on a Mike Aviles triple (oh man triples!). Another Blue Jays run on a groundout in the seventh should have meant nothing but good times, but my man Mark Rzepcynski kind of didn't get anybody out and walked three dudes in relief, including walking in the tying run. This is a shame, in that it is on its own awful, but also in that Scrabble has been terrific out of the bullpen this year. Alas, and also alack. 


Why even mention that it was The Closer Frank Francisco who gave up the walkoff hit to Eric Hosmer in the eleventh? Everybody knows. Francisco is awful, legitimately awful. You don't even need to get fancy about it: 6.06 ERA, 1.78 WHIP. That's brutal, and brutal in a way that is easy to understand. End this. Someone. Please.


Finally, I couldn't help but notice that Fangraphs ran a neat thing on the worst players in baseball by WAR yesterday. I recently did the same, but I'm going to take this as a loving tribute rather than anything untoward. Here's what Seidman wrote about our dude E5:


Edwin Encarnacion (-0.9 WAR): Some players are on here as a direct result of their suckitude with the bat. Encarnacion, aptly nicknamed E5, makes this list primarily on the lack of merit of his glovework. In just 43 games his UZR is a spectacularly bad -9.1. If you’re more into the fielding percentage metric, consider this factoid Dave Cameron discussed recently. As of May 27th, Encarnacion had a .784 fielding percentage. The next worst was Andy LaRoche at .892, a gap of 108 points. Encarnacion is one of the worst fielders in baseball history, and if he can’t even match the lower league average with the bat, what actual purpose does he serve?


Aside from using "factoid" in the debased and subliterate sense that indicates no understanding of the meaning of the "-oid" suffix, the man has some valid points. Also, I am a dick.


KS

Rangers 7, Blue Jays 6: Do Not Blame Jo-Jo For This

What it do, Yorvit Torrealba. What it do.

At first glance, you'd think there were just the two ways to go on this one: either that disastrous, six-run third inning is Jo-Jo's fault, or it's E5's. In an utterly unshocking turn of events, E5 committed yet another egregious Edwin Encarnacion (yes, I am still on that), allowing Yorvit Torrealba to reach, and opening the door to, well, a six-run inning, like I say. So you could totally pin this on E5 were you so inclined, and I would get that. On the other hand, you could suggest that sure, those are technically unearned runs, but eventually Jo-Jo has got to shut the door, right? It's not awesome to have to get four outs in an inning, but it happens all the time without getting pounded for six runs, right?


But I am here to argue that any ill feelings you have towards either E5 or Jo-Jo coming out of last night's game are misplaced and, ultimately, cowardly. They say more about you than they do about either of these deeply troubling athletes. We know, we know that E5 can't reliably make the throw to first. Let's not ask him to. Further, we know that Jo-Jo Reyes needs all the support he can possibly be given to have even the slightest hope out there. So let's especially not put E5 out there on Jo-Jo nights. It's not fair to E5; it's not fair to Jo-Jo; and it's not fair to me.


Let's hear it, though, for the Blue Jays' bats that pounded out fourteen hits and made a game of it, and for the bullpen that allowed only a single run the rest of the way. Juan Rivera went three for four with a home run, which in and of itself is hard to hate, except that I hate him. Also on the subject of haters, and specifically Jose Bautista's on-going struggle against them: knocked in a pair with a double. Eat it. 

KS