Angels 9, Blue Jays 7: The Angels Are Sort of Good Now, The Blue Jays Less So

pretty much yeah

No, Brett Cecil did not pitch well, and yes, Jose Bautista dinged his twenty-sixth dinger of the year last night, but what I would like to talk to you about here however briefly is how there was totally this little pigeon that made its way from the first baseline to the third baseline in the fifth inning, and as it approached the pitcher's mound and time had to be called, the crowd went nuts for it, and Jerry Howarth called it all like it was the most exciting thing to have happened during a baseball game in weeks, which maybe it was. Baseball is awesome.


KS

"LET'S GO, BLUE JAYS!"

AAAAAAAAAAAAAAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAAAHHAHAHAHAHAHAAAHAHAHAHAHA:

If this video ran like five seconds longer, you would see the Flyers score their sixth goal of the night. Suck it, Maple Leafs. 


That's right: suck it. 


KS

GAMBATTE ICHIROOOOOOOO

they are right to think he is cool

It is of course undeniable that Dustin Ackley and Felix Hernandez had a lot to do with the Mariners' 3-1, eleventh-inning win over the Athletics in Tokyo in the opening game of this probably glorious 2012 Major League season, but is it not awesome, I ask you, that Ichiro went 4-5 and knocked in a run? Is it not? Here, look at him busting out of the box on an infield single, the first hit of the year: 

ichiroooooooooooooooo

Also, and finally, I would like to propose that there always be a baseball game going on when I get up in the morning, because today I found this arrangement agreeable to the extreme.


KS

Blue Jays 7, Pirates 2: A BASEBALL GAME

Yusssssssssss

I had known for some time that Grapefruit League action, such as it is, was scheduled to begin for these Toronto Blue Jays on this the third day of the third month in the year of our lord 2012, but somehow this managed to sneak up on me all the same. Fortunately, the thoughtful folks at MLB.com went ahead and signed me up for another year of GameDay Audio without me even having to ask! Can you believe it? So I am all set! As is my favourite douchebag in all the world Brett Lawrie, who hit two two-run doubles today, so he remains on pace to be literally the greatest hitter in the history of professional baseball (I will overlook today's error). Nine pitchers took the hill for the Blue Jays, which only ever happens in the first week of spring training games or I guess in the All-Star Game, too, sometimes, and the not-as-fat-as-previously Brett Cecil got the start but not the all-important win, which instead went to Kyle Drabek, who pitched a scoreless inning and struck a guy out so it's like :) SMOKE but also he walked a guy so it is also like :( and so on the whole is like :/ which is the probably the best case scenario for Kyle Drabek this season.


I would also like to call your attention to Eric Thames, who homered today, and who I fully support in the battle for the everyday spot in left field because he not only reads but totally gets Beowulf and also sketches out plans for his facial hair but most importantly he is not Travis Snider. If one is a fan of the Toronto Blue Jays one is supposed to be of the opinion that Snider has been jerked around between the majors and triple-A to such an extent that his confidence lies in ruins and he is a broken man and probably this is mostly Cito's fault, or something, but on the whole he is a dude who has looked less like a dude than a butt, if I may be frank, and I am sure we all agree that the proper place for butts is on the bench. Anyway, go Eric Thames: you are skilled, maybe, and I exhort you. 

moustaches for all imo

I'm listening to the replay of the radio broadcast right now man and Alan Ashby and Jerry Howarth are cold killin' it on day one like I mean killin' it and I just heard a couple of little girls singsong something about raffle tickets and I don't care that it is the grossest day ever outside as the wind howls around my creaky old house because baseball is here and not in the abstract way where there are dudes who sometimes play baseball jogging in uniforms and stretching somewhere but in the very real sense that games are being played and I am listening to them which at the end of the day is what this is all about is it not my friends? 


KS

The Baseball Feelings Recent Baseball Fiction Review: W. P. Kinsella's Butterfly Winter and Chad Harbach's The Art of Fielding

First on my postseason baseball reading list was W. P. Kinsella's Butterfly Winter. Perhaps you will recall Kinsella as the dude who wrote Shoeless Joe which then became Field of Dreams which seemed pretty amazing when you were twelve but then got kind of embarrassing for a couple decades but now seems pretty OK actually? Well he's back! This was the first thing he had published in forever and I was intrigued when he said in an interview that, "On a true baseball field the foul lines diverge forever, eventually taking in a good part of the universe," because frankly that seems like an excellent thing to say. And a couple of chapters in, I was really feeling this one; it was like, oh hey cool, it is another magic realist baseball novel from a dude who knows how to do this. Here we have a pitcher and a catcher from a made-up Caribbean nation who were not only born to play baseball but conceived to play baseball: they stared down shadowy ghostly batters in the womb. It is clear from infancy that this pitcher is uncommonly gifted, but he will only pitch to his brother, a philosophical but mediocre catcher who would be nowhere without his brother but his brother would be nowhere without him because he can't pitch to anyone else and so there you go.


Awesome, right? Well it is, for like a minute, but the novel is framed in this kind of shitty way by "The Gringo Journalist" who is trying to establish what is up with this mysterious figure known only as "The Wizard" who is a legit wizard apparently, and it gets awfully tiresome. Also it appears that W. P. Kinsella is not nuts about women. And things get all fantastical with such frequency that soon enough, you don't care that the butterflies cover bodies entwined in the act of sexing it and settle there for all a winter, or whatever. I finished it, because I am a scholar of the utmost seriousness and probably also renown, but Kinsella lost me for good when like a hundred and eighty pages in (or something), the obviously unreliable narrator says something like I am you see what is sometimes called an unreliable narrator and it is like oh dude come on unless I guess you really needed a topic for your second-year CanLit essay or whatever; in that one specific instance, you would be thrilled, and I should not diminish that. But yeah don't bother. 


In contrast to Kinsella's Butterfly Winter, which is bad and you shouldn't read, Chad Harbach's The Art of Fielding is basically the best and if you don't read it you will be dumb. In the early going, one understandably assumes that the central text around which the awesome and totally real characters in this novel are going to orbit is the fictional and titular (lol) Art of Fielding by the equally fictional Aparicio Rodriguez, the greatest shortstop to ever live: we get a number of short excerpts from that non-existent text, which seems to be written in the style of Goethe's Maxims and Reflections except that it is mostly about grounders. But before long you realize that the central text here is in fact Moby Dick, and not just in a singular-obsession-white-whale kind of way, although that is definitely there, but in a broader "here is what friendship is like or can be" way, like a prolonged meditation on Queequeg and Ishmael tucked into bed just being bros or something. Also there is totally a statue of Melville looking out over the water that everybody in the novel visits and the college they are at is totally in thrall to a brief visit Melville made there for a like a second and the baseball team is called the Harpooners, so it is not like I am putting on a dazzling hermeneutic display when I suggest to you that Melville matters here. (An aside: "Why couldn't it have been 'Harpooneers,' that would have been so much cooler," I would ask Chad Harbach if I had the chance, and he would be like, "I got a six-hundred thousand dollar advance for my first novel; it's probably OK with the one 'e'" and I would be like "why do you have to be like that Chad Harbach I totally liked your book.")


In addition to showing that Harbach has read everything you have read plus like two other things, making the breadth of his literary knowledge seem limitless,The Art of Fielding also manages to be pretty much the best thing you will read in that kind-of-genre that is the university novel. We all have our favourites! There is of course Lucky Jim. I am or at least was really partial to Robertson Davies' The Rebel Angels but I have this thing where I won't reread any of the Davies stuff because I have a suspicion that I might not actually like it that much if I were to look at it again so I am going to content myself with the slightly vague memory that all of those books own. But the Art of Fielding manages even to exceed my probably incorrect recollection of how awesome The Rebel Angels was on the topic of just, like, what a university (or "college" if that is your way) is like, which is a subject I enjoy an awful lot. What, for instance, is the interior life of a college president named "Guert" really like? Find out! Spoiler alert: you will be moved. 


Still on the topic of spoilers, briefly: do not under any circumstances read the "advance praise" blurbs on the back of the hardcover, because one of them totally, completely, absolutely blows the ending. It's not like it's a biggest deal, but the last ten pages or so manage to establish a certain amount of narrative tension again after you think pretty much everything is over and settled and you're good, and if you have read one particular blurb from the back, you would be completely free of that tension, which would be unfortunate. I always ditch the dust jacket whilst reading because they are floppy so I was OK but when I grabbed it to reassemble the whole package for stately display on my bookshelf as evidence to my guests who do not exist that I had in fact read the novel that everybody is right to not shut up about right now I could not help but notice that son of a gun, there is advance praise that totally blows the ending, what is the deal. 


So yeah, real quick: Butterfly Winter can totally be ignored; you're fine. The Art of Fielding, though, is the best American novel since the last time you were like "this is the best American novel since . . ." which probably means the last time you really liked a Michael Chabon or something? But really, honestly, in the most serious of ways, you should read The Art of Fielding, because it will be among the best things you will read about baseball or college or fellowship or, like, the soul or any number of other things that are also important. 


KS 

OK So Moneyball Did Not Win The Million Oscars It Deserved But At Least Lady Gaga Really Liked It

Lady Gaga is the best

I am sure that you will agree that Moneyball was robbed last night of its rightful and deserved glory, but that is not the most notable or important thing to have happened to Moneyball of late, because Lady Gaga wrote about it in her V magazine column. And it is insane. An excerpt:


I lay down on the airplane back from Japan, tossing around some dashi, fondling my pearls. I watched the movieMoneyball for the first time. I began to laugh and smile as [Brad] Pitt talked romantically about the game. I suddenly imagined that my pearls were teeny-tiny baseballs. When a player hits a home run, the baseball is flung into an abyss of enigma and screams so great. It travels so far that only rarely is one caught in the bleachers. Where do these balls go? Where do all these wins get encased? Are they in a heavenly baseball land floating around for players who pass to acknowledge? Or do they disappear?

By the end of the film, we discover the truth about winning from our hero. It only matters if you’ve changed the game. Being kicked in the teeth is par for the course for this kind of win, a win that not only pisses off the team you’ve beat, but every other team, their coaches, owners, and even some of the greatest baseball players of all time. You’ve made your own set of rules and gone so far on your own talent, no one can possibly crack the truth behind your wins. You were either lucky or were cheating. Nobody likes the game that they’ve won over and over again to change.

Pitt expresses this as the central objective to his life, as we see a flashback to an old Oaks game. Batter hits and runs, doing what he does normally, running past first to take second, but trips, falls, and scurries back to first. He’s so focused on the game, so focused on the team winning, head so down into the dirt of the stadium, he doesn’t even realize he’s got a home run. The crowd roars, and he’s not sure why.

In this moment I looked down at my pearls, and I saw all the teeny-tiny home runs I’d hit over the past year. I knew some of them were more perfect than others, but I knew only an eye trained in pearls would notice. The thing about music is you’re not in competition with anyone else. You’re in competition with the psychology of the industry as a whole. You’re in competition with you. You must delve deeper and deeper into your creativity, history, and modernity to change not just this moment, but every moment that came before it. How can I hit a home run that will make every player question every run that was ever scored? How can I round third to home plate and bewilder some of the greatest players of all time? How can I change the game, until 30 years goes by and someone changes it again?

Sometimes my face is buried so deep in the work I forget to look up. Sometimes I don’t even realize I’ve won, because the stadium is either cheering or screaming so loud it doesn’t even matter. So this season, in the spirit of the Super Bowl and all things sporty, wear your pearls. Wild, cultured, real, or fake, wear them proud. And look up, or rather down, at all of your home runs. (Unless you’ve made them into a crown with a glue gun.) Then look up! In fashion and in life we all deserve more pearls, please. A moment of revelation to remember that we are timeless, we all matter, and every win like this is as important as the next. When you are changing the way people think, your life achievements are working toward the greatest accessory of all time: nerve. So collect your tiny baseballs, string your pearls, and remember that you are as timeless as the pearls on your neck. And if you forgot to be a lady and wear them, then shame on you.

The rest is here. You should probably read it.


KS

ZOMG

"And then I just let it go and it is like *fwooosh* smoke."

I thought nobody was going to show up until Tuesday! That's when Blue Jays pitchers -- and thus, understandably, catchers -- are supposed to "report" to Spring Training, "report" being the paramilitary verb that we have agreed to use to describe that act in which heavyset dudes with mustaches show up in Florida (or I guess Arizona for other, lesser organizations) and try to shake the shit off their arms before embarking on an arduous season of sitting with their feet up behind the left field fence drinking coffee and eating sunflower seeds and just generally fucking around out there. But a bunch of guys showed up early! So now baseball! And I love it. I could not possibly love it more than I do. It is maximally loved by me. Baseball is back. Eat shit, winter; you have been a dick. 


And you know what, this year could be pretty alright! As you will no doubt recall, the Blue Jays finished 81-81 last year, putting them very near the .500 mark on the season. The chief glory of the precisely .500 team is that you can totally you can totally you can totally remember ten games that they could easily have won last year, ten games that it is in fact completely ludicrous that they somehow managed to lose. It is therefore both perfectly obvious and obviously wrong to think that with even minimal improvement, a ninety-win season is just around the corner, and this is what I have chosen to believe. 


Hey, did you see or hear about the ESPN Insider thing that they called "Future Power Rankings" or something, where they had some guys rate every MLB team in a number of categories so as to say where they saw all of these teams in five years' time? The good news is that the Blue Jays were sixth in all of baseball; the bad news is that Tampa Bay, New York, and Boston were all ranked ahead of them. But whatever, man, whatever. I am less concerned with the 2017 season than the imminent 2012 "campaign" in which the Blue Jays are winning ninety. 


If I may however be somewhat sober for a moment: this is perhaps unfair of me, given that The Dear/Great Leader Alex Anthopolous actually managed to pull off the best trade of the offseason for the second consecutive year (more on that in a moment), but it's hard to say that this winter was anything but disappointing just because of the whole Yu Darvish thing. I mean, I have no real expectation that he's going to be the first Japanese starter to really be as awesome as he looks, nor do I think the Blue Jays really should have been willing to spend the kind of dollars it took Texas to seal the deal, but it would have been so cool and exciting, man, it would have been the best. Also even if Darvish only turns out to be kind of OK, that would still go an awful long way in this rotation, because who knows what we've got, exactly? There can be no question as to Ricky Romero's status as a boss (that being: he is one), but after that, things get iffy in a hurry: Brandon Morrow consistently underperforms like all of his peripherals to such an extent that one begins to doubt the reliability of certain modern nerd metrics; Brett Cecil might just be straight-up horrible; Henderson Alvarez impressed but one must be cautious; Dustin McGowan's arm is barely attached and so, again, caution; and Kyle Drabek is thus far a baffling ordeal of a guy. 


But how about that bullpen! The Sergio Santos trade was awesome, just awesome: AA gave up nothing of substance for a good, young reliever who has closed and not freaked out about it and who is "controllable" in the sense that he is not free to meaningfully negotiate the terms of his employment owing to the economic structure of professional baseball and also he has no access to the means of production so the ninth should be covered no problem. Darren Oliver is a smart pickup, and those few months without Jason Frasor were a dark era I never wish to see again, so it's cool that he's back. I am good with Carlos Villanueva and Casey Janssen and I am not about to start trouble about Jesse Litsch necessarily so what you've got here is a bullpen that has all of a sudden gone from being a hideous, untenable shit show to a strength! Bullpens are supposed to be easy to fix, but this looked really easy. Good job Alex Anthopolous!


An infield of Adam Lind (who can't possibly be that bad again, can he? I am going to assume "no") at first, Kelly Johnson at second (he is way better than you think relative to league average second base production, which sucks tremendously these days), Yunel Escobar at short (.369 OBP!), and Brett Lawrie (a douche, yes, but our douche) at third is going to be plenty interesting, especially since Brett Lawrie is probably going to be Mike Schmidt, basically. I am a strong proponent of E5 "Edwin" Encarnacion at DH, and if you look at last season, he was totally OK except for the part of the year where he was, according to the advanced metrics, maybe the worst player ever. 


And what about the outfield, you ask? That is reasonable of you. Well, I am not over the moon at the idea of Eric Thames being our everyday guy in left if that is what happens but maybe there's a trade out there or something. I have every expectation that Colby Rasmus is going to be fine, and in fact probably even better than fine. Also if it is cool with you I am going to just go ahead and pencil Jose Bautista in for another 1.000 OPS year of being the baddest motherfucker on the planet and project the haters to suck it. 


In short, I am surprised and delighted at just how surprised and delighted I am that there are Toronto Blue Jays grab-assing around Dunedin, Florida right now, several full days before I thought they were going to begin even the most preliminary grab-assing. Internet propers for this thrilling revelation go out to the Blue Jay Hunter Tumblr, which I totally would not know about were it not for the indispensable Drunk Jays Fans, finest of all team-specific blogs in my estimation. Oh yeah finally: Fangraphs Audio was really good today, as baseball writer and stay-at-home dad Dayn Perry (*strange background noise* "don't do that, bud" *further noise*) joined published poet and renowned hipster Carson Harrington Cistulli and together they established that irony began in the early nineties, which is not what my own calculations suggest, but which is worth considering. 


Hey why not close by posting other pictures from Spring Training BECAUSE THAT IS WHAT IS GOING ON IT IS SPRING TRAINING CAN YOU EVEN BELIEVE IT


KS 

Adam Lind (centre) is chubby.

Balk, imo.

Please don't suck Kyle Drabek come on man.

I like Ricky Romero even more than John Farrell does in this picture.

Brett Lawrie, who is probably a dick but who is awesome so you don't really mind, and Adam Lind, who is kind of awful but who seems nice so you don't really mind.

Rajai Davis, as seen through Scott Richmond's crotch.

Cardinals 6, Rangers 2: The Loathsome Cardinals Win the 2011 World Series, But At Least It's Winter Now

A fifth World Series ring for the great catching Molinas

There was no way that even a genuinely remarkable Game Seven could have equaled the mad splendor of Game Six. We knew that going in, and we pretty much got what we expected all the way around: Chris Carpenter, starting on three days' rest but only starting at all because rain pushed these final games back, pitched into the seventh, the only trouble coming early on two runs in the first (back-to-back doubles from Micheal Young and the prophet Josh Hamilton); and the Rangers, as it turned out, used up all of there chances to win the World Series the night before, just like we'd figured. 


The 2-0 first-inning Texas lead evaporated later that same inning on MVP David Freese's two-run double, and Allen Craig's solo home run in the third put the Cardinals out in front for good. The game didn't feel well and truly over, though, until the sad debacle of the fifth. Reliever Scott Feldman, for whom we can only feel sympathy at this point, walked Craig, hit Pujols, and, after a Berkman ground out, was asked to put Freese aboard to load the bases with two away. A bases-loaded walk -- which is totally the worst kind -- on a close pitch brought Craig home, Washington to the mound, and C. J. Wilson in from the 'pen. With his first pitch of the game, Wilson plunked Rafael Furcal to plate another run. It was brutal


And that was pretty much that. After the best thirty-one days of baseball in my lifetime, the St. Louis Cardinals walked away with their eleventh World Series championship, perhaps the unlikeliest of them all. Good for them. You can't help but feel for the Rangers, the first team to drop back-to-back World Series since the Atlanta Braves of 1991 and 1992. Ron Washington is getting absolutely murdered in the papers and on the blogs, fairly or not, and you've got to wonder if he'll even be back after this. But there's no reason to think the Rangers can't survive the odd free agent loss and remain the class of the AL West for the foreseeable future; and with their young talent coming to the fore this postseason, and with the Brewers about to take a step back, the Cardinals look like they're going to remain relevant for a long time, too, with or without Albert Pujols. It's not inconceivable that these two teams could end up here again in a couple of years. It's almost entirely inconceivable, though, that they would be able to put together a series like this again, a seven-game thriller that featured the best single-game World Series performance in a generation, and one of the strangest and most compelling games we've ever seen. 


This one was a honey. Baseball is awesome.

KS   

Brewers 9, Cardinals 6: That Six-Run Fifth Was Bananas

As hard as baseballs get hit, ever.

Much is rightly made of the Milwaukee crowd. They're crazy loud, for starters, and there are a lot of them, and both of those things are excellent, but what gets me is, who tailgates baseball at all, let alone with the single-minded intensity of Brewers fans? "The grills were smokin'," Bob Uecker reported about yesterday's pregame festivities. I bet! Sausages are the best.


I'll tell you who was not the best, at least not yesterday, was Zack Greinke, who recently denounced Chris Carpenter as "phony," which is pretty cold: six runs on eight hits and couple of walks in six innings is rarely going to get it done. Fortunately for him, though, Ryan Braun hit one out in the first -- Jaime Garcia responded by putting Prince Fielder on his considerable ass, although I can totally buy that it wasn't intentional, given that he was wild that entire inning -- and then the fifth inning was, as I may have already mentioned, bananas. If you haven't seen it, or if you have seen it, but without the accompaniment of Bob Uecker, you really should click here. Our highlight joins the inning already well under way, after a Cory Hart single and a double from Jerry Hairston; you'll see and hear the TBS call of Ryan Braun's ground rule double (what a crazy bounce!). Then you will hear Bob Uecker call Prince Fielder's two-run, Delgado-esque lined shot that leaves the ballpark as quickly as a baseball can do anything at all, really, and what I really love about the clip is not just how worked up Uecker gets, nor how worked up Fielder is as he crosses the plate and plays to the crowd and his teammates; the best part is just after that, when he's walking towards the end of the dugout, nobody else around him, and he's still completely riled up, as though all that other stuff he's done was for show, and now that he's alone he can really let go. Also stay tuned for Ueck's call of Yuniesky Betancourt's two run dinger: "HERE COMES YUNI BEEEEEEEEEE!" You will note that the mighty wallop was struck off of the hangingest breaking ball anyone has ever seen not just from Octavio "Don't Ask" Dotel, but, like, ever, as in ever ever.    


Despite the bananity of all of that, it could very well have been for naught, as Albert Pujols came up with two on and nobody out in the seventh. That he grounded into a classic, around-the-horn 5-4-3 double play to plate a run but end the threat of the big inning, was legitimately surprising to me, as I figured he would have launched one, you know? Since he is arguably the greatest right-handed hitter since Hank Greenberg? But double play ground balls happen, man, they just happen. What can be done? Here's a photograph of Albert Pujols from yesterday that I like -- it's not the double play ball; it's his single in the first, but here it is all the same:

I am all about pictures at the plate where you see the batter, catcher, and umpire all looking in exactly the same direction for a second. I can't say why. Also I am all about yesterday's game, and in this case I can say why: it is because it was so awesome and exciting.


KS

Rangers 4, Rays 3: Another Dandy!

If thinking about Ron Washington makes you any less happy than Ron Washington himself appears in the above photo, then you have missed the point of literally everything ever and I don't know that we can even continue this conversation, frankly.

Holy cow! What a game! Headed into the seventh, the only run either team had scored came on the Rays only hit, a Desmond Jennings solo shot in the fourth. But then! A four-run Texas seventh: Mike Napoli, who was unawesomely traded by the Blue Jays for Frank Francisco only to go on to have perhaps the third-best offensive season ever by a catcher, hit a two run shot; and Josh Hamilton pulled a single into right to plate a pair. The Rays chipped away -- and Desmond Jennings hit another one out, no big deal -- but Neftali Feliz nailed down the four-out save to, well, to save it, really. 


Baseball!


KS

Man Getting Hit By Baseball

Argh; his groin.

In the groin! Imagine it!


And that came only an inning after this:

Boom; head shot.

Yikes!


KS

Blue Jays 3, White Sox 2: Well, that's it.

You would think 162 games would be enough, but I am not convinced.

Last night was maybe the single best night of regular season baseball I can remember, with four games with serious playoff implications going on at the same time, all easily followed through the glory of baseball on the internet. (Bill covers all of this superbly in the post just below mine, but I got about halfway through this earlier today, saved it, and am returning to it now, hours later, and I think it would be wrong of me to deny you my, you know, word bounty, so here it all is. Inevitably, we cover some of the same ground, but get used to it: everyone is writing about last night, and I would be stunned if there were not at least one 28 September 2011 book on the shelves this time next year. So here we go.) 


The Cardinals got out ahead of the Astros early with a five-run first, and Chris Carpenter allowed only two hits all night, so the pressure was on the Braves to stay alive against the Phillies, which they very much did not, losing in thirteen in a straight-up hell of a game. "Braves Cap Collapse," the headline says, and yeah, they sure did. I don't want to diminish the severity of that collapse, or the agony of the Braves fans who endured it, but the Red Sox implosion has been far more vivid to me, a streak of incompetence so wide and so deep that it began to look like self-abnegation. Last night, when Papelbon threw the last of his fifteen pitches in twelve minutes -- the one that ended up lined into and then out of Carl Crawford's glove in left, allowing the winning Baltimore run to come across in the bottom of the ninth -- it was the perfect ending to a seven-win, twenty-loss month, a fitting bookend to Boston's equally improbable two-and-ten start to the season. 


Meanwhile, the Rays, with a total payroll that exceeds the combined salaries of Papelbon and Crawford but not by as much as you might think, clawed themselves back from a seven-run deficit through seven-and-a-half innings, with Evan Longoria's three-run shot in the home half of the eighth bringing them to within a run. When pinch hitter Dan Johnson, who came into the game batting .108, and who I had literally never heard of, homered to tie it in the ninth, it was ludicrous, even more so than Longoria's walk-off shot in the twelfth, I think. According to FanGraphs, the only player in either leagues with worse production in at least ninety plate appearances this season is Roy Halladay. Just amazing stuff. Too bad they couldn't even put thirty thousand in the seats for it, but that's baseball in St. Pete, I guess.


Despite all of that amazingness last night, in all honesty my attention was much more firmly focused on a perfectly meaningless afternoon game between the Blue Jays and the White Sox. A game of utterly no playoff consequence, it was played entirely for the benefit of a bunch of people with nothing better to do on a pretty nice fall afternoon, people like:


(i) An old man with a scorecard.

(ii) A man with a helmet full of nachos.

(iii) A couple of Frank Thomas fans.

(iv) A lady with a beer.

(v) A kid with a rally cap behind the bullpen and his brother.

(vi) A young couple messing around with their phones but in a way that looks fun and shared and not alienating.

(vii) Seventh-inning stretchers.

(vii) And this guy.

So the usual, basically. 


What they saw was, from their perspective, I'm sure, kind of a debacle. With the White Sox up 2-1 in the top of the ninth after perfectly OK outings from both starters (Humber for the Sox, Morrow for the Blue Jays), Chris Sale just pretty much blew it: double, single, sac bunt, intentional walk, run-scoring walk, run-scoring walk, and then, inevitably, the hook. That Frank Francisco managed to seal the deal in the bottom of the ninth was both a relief and a pleasure. (After an absolutely abysmal first couple months, Francisco has actually kind of almost salvaged his season, and so good for him, I guess, but the hurt remains, a little.) I was entirely satisfied with the slightly strange way this one ended, but I've got to think White Sox fans felt it the worst bullshit ever. 


The win on this last day of the season brought the Blue Jays back to .500 for the thirty-third time this season. I don't know if Mike Wilner was entirely accurate when he called the 2011 Toronto Blue Jays the five-hundredest team to ever five hundred, probably not, but it has definitely felt that way: no great streaks one way or the other, no real can-you-even-believe-this runs of elation or let's-trade-everybody stretches of incompetence and despair. Things have been even-steven. I will have more, much more, senselessly more, to say about the 2011 Toronto Blue Jays in the coming weeks and months, but for now I'm just like, "Well, that's it. Last game of the season. I am, as always, genuinely sad to see it end." That is what I am like for now. But I had fun! 


To return, finally, to the dramatic stuff from last night, I've got a few things I'd like to share with you, the first a .gif that shows pretty clearly that Dan Johnson's game-tying solo blast totally bag tagged some guy. Here you go:

Next, here's a graph from FanGraphs (where else?) of AL wild card probabilities throughout the evening (click here for more):

Here are Harold Reynolds and Dan Plesac of MLB Network losing their minds, a little:

And finally, here's a pretty terrific video timeline that MLB put together, definitely worth ten minutes of your time on this, a night without any baseball:






Enjoy!


KS

Man Alive, What an Evening

Wow.

Bruce Bochy fielded his best white-flag team yesterday and the Giants got trounced 6-3 by the Rockies, exactly as expected. But who cares? Yesterday was possibly the most thrilling single day of regular-season baseball in history. Certainly in my lifetime. Four games with final postseason slot implications. The possibility of two separate 163rd games.

The Red Sox and Rays entered the day tied for the AL Wild Card Lead, and the Braves and Cardinals entered the day tied for the NL Wild Card. The Red Sox were in Baltimore, the Rays were hosting the Yankees, the Braves were hosting the Phillies, and the Cardinals were in Houston.

The Red Sox went into a 7th-inning rain delay leading the Orioles 3-2. The Rays fell behind to the Yankees 7-0 going into the 8th inning. The Braves were leading the Phillies 3-2 into the 8th. The lone uneventful game was the Cardinals, as expected, simultaneously mauling and shutting out the Astros (the worst team in baseball).

The Braves coughed up a Phillies tying run around the same time as the Rays put together a 6-run bottom of the eighth. The Cardinals game wrapped, ensuring them at worst a playoff game against the Braves the next day. The Red Sox game resumed and the Sox failed to score an insurance run that was gunned down at home plate. The Braves game headed into extra innings as a Rays .108 pinch-hitter -- who hadn't hit a home run since April -- bounced a line drive off the net of the foul pole with two out and two strikes in the bottom of the ninth inning to knot the score at 7 and send that game into extra innings as well.

The Braves got runners in scoring position for Martin Prado, who offered the worst swing I have ever seen in a pressure situation and ended the inning. The Phillies got a go-ahead run off a Hunter Pence BABIP Special, and the Braves bounced into a double play to give the Cardinals the NL Wild Card.

Back in Baltimore, Carl Crawford was unable to grab what would have been out number three as the Orioles got three consecutive two-out hits off of Jonathan "huck it down the middle" Papelbon, and stunned the Red Sox by winning the game, 4-3.

Three minutes after the Orioles dogpiled one another on their rain-soaked home field, Evan Longoria hit his second home run of the game, a laser beam that just cleared the fence inside the foul pole along the left-field line and clinched the Wild Card for Tampa Bay.

There are moment in baseball -- key moments, indelible moments -- that you know, as you are watching them, that they will be part of baseball lore forever. That you'll be seeing them on replay for the rest of your life. Aaron Boone's 2003 ALCS homer. Kevin Mitchell's barehanded grab. Dave Roberts' stolen base. Kirk Gibson. Bill Buckner. Carlton Fisk. Now we can add Longoria's home run to that elite group. He raced down the first base line, knowing that the ball might not clear the wall, but that he was going to have to try for extra bases if it didn't. Just before he got to the bag at first, both arms shot straight up in the air. The look of elation on his face matched that of the stunned and exultant crowd. His teammates flew out of the dugout as if shot from a cannon, and everyone watching could scarcely manage to come up with a sentiment any more profound than that of, "BASEBALL. OH MAN, BASEBALL."

This is why we watch. Baseball simply does not get any better than this, and no other sport on its best day can ever hope to match moments such as these.

So now we move beyond 2011 and into the postseason. Let us root for the Brewers. Let us root for the Rays. Let us root for the Diamondbacks and the Tigers and the Rangers. Let us root for baseball at its most glorious, at its most profound and affecting. Let us enjoy these next few weeks, for the winter is long and devoid of this glorious game. We will continue to be here talking about the feelings that the postseason and the hot stove and all that malarkey will bring, but baseball is now entering its yearly twilight.

This is going to be one hell of a postseason, my dear friends. Let's all be baseball fans together, for there is surely no greater thing.

Blue Jays 8, Orioles 2: Brett Lawrie Makes Me Want to Shoop

Here I go; here I go; here I go again. 

He is the best! 


In his twenty-six big league games, Brett Lawrie's slash line is .340/.392/.713/1.105 with six doubles, four triples, and now seven home runs after cracking the game-winning two-run shot in the eighth. There were worries about his glove coming into the year, but look, I'm telling you, he's making all the plays, and he has a rifle of an arm, a rifle. I am just all the way in on Brett Lawrie, is what I am saying to you right now. I recognize that it is unlikely that he will sustain a 1.105 OPS throughout his major league career, but what if he did? Wouldn't you feel dumb for not getting excited about that when it first got going? That is egg that I simply will not have on my face. I won't have it. But you very well might, unless you get in on this immediately.


It is fortunate and good that Brett Lawrie decided to be amazing today, and also that Yunel Escobar was willing to get four hits, because Luis Perez stunk it up out there. That is not stunning; what is very close to stunning indeed is that the bullpen pretty much held the line the rest of the way, putting Lawrie in position to be the best guy. So, thanks!


The game was played before an announced but obviously bogus attendance of 11,617 after first pitched was moved up about seven hours so the Baltimore Grand Prix racing route could be finalized, or something. Look at this, though:

Big fun in Baltimore?

Paltry, man. Paltry. But baseball is baseball, and it is awesome whether forty thousand people show up or like eight people show up. Actually, if I may be frank with you for a moment, let me say that I actually wasn't actually nuts about the half dozen times a year the SkyDome would have a big drunk crowd of 40,000 or more. One felt, literally, crowded. There was nowhere to put your stuff, you know? Let alone your extra stuff. And you couldn't wander to other sections and just kind of see what was up. You know what is the perfect number? Like 24,000, somewhere around there. That's how many people I want to be with me at a ball game, tops. I want the lower levels to be nicely filled up, and then I want some room to put my feet up in the upper deck and just spread out and be with my people (but not that near my people), the deeply odd people of the 500s. I want there to be a guy a section over who is totally just completely reading the paper, a study in leisure from another era. On a darker note, I want plenty of room between me and my Mr. Sub-devouring nemesis and his poor unfortunate potato of a ladyfriend. I also want Maureen the usher to have to come over like two sections to say "hello" to us, just because it makes me feel special that she comes all that way. That's vanity, but I'll admit to it. I liked it when that happened. Yes, it can be totally exciting for the place to be packed with, like, a teeming mass of humanity, I get that, and I'm not saying that you don't need that -- I would absolutely miss that if it never happened; I'm not made of stone -- but that's really not the day-to-day of baseball, and it is the day-to-day where baseball really shines.


Anyway, in Baltimore today you pretty much could have had this guy right here as your private dancer.

Big fun in Baltimore!

KS

Blue Jays 7, Rays 3: This Is So Much More Like It, You Have No Idea

You got stuck in a rundown, and you can't get out of it.

Nobody knows exactly what hitting coach Dwayne Murphy said in the team meeting yesterday in which he is thought to have implored everyone to stop yapping at the umpires, except of course for me, with a big assist from both Imagination and the viewless wings of Poesy: "OK then (Jose Bautista), so everybody (Jose Bautista), I am going to keep this short (Jose Bautista), but (Jose Bautista) let's all just agree to lay off the umps (Jose Bautista), because it's getting out of hand (Jose Bautista), and we're getting the kind of reputation that's hard to shake (Jose Bautista), and the bottom line (Jose Bautista) is that it's not doing us any favours (Jose Bautista), so let's just cut it out. Jose Bautista." This issue had been troubling me, and so I am very glad that this has been dealt with.

I am equally glad that the Blue Jays avoided the four-game sweep last night by hitting everything. Ricky Romero once again looked slightly below his usual top-notch self: three runs over six is far from poor, but four walks to go along with six hits (including two Johnny Damon dingers, no less) and only two strikeouts is subprime Romering. But who cares? Every Blue Jay in the lineup last night had a hit, except for Dewayne Wise (did I mention Colby Rasmus is on the DL, and that that sucks?), but let's be reasonable in our expectations re: Dewayne Wise. It was just straight-up mashing of the best kind: Jose Bautista's thirty-eighth home run; Adam Lind's twenty-third; Kelly Johnson's three hits, including a triple; J. P. Arencibia's three hits, including a double, a triple, and a stolen base. All these things occurred, and owned. 


And the bullpen! Nobody would tell you the Blue Jays bullpen is anything but a butt, and so we should really show warmth and appreciation in the direction of Litsch, Janssen, and Francisco for allowing but one hit in three innings of relief last night, because it would have been depressing as hell to have blown that one, and don't act like it couldn't happen, because that sort of thing is happening on the reg/is killing me. Ricky Ro' is now a pretty choice 13-9 with a 2.84 ERA and four complete games (two shutouts). I know the advanced stats prefer Brandon "I'd rather look at the nerd stats" Morrow this year, bless his heart, and I am not a PITCHER WINZ guy by any stretch, but I just feel a whole lot better with Romero on the hill, friends, what can I tell you. The man is a bulldog out there, A Bulldog.   


In short, bring on the O's.


Hey also: I am not here to tell anybody how they would best enjoy the game of baseball, but let me say, you can do a whole lot worse than getting rid of all of your cable, giving our evil overlords at MLB twenty dollars to get access to every game on the radio (blackout free!), spending twenty minutes a day watching the luxurious and non-YankeeSox-centric game recaps at MLB.com (blackout free!), and checking in on whatever the MLB.TV free game of the day is (pending blackouts). It is seriously incredible how much baseball there is out there, and the kind of access we have to it. Being a baseball fan in 2011 is roughly a zillion times better than it was to be a baseball fan, say, twenty-five years ago. Let us not loose site of this (unless you really liked the Expos, I guess, in which case I would forgive you for loosing sight of this). Sometimes I think that the only thing about baseball that might not be as awesome as it was when I was a kid is baseball cards, but then you see something like the 2011 Topps Prince Fielder, and wonder if any baseball card has ever captured l'essence of its subject better:

Fattest vegan alive, friends; act surprised.

But then you remember, oh yeah right, his 2010 Topps:

Really, this got him beaned? Really? 

Anyway. Baseball. Let's hear it for it. 


KS

Rays 6, Blue Jays 5: And Yet There Was Much to Like

This close to a triple play!

Maybe it was the lawn-mowing-perfect-summer-Saturdayness of it all, but I enjoyed the heck out of yesterday's long, lazy game. Which is saying something, because Shawn Camp and Jesse Litsch combined to ruin Louis Perez's solid start with a three-run seventh (curse you, B. J. Upton) and the Blue Jays' comeback ultimately fell a run short. And actually, this one-run loss came on a day when Jose Bautista totally misread an Adam Lind drive off the wall in the first. There can be absolutely no doubt in anyone's mind (least of all Bautista's) that he should have scored on that play, but he didn't, and yet here I am, utterly undespondent. I just really like that Eric Thames went 2-4 with a home run late (after a nine-pitch at bat!); that E5 homered and walked; and that J. P. Arencibia doubled and threw out three baserunners (and nearly picked a dude off first, which is arguably the ultimate form of catcher awesomeness). Even Bautista, while not at his best, doubled, walked, and threw a guy out at third, you know? Just all kind of cool things happening yesterday, even if the end result isn't what I might have had in mind. 


Hey, did you hear that A. J. Burnett allowed six straight extra base hits the other day? Isn't that awesome? I can't think of a single baseball player that, broadly speaking, I don't want to do well, beyond a simple "I hope they do not do well against the Blue Jays" -- it's just not how I enjoy the game, and I'm not suggesting this is better or worse than a legitimately hate-filled approach, which is a totally viable way to enjoy sports, obviously -- except for maybe A. J. Burnett. And so his recent struggles have, well, they haven't made me glad, exactly, but I have certainly chuckled. Not chuckling: A. J. Burnett.

A. J. Burnett, shown here not chuckling.

The struggles of A. J. Burnett make up for things like the Yankees hitting three grand slams in a single game against Oakland this week (they batted sixteen times with the bases loaded, which is maybe the even crazier stat). 


Finally, how did I not mention previously that the Arizona Diamondbacks this week fielded an infield that was identical to a 2007 Blue Jays infield, and that according to Retrosheet, that has probably never happened before? McDonald, Hill, Roberts, Overbay. That is nutty! 


Actually finally, here is a neat picture where you can see the field reflected in Tim Tschida's mask. Neat!

Steeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeee.

KS

Blue Jays 8, Athletics 4: Brett Lawrie's Grand Slam Was Arguably the Coolest Part of This

lol

Through five-and-a-half innings, it looked like the Blue Jays were going waste a perfectly fine debut by twenty-one-year-old Henderson Alvarez. Fortunately for all concerned, Brett Lawrie (also 21) launched a grand slam over the left field wall in the home half of the sixth. There was, as you might expect, much rejoicing, and Lawrie was all fired up in the mookiest of mook ways in the dugout, but you can't really be like "act like you've done this before" when he has literally never done this before, right? Curtain call and everything, man, it was a scene. Later, the benches cleared when Jordan Norberto threw at Yunel Escobar, and while nothing else came of it, it was just like, baseball is awesome.

KS