Blue Jays 5, Phillies 4: I Can't Believe We Got Away With It

 

yay

Quite a night for the new guys! José Soriano, newly arrived from the Angels, looked sharp, allowing two runs in his nearly five innings of work, with only one of them earned, as, Jésus Sanchez, god love him, is coming up with entirely new ways of misplaying balls in left field (seen from a certain perspective, it's really quite breathtaking). Brett Batemen, a reputedly zero-power centre-fiedling prospect who came over from the Cubs as part of the Kevin Gausman deal, ripped the first pitch he saw in his major-league début—off of the great Zack Wheeler no less! (also Wheeler got pretty mad when Blue Jays hitting coach David Popkins complained-to-the-point-of-ejection about Wheeler not actually standing on the rubber when pitching from the windup [in the aftermath, Myles Straw is said to have uttered a swear])—all the way, narrowly missing a home run, and walked twice. Josh Smith, heretofore a Ranger (he came over for Adam Macko), had three hits (including a home run! on his birthday!) whilst playing a sharp third base. And Matt Waldron, a relatively hard-throwing knuckleballer (it's in the low eighties, and that's pretty hard for a knuckleball) we picked up off of waivers from the Padres, pitched a scoreless eighth (Alejandro Kirk used one of Vladdy's first-baseman's mitts to catch the knuckler, which was neat). All good stuff from the new guys! Throw in some nice outings from some of the more familiar faces—Nathan Lukes' two hits, including one that came at the end of a fifteen-pitch at-bat; a homer from the sneaky-strong Andrés Giménez; and good, or good enough, relief work from Mason Fluharty, Lazaro Estrada, and Brandon Little—and you'd figure we're probably all set headed into the ninth with a 5-2 lead, right? Kind of not so, though! In that things got hairy as all heck! The ninth inning fell to the underhanded (in the non-duplicitous sense) Tyler Rogers, who has been about as steady as they come over a period of several years now, but last night, less so: walks to both Bryson Stott and Justin Crawford to open the inning were followed by a catcher's interference call on Alejandro Kirk (who had a weird night, with a couple of uncharacteristically poor misses on ABS challenges) to put Kyle Schwarber on and load the bases with nobody out; a Trea Turner grounder brought in a run at the cost of an out; Bryce Harper "singled" past/through Ernie Clement at second but Ernie sure thought he should have had it (no real argument here, as Ernie's up-and-down year with the glove mysteriously continues) to bring in another; then another walk (Louis Arraez this time); a ground ball to second that saw Ernie cut down the run at the plate (attaboy, Ernie); and finally a truly bizarre groundball to second that saw Okamoto (in at first again with Vladdy troubled by a hammy, his back, and who knows what else) lurch momentarily to his right, making it difficult for him to get back to first base to receive Ernie's throw before the hard-charging Brandon Marsh got to the bag, but all of a sudden Okamoto hit the deck just as Tyler Rogers burst onto the scene as though he were dashing through the Emerald Hill Zone (perhaps Emerald Hill Zone Act 2) to snag the throw and, upon review, yes, end the game. What the heck, man.

All told, a pleasure! I will note that it was a long game by modern standards, though, at three-hours-twenty minutes (what an era, honestly, that that's all of a sudden a long game again), and didn't start until pretty late, following quite a rain delay. All of this despite retractable-roof stadiums (excuse me, stadia [pardon me, stadipodes]) being a totally known thing for more than thirty-five years. It seems as though something could be done.   

KS

Cubs 3, Blue Jays 2 (F/11): One Of The Better Games All Year, Though

 

I found Alejandro Kirk's four hits on the day quite enjoyable

If you grab your hardcover first edition of The New Bill James Historical Baseball Abstract off the shelf (apparently you paid a preposterous $68.50 for it when it came out in the fall of 2001, which now seems like an awful lot [did it seem that way then? it must have, right?]), and turn to page 320 (let me say: this book's index is insanely on-point), you will find the following: "[B]aseball needs to adopt a rule limiting the number of times a pitcher can throw to a base [. . . ]. [I]t is a clear situation in which the interest of the game itself are at odds with the interests of one participant. A major league pitcher has a selfish interest in preventing stolen bases against him. Throwing to first base, even throwing to first base repeatedly, is one way to accomplish this. Incidentally, if you're curious about this, it does work. STATS Inc. keeps records, including records of every time a pitcher throws to first base. A few years ago, they did a study comparing the stolen base percentages when pitchers threw to first, and the stolen base percentages when they didn't. The conclusion was clear: throwing to first base does reduce the number and the success rate of stolen bases. Throwing repeatedly is more effective than throwing over just once." Disappointing, isn't it? That it turns out to actually be a sound strategy to just keep on lobbing it over there? Wouldn't this have been a great spot for a counterintuitive finding? But alas, no. Noting that there is already a limit "to the number of times that a pitcher can throw home without getting something accomplished," James suspects that the only reason there hadn't been a rule against excessive throws over to first is that, quite simply, when the broad lines of baseball came into focus in the 1880s and 1890s, nobody had conceived of it as a tactic. "The idea of baseball as a perfect machine," he goes on, "never in need of a little fine tuning, is objectively ridiculous—yet it blinds baseball men to the fact that those long, tedious interludes when pitchers flip the ball repeatedly to first base can be very easily eliminated by a rule that would fit into the game so seamlessly that few people would ever realize that such a rule existed, if it did exist. That rule would say, very simply, that a team is allowed two unsuccessful throws to the bases in each inning. Two; that's all. If they make a third unsuccessful throw to the bases in any inning, it is counted as a ball. That is all it would take—just a tiny, lightweight penalty for wasting time. In reality, the rule would virtually never be applied, because pitchers would virtually never throw three times in any inning." 

Pretty interesting take from 2001, isn't it? (As an aside: in the same section of the book, James also proposes eliminating the batter's time out once they've stepped into the box, which hasn't quite happened, but we're down to one time out per plate appearance, which, along with the pitch clock, has improved the pace of play tremendously while costing us none of the pleasures of the game at all, as far as I can tell [if there are anti-pitch-clockists out there, they gather silently]). What James proposes as far as throwing over is in a sense stricter than the rule changes MLB opted for ahead of the 2023 season (only two throws to the bases per inning in James' proposal, rather than the two throws/disengagements per plate appearance [resetting if the runner advances] that we have now) and in another more lenient (the penalty James proposes is just a ball, rather than "everybody moves up one" like a full-on balk, the much harsher penalty that is in place currently). But fundamentally, his 2001 suggestions anticipate an important suite of successful rule changes MLB has brought in in recent years, and he was certainly correct that rules restricting the number of times a pitcher can throw over to a base (even more than the fairly invisible [in the sense that it is rarely violated] pitch clock [easily the single best rule change of my lifetime]) "would fit into the game so seamlessly that few people would ever realize that such a rule existed."  

Anybody at Wrigley Field who hadn't heard about it before sure found out it existed yesterday, though, when, in the first inning, Cubs pitcher David Peterson threw over to first base three times during Nathan Lukes' at bat, a strange enough decision given that it was just Old Man George Springer leading off over there (bro, he is not going), but one rendered stranger still by the fact that Kazuma Okamoto had been chilling over at third the whole time. The result of this "disengagement violation" is that Springer was given second, and Okamoto came in to score. Wild, right? Have you seen that happen even once since they brought this stuff in? A runner scoring on a disengagement, I mean? I'm sure I haven't! The only other run the Blue Jays managed despite their eleven hits on the day came in the seventh, when Alejandro Kirk (four hits on the day!) singled home Giménez. Not much, but it looked like all the Blue Jays would need, given Dylan Cease's ten-strikeout, one-walk, two-hitter of a seven-inning performance, and a nice eighth from Braydon Fisher to set the stage for a Louis Varland ninth. But Varland, who nearly got out of the inning on a one-out grounder with a runner on first that might have turned into two outs had he fielded the ball himself rather than letting it roll by for Giménez to play (not a lack of effort, but a judgement call, and I'm honestly unsure if it mattered), had the Cubs down to their last strike when Alex Bregman homered to tie the game. That's Varland's first blown save of the year (le sabotage, as it is literally called in the language of Molière), and he can be immediately forgiven it, I think it is fair to say (unless you are actively deciding to be mean). The Blue Jays narrowly escaped Chase Lee's bottom of the tenth on a fairly absurd Ernie Clement catch up the middle (his best of the season), but the eleventh, though amazing (on a Pete Crow-Armstrong single to centre, Myles Straw threw out Carson Kelley at the plate on a [temporarily] game-saving play), did not entirely break our way (Brandon Valenzuela's errant throw to third on a double-steal attempt brough PCA in as the winning run). A wild finish to a great game. And whether we'd won or lost this one, we've still got to grab a couple in Philadelphia this weekend if we hope to get any closer than our current three-and-half-games out, right? Maybe we'll do just that; who can say.

In closing, I wanted to mention that it was surprisingly not that strange at all to see Kevin Gausman as a Cub (it no doubt would have been weirder had he pitched this game, which he reportedly lightly requested not to). The Cubs got the best of the Dodgers earlier in the week, causing one of Gausman's daughters to tell him that she thinks she likes the Cubs even more than the Blue Jays, since the Cubs can beat the Dodgers, and the Blue Jays can't (lol tough but fair!). Gausman had this to say to Arden Zwelling about the Blue Jays' trade deadline: "I'll be honest, I thought they did really good for the future. They got controllable starters, guys who have really good stuff. The pitching department over there is great. I think Pete is going to do wonders for those guys. I thought they did a great job of taking advantage of the market and, unfortunately, the situation that we put ourselves in. Listen, if a couple of us that got traded would've had good years, we're probably not getting traded. That's just the reality. But I thought they took advantage of what they had to to. You can't blame them for it. I'm happy for them. I do think they got better. They definitely got younger getting rid of me. That helps. I wish nothing but the best for that organization and especially those guys. I texted Varsh, 'Go Stros!' It's weird. But's it's part of the business. It's what we sign up for." This seemed like a characteristically Gausmanesque response to the whole unfortunate business, and I thought it worth including here for that reason. Okay cool!

Oh wait, actually: I almost forgot about our woes, specifically our injury ones. It turns out that Trey Yesavage, who left his start against the Astros earlier in the week after just two innings, has a meniscus tear, news that I receive as obviously a shame but not necessarily full-on dire, in that I have been around meniscus injuries through my decades-long participation in the exquisite art/Olympic sport of 講道館柔道 Kōdōkan Jūdō (give it a try some time! it's pretty fun!), and while they can certainly be a surgery-requiring drag, guys, even old guys, seem to recover from them quite well? I'm sure Yesavage will be ship shape in Bristol fashion once that gets taken care of (no fun for him in the meantime, of course). Though the team has not announced that it will require surgery and cost Yesavage the rest of the season, I think we might as well just assume that to be the case (it's what I'm doing, at least). Also our newly acquired "Big Spaghetti" Spencer Arighetti left his rehab start in Buffalo in the thrid, and though I have not come across the specific reason he was pulled, the injury he is working his way back from is listed as "right foot nerve irritation," which sounds like no picnic. And finally, Vladdy has been out the last two games after looking not-so-hot after running out a ball in Houston, and one wanders if the things that have plainly been nagging him for months are coming to a head here as the dog days deepen (could somebody check on the heliacal rising of Sirius real quick please?). Okay, there we are, then; woes fully noted for woe-posterity.

On to Philly! 

KS

Blue Jays 5, Astros 4 (F/10): An Improbable Win That Could Not Have Pleased Me More

 

Jésus be praised

Let us begin by welcoming Jameson Taillon—once a second-overall draft pick, who has since pitched about thirteen-hundred innings of slightly-above-league-average baseball in his ten big-league seasons, which is good enough to fetch you about eighty-million dollars over the course of a career if you do it all in kind of the right order (which he totally did)—as he fully and completely enters his last-legs-innings-eater era (complete with the DFA to prove it!) of his probably quite enjoyable baseball career. I have personally enjoyed him as a member of team(s) Canada at the WBC (may I remind you that we got to the quarterfinals this time! that's as far as Japan got! our official final placing was sixth! that's just one spot behind Japan this time! also the Netflix Japan documentary about the Japanese team this year is outstanding and probably essential!), and though his connections to Canada are obviously not as direct as players who were actually born and/or developed here (or who, in the most extreme cases, had to pause their farming activities in or around Gatineau to join the team [Philippe Aumont nearly missed the previous WBC because of how "[i]n January 2023, just two months before the 2023 World Baseball Classic, Aumont broke his tailbone during a recreational ice hockey game at Carleton University. He was not able to throw a baseball for about three weeks after the injury"—the man is a Canadian WBC legend]), Taillon's aren't half-bad: "My parents met at the University of Toronto, and my grandma lived downtown. I had a lot of great summers visiting and seeing Blue Jays games and going to the island." That's plenty good enough for me! I will in fact settle for much less than that, I think you'll find. Anyway, good stuff, Jameson Taillon, and thank you for your four innings of work against the Astros yesterday, even if three runs occurred within those frames; that's all fine, given where things stand (for you; for us; for our time together). And also! As it turns out! Those three runs were scarcely a problem! On account of a three-run Blue Jays' sixth, in which Okamoto knocked in yet another "Kilometres" Straw double just ahead of a Jésus Sanchez two-run shot to tie it (I must note here too that Sanchez made two entirely credible and creditable plays in left field, despite such feats not coming at all naturally to him [we have all seen some things out there]). Spencer Miles (taking those Hoffman innings and then some), Mason Fluharty, Tyler Rogers, and Louis Varland—helped out plenty by a great throw from Brandon Valenzuala and an even better tag from Luis Urias right atop Cam Smith's head and/or shoulder in the bottom of the eighth like *boop*—kept things square at three through nine, whereupon Ernie Clement opened the tenth inning with a towering two-run homer (Urias had been placed at second as the Manfred Man), giving us a two-run lead that stood up in an improbable and notable fashion: Yordan Alvarez (who we maybe shouldn't even have pitched to given the circumstance? there's a case to be made either way) ripped what should have been a double to the right-field corner to open the Houston half of the tenth, scoring Manfred Man Jeremy Peña with great ease, but ending in an honestly totally shocking out at second, as Andrés Giménez, who is a sneaky guy (he snuck his way on base with one of those HBPs where he literally throws his hand at the pitch earlier, and nobody even really made a big deal about it; such is the quality of his sneakery), stood totally nonchalantly as Nathan Luke's pretty good throw made its way in from right field; so nonchalantly, in fact, that Alvarez came in standing up rather than sliding, and was tagged out on a super close play that not only stood up to the Astros' replay challenge, but was indeed confirmed by it (ah, the subtle epistemologies of the replay centre emerge once more). It was nuts! No less nuts, in a way, that Chase Lee was the pitcher who handled the tenth for the Blue Jays; I will admit to having had no idea he was even up with the club these days. That one got by me. 

Nevertheless! A series win! In fact, the Blue Jays' third series win in a row! And would you believe that, with the Guardians' loss (with thanks to our old friend Bo Bichette driving in the go-ahead run for the Mets in extras in that one), the Blue Jays are somehow now just three games out of the last Wild Card spot, the very Wild Card spot I had previously said I was not really going to pay all that much attention to any longer on account of how there's really not much to be done unless you're at .500 anyway, so why not just think about that and forget the rest? Well, that was a foolish thing to say and I am a fool. I am in fact extremely paying attention to that last Wild Card spot, and deriving a good deal of enjoyment from that attention, and so I plan to continue, unless, perhaps, the Blue Jays lose this afternoon in Chicago, in which case I might act as though that last Wild Card spot was not really a concern of mine. A quick look at the (Home Hardware) out-of-town scoreboard shows me that the Mats are again leading over the Guardians today, though, and so a Blue Jays' win could have us within two! Two! Dare to imagine it, a little! 

KS  

Astros 7, Blue Jays 2: This One Got Away From Us A Little, Sure

 

in there, alas

On the same day the Blue Jays announced they were going to a six-man rotation (and so, necessarily, one fewer reliever), Trey Yesavage tweaked his knee warming up for the third inning and left the game pretty abruptly. It was regrettable, certainly, but at the same time this unfortunate occurrence afforded young Chad "Dad Chalice" Dallas, in just his third big-league appearance, a dare-to-be-great moment. I was stoked for him! And for the early returns! The earliest ones, anyway! In the fullness of time, Dallas got lit up for six runs (all very much earned) on seven hits and four walks in just three innings, including a three-run home run from Taylor Trammell, a day after Trammell had home-run trotted around the bases in a painful misapprehension, having failed to discern Myles Straw's leaping catch at the wall as having been successful; it was a second-hand embarrassment moment that I found I could only feel bad about (not even the slightest chuckle over here). Straw, actually, has had quite a series so far: two-for-three with a double and a triple last night, two-for-three with a double the night before. Although I doubt that he will necessarily continue to hit .666 whilst racking up extra base hits consistently throughout the remainder of the season, maybe being the everyday starting centre fielder will suit him well! Perhaps he can keep it going in Wednesday's getaway-day game (getaway day-game?)? Might the Blue Jays win their third-straight series? It's not inconceivable! Not entirely!   

KS 

Blue Jays 3, Astros 1: Pencils Down

 

bring it in, Daulton Varsho; bring it on in

"Under the circumstances," reporter Jon Morosi suggest-reported yesterday afternoon when things were about halfway done, "the Blue Jays are having an excellent trade deadline." And I agree! I really do! Let's web-log about it for a bit! Or actually for kind of a while, probably, as there are, I think, a number of things to say—I thank you in advance for your patience (like extra).

Things started for the Blue Jays in a low-key way, you will recall, as early as Sunday afternoon, with the previously mentioned acquisition of rotation-depth-guy Jameson Taillon from the Cubs for an unspecified player and/or an amount of fiat currency yet to be determined, but really began in earnest Sunday evening, as Kevin Gausman was traded to the Cubs (with whom I have no problem) for prospects Brett Bateman (a speedy voltigeur) and Ty Southisene (a speedier-still utility infieldest) in a deal which brought into predicable relief the distance between what Kevin Gausman's rôle has meant to us both materially (producing more on-field value for the Blue Jays over his stay than any free-agent pitcher in team history aside from Roger Clemens, arguably the best pitcher in baseball history full stop, whose best two-year stretch came as a Blue Jay, arguably for reasons) and in our silly, silly hearts (we loved him, and also how much he and his nice little family loved Toronto; it was all very pleasant [beat writer Keegan Matheson wrote: "I rarely comment on departing players, but Kevin Gausman is different. A thoughtful, reliable and impressive person to cover. All of the reasons Blue Jays fans were drawn to Gausman are genuine and real. Model player, model representative of this organization. He did it right"]) on the one hand, and the present-day trade value of roughly ten starts (plus postseason) from a just-about-league-average starting pitcher on the other. It's not great! That last part, I mean! There was never going to be a return on a Kevin Gausman trade that was going to feel satisfying or sufficient, and this particular return was fine for what it was, and, crucially, at least it was over. Gausman, George Springer, and Daulton Varsho apparently had a good cry together on the flight to Houston Sunday evening, as well they should have; it can be important to do that sometimes (let it all out, boys; just let it go).

The next deal was noticeably less emotionally fraught, in that it saw Slovakian-Canadian fringe-bullpen-lefty Adam Macko sent to the Rangers in exchange for utility player Josh Smith (literally every position but catcher and pitcher!) and starter Josh Stephan, who will probably mostly figure in at Buffalo, I guess? Trades at this level, consisting of players at the edges of major-league rosters (indeed, sometimes at the edges of the forty-man roster) are in one sense the most interesting to me, in that they rarely occur for reasons that are especially legible to the layperson (that's us!), but for reasons that are no doubt entirely self-evident to, say, the poet Carson Cistulli (Assistant Director, Player Analysis). They make for good pondering, these deals do, and so offer us some measure of value in that respect (in the interior stadium, to borrow a phrase).

From there, things got a little nuts, honestly, as the Blue Jays moved Arjun Nimmala, one of our two top shortstop prospects (the other being Jojo Parker), along with minor leaguers Eddie Micheletti Jr. (corner outfield/first base) and Angel Rivero (a pitcher) to the Los Angeles Angels (of Anaheim) for, of all people, José Soriano, a front-end-of-the-rotation kind of guy who has certainly sliced us up previously, and seemed likely to continue doing so for years to come (how the tables have turned! in this regard!). Soriano will slide into things just behind Dylan Cease—he will tuckle right in there—and ahead of Yesavage for at least the next two years, even if the Blue Jays do not offer him a contract extension in the manner of, say, José Berrios, acquired at a similar point in his career (feels like a long time ago now!). I am fully, fully delighted by this move. In almost every circumstance, I will take a couple of years of a provenly viable starting pitcher over a yet-to-début prospect of strong-but-not-bananas promise. I have been known, when overtaken by one of my characteristic fits of pique, to denounce "prospects" (like as a category) as "a fake idea," which is obviously a false and indefensible notion, but is closer to how I actually feel than is at all sensible. I am quite foolish in most regards.

Jeff Hoffman was as vocal as anyone on the team about his desire to stay with the Blue Jays, and about how much his time in Toronto has meant to him and to his young family of effectively infinite children (the number is four, but that, to me, is a nearly incomprehensible amount). In recent weeks, there was chatter that Hoffman—maligned though he may have been by the worst elements of the Blue Jays' fanbase, a victim of their inability to understand (I say this with no exaggeration) literally anything about anything—was the most coveted trade target of anyone on the Blue Jays' roster, given his three swing-and-miss pitches and his reasonable contract that runs through the end of 2027, and this chatter proved to credible as all heck, given the  return that came back from the Twins yesterday: Dasan Hill is a flamethrower of a young strikeout guy (who, it is said, will need to walk fewer guys to reach his potential); John Klein has pitched (briefly) in the major this year but at the very least will add to their non-Corbin (no diss; thank you for your five innings) options; and Dameury Pena is a small and speedy middle infielder about whom, hey, you never know. I'm sad to see Hoffman go: he was essential the 2025 Blue Jays run to the AL pennant (I'm unconvinced we beat either the Yankees or the Mariners without specifically his excellent performance), and he was more upfront and open and honest about his limitations and failings than I could ever conceive of being publicly (privately, in my experience, is bad enough). "I think all organizations should strive to be like Toronto," Keegan Matheson reports Hoffman saying before stopping to sign some autographs for Blue Jays fans (we're everywhere, even Houston) from the dugout before he gathered his things and left the clubhouse; Hazel Mae reports that he got choked up one last time talking about his family's love of the city. Know this, anybody who boos Jeff Hoffman the next time the Twins come to Toronto: I am denouncing and attainting you right now ahead of time, plus I am going to do it extra on the actual day. I am fully ready to leave you doubly denounced and not even feel bad about it.    

Finally, we had Daulton Varsho, who went from crying-it-out on the flight to Houston with Gausman and Springer on Sunday night, to getting more than a little choked up at the Monday evening press availability in which he was introduced as, quite conveniently, I suppose, a new member of the Astros (in exchange for starter [I am not making this up] "Big Spaghetti" Spencer Arrighetti, a surprisingly strong return for two months of the well-liked but struggling Varsho). It wasn't all bad news, though: not long after, Varsho was on the receiving end of an eighty-grade hug from Vladdy, who we have known to be an elite hugger going as far back as the Téo and Lourdes Gurriel Jr. days (were we ever so young?). And that was that.

Quite a day! You will note that George Springer, with his "five-and-ten" full no-trade clause plus also a new baby at home, did not go anywhere; nor did Max Scherzer, with his full no-trade and various troubles; nor did Shane Bieber, whose limited and mixed results this year no doubt led to less interest than one might expect based on name alone (make no mistake: I remain a Belieber, but I get it). I must say that really liked what General Manager Ross Atkins managed generally: this was a trade deadline performance that neither threw in the towel utterly (everybody goes! to heck with guys!), nor was it one unduly burdened by sentiment (no guys get to go, as guys are too precious to me, and I cannot bear their parting! [this is my undoing in the realms of baseball simulation more often than you'd think {in the unlikely event you would choose to think on it}). I'm pleased that George Springer and Max Scherzer will finish their seasons, and perhaps even their careers, as Blue Jays; I am a little saddened, though not overwhelmingly (perhaps not even whelmingly?), that Kevin Gausman will not. I'm sorry to see Hoffman and Varsho go, but both moves make sense, for different reasons. Adding Soriano is a true boon, and a totally unexpected one. I think there is a totally reasonable case to be made that, for the rest of this season (saying nothing of the good that may happen beyond it), our rotation is actually stronger today than it was on Sunday? Not at all what I expected, but pretty great, considering! And as Max Scherzer noted, even with the Blue Jays' struggles this year, you've still got forty-thousand people showing up every night; you've got to at least try to give them something.         

With all that settled, there was still a game to play Monday night: Shane Bieber (who found out just fifteen minutes ahead of the deadline that he would indeed for sure be pitching [for Toronto]) danced around the raindrops, as they say, allowing just one of his eleven (eleven!) baserunners to score in his five-and-two-thirds; Braydon Fisher (who along with Spencer Miles will no doubt see a lot of what would otherwise have been Hoffman's innings) was not at his best, but managed a scoreless inning; the resting-sad-faced Brendon Little struck out four of the five batters he faced (stunt on your foes, Brendon Little; stunt on every last one of them); and Trevor Rogers handled the ninth after Louis Varland threw more pitches than you'd altogether to see on Sunday. Alejandro Kirk homered, Sanchez and Clement each knocked in a run, and there you go, a 3-1 win over the AL West-leading Houston Astros to gain a little ground in the Wild Card race, and sit four games out with . . . (quick math) . . . yikes, only forty-nine to play. Nevertheless, though! A tidy win! After an interesting day! I thank you, as always, for your attention to it.  

KS

Cardinals 5, Blue Jays 1: Oops!

 

hey great job Max Scherzer though

Before Luis Urías doubled home Andrés Giménez to tie the game at one in the bottom of the eighth, the closest the Blue Jays had come to scoring all afternoon was in the previous inning, in which George Springer's one-out triple (a triple! from George Springer! a little misplayed by all-time Name Guy Lars Taylor-Tatsuji Nootbaar [榎田 達治 Enokida Tatsuji], sure, but still! perhaps his start in left field [just his second of the year, I believe] had George feeling youthful and fleet!) was stranded at third. I'm sure we all felt pretty good about things with Louis Varland taking the ball for the top of the ninth, but things went uncharacteristically imperfectly for 2026 Louis Varland: leadoff walks are always trouble, rarely more so than when they are followed by back-to-back singles to bring in the go-ahead run. But things looked okay from there: Alejandro Kirk made a great diving play to snag a bunt that had been popped up foul down the third base line (he had an infield single earlier [speed kills]), and a groundout to Okamoto at first (Vladdy was DHing on the day, though unsuccessfully, I'm afraid) had things looking swell enough as Lars Nootbaar (there he is again!) grounded to Luis Urías at second in routine fashion. But Urías yanked the throw to Okamoto's right (could Vladdy have snagged it? hard to say) to bring in another run and extend the inning long enough for Jordan Walker to single in another. So that's a four-run ninth, although just one of them was earned in Varland's two-thirds of an inning (Fluharty came in to get the lefty), for those of you calculating Louis' ERA along at home (it now stands at 1.11). Now that's a bummer of a ninth, after a pretty fun game! Max Scherzer, for his part, couldn't really have pitched much better: one run on four hits and a walk in six innings pitched, striking out five to either surpass or draw nearer Walter Johnson's spot on the all-time strikeout list, depending on who you trust more as concerns century-old strikeout totals (MLB and the Elias Sports Bureau? Or Baseball Reference? [make mine BR, I would hope it goes without saying]). 

Pregnantly as all heck, the Blue Jays announced during the game that they had acquired thirty-four-year-old innings-eater/Baseball Canada WBC legend Jameson Taillon from the Cubs for a player to be named later and/or cash considerations, which would seem to completely confirm that the Blue Jays' expectation is that they'll be trading at least one starting pitcher between now and tomorrow evening. In order of likelihood, you'd have to rank them Gausman (one of the better starters available with Skubal and Peralta and Castillo already dealt), then Bieber (quite a bit behind that), and finally Scherzer (an ironclad no-trade situation), right? I guess we'll find out soon enough! Looks like the Blue Jays will be headed into the deadline four-and-a-half out, and about to set out on three brutal weeks (Houston, Chicago, New York, Tampa Bay), so the path is fairly clear, if not super duper fun. I'm sure we will find pleasant enough ways to pass the time though (like by watching baseball games and then talking about them, for instance).   

KS  

Blue Jays 5, Cardinals 1: One More Round, Probably

 

there he goes

I'll wait until Kevin Gausman is actually traded, if that is indeed what's still going to happen, before getting much into the particulars of where he figures amongst the all-time Toronto Blue Jays greats (it is more prominently than you might expect! amongst them!), but I did want to mention this much for today: that the Blue Jays, as some of us will recall instantly/intimately, have played postseason games at the conclusion of eleven of their first forty-nine seasons (not at bad rate, honestly) for a total of eighty-four games; of those eighty-four games, Kevin Gausman has been the starting pitcher in seven of them, and appeared in an eighth, as well, coming out the bullpen to battle through a scoreless seventh inning against the Seattle Mariners in Game Seven of the 2025 American League Championship series, setting the stage for George Springer's three-run home run in the bottom half of that same inning. Even setting aside the thirty-plus regular-season starts he's made every year he's been with the team so far—and the Cy Young votes, and the All-Star Game, all of that—and just thinking about the postseason (a strange thing to do, I grant you), Kevin Gausman has pitched in very nearly ten percent of the Toronto Blue Jays' postseason games—ever, I mean! That's kind of surprising, isn't it? Did it feel that way to you while it was happening? I'm honestly not sure that it did to me. I do know that whenever it was Gausman's turn at any point throughout last year's whole miraculous run, I felt good about it every time, or as good as you ever can: who knows what might happen, one would be forced to concede (before the fates or whatever), but he's for sure the best we've got, so here we go . . .

The whole of Saturday's game was about Kevin Gausman, from start to finish, or really from before the start, even, as the early crowd stood and cheered him all along his way from the dugout to the bullpen to warm up ahead of the game. The broadcast, both pregame and throughout the afternoon, foregrounded the likelihood of this being Gausman's last start with the team, and was filled with nothing but praise for him as a player and a congenial presence around the team (his ever-audible "attaboy, Kirky" on an ably blocked splitter in the dirt was not just highlighted, but lingered over), with much made of Gausman and his family as people who fell in love with the city (it really is pretty nice!). As to the game itself, Gausman held up his end of things admirably, scattering nine hits (a lot of it soft contact, though not all) and just one walk over five-and-two-thirds of one-run baseball, before quite a crew, really (Fisher, Fluharty, Hoffman, Rogers), handled the final three-and-a-third. Blue Jays runs came in the third (Springer singling home Schneider), fourth (Luis Urías bringing Ernie home on a sacrifice fly), and, most excitingly, the seventh (Springer doubling in Giménez, and Kirk driving one to right to score both Springer and Vladdy [who had a pair of hits on the day, for his part]), and there you go: three straight wins, all of a sudden, and four of their last five. At this very moment of composition, I am checking in and seeing that yes, the Guardians did end up losing to the Diamondbacks in the end; the Twins lost to the Mariners earlier; the Rangers lost to the Astros; and the Orioles lost to the Phillies; which is all to say that Blue Jays are closer to the action than they've been in a while, now just three-and-a-half games behind Minnesota and Cleveland for the final Wild Card spot. If Max Scherzer can put something together tomorrow—a tall order at this stage of things, no question—and we get a few more breaks on the (Home Hardware [forever, to me, at least]) out-of-town scoreboard like we did today, we could be two-and-a-half games back as Monday evening's trade deadline approaches. What a mess that would be! That's chaos! And for that reason alone I say we do it.

KS 

Blue Jays 3, Cardinals 1: Blue Jays Legend Luis Urías

 

of all guys

You may recall our recent characterization of Luis Urías as "somehow the easiest guy on the roster to forget is on the roster, even though he's played genuinely well when he's been in there," but also it is okay if you don't, because really there has been so much, hasn't there? Either way, there he was last night in the bottom of the eighth, pinch-hitting for Davis Schneider (who had himself entered the game as a pinch-hitter for Jesús Sánchez [hey welcome back; glad your ankle is better]), rolling one just out of the diving reach of the Cardinals' fine young shortstop Masyn Winn to bring home both George Springer and Daulton Varsho and break the one-one tie. It was huge! And sadly necessary, as an inning earlier, alas, Vladdy, despite everyone cheering so sincerely, had grounded into a double play with the bases loaded and one out, which was a drag for sure, though to be fair he had ripped a double off the wall the inning before that (missed the home run by maybe two feet?), and came in on Okamoto's double right after. A mixed bag for Vladdy, then, but when one of the items rattling around in one's mixed bag is a ringing double off the wall (and a slick slide to boot), you can't really be too upset about the contents of the bag on the whole, I don't think. Dylan Cease, who has pitched about as well over his previous three starts as anyone has in the entire history of the team, turned in six further innings of three-hit, three-walk, seven-strikeout, one-run baseball, a tick below his recent performances, but still legitimately excellent, and enough to bring his ERA on the year down to a wholly admirable 2.41; Spencer Miles (getting whiffs), Jeff Hoffman (getting whiffs), and Louis Varland (twenty-four-for-twenty-four in save situations, 0.96 ERA) took things the rest of the way scorelessly, and everyone (another huge crowd, over forty-thousand yet again) was like "yay." All the talk surrounding the team right now is trade deadline stuff, and understandably so (Gausman? Bieber? Springer? Varsho? Scherzer? Straw? Hoffman, perhaps the most coveted of all our guys right now?), but wouldn't it be neat to grab another win or two this weekend, and be just a handful of games out as we roll into Monday's deadline? Just for yucks, I mean? It'd be pretty interesting! Kevin Gausman throws today, and I both hope and expect the crowd will be treating it, in the most generous sense, like the last start of Gausman's fine tenure (in truth, his fine five-year, excuse me [wordplay]). Maybe the splitter will be splitting! Have I mentioned that, historically, the splitter used to be called "the dry spitter" because of its resemblance to the action of a spitball? And that that term seems somehow lurid to me in a way I am incapable of formulating with any real precision? All true, in any case; all true.  

KS 

Blue Jays 5, Nationals 2: A Fairly Merry Affair

 

imagine how hard Louis Varland could throw a glove at you

Trey Yesavage held the highest-scoring team in baseball to just one run on three hits and three walks, and pitched deep into the seventh, before handing things off to Tyler Rogers, who really could not pitch more differently (just about totally underhand, like weirdly so, as opposed to just about totally overhand, like weirdly so), and ultimately to Louis Varland, who, competing against his older brother Gus's squad (Gus has bounced around a bit, but is a National these days), pitched another six-out save as though that were no big deal at all to do (his ERA is now down to 0.98 on the season [his WHIP is tastefully and tastily below one, these days, too {0.95}]). The Nationals, as mentioned, are baseball's highest scoring team this year, while the Blue Jays, if you can believe it, are actually baseball's lowest! Haha! Nobody expected that I bet! Headed into a season full of promise! In a way, I suppose, we could take a little bit of comfort in the admittedly dark reality of that strange fact, at least going forward: had the Blue Jays only been even the twenty-fifth team in baseball, say, in terms of runs scored, rather than the thirtieth, I bet they'd have turned that into three or four or even five more wins, probably, right? Which would have made them a team still very much sticking around and looking to add at the trading deadline, rather than one much more likely to (not to be dramatic about it) send guys that we like away from us forever? This augers at least slightly well enough for next year, is all I mean to say, in that it's deeply unlikely we'll hit quite this badly again, even if we were to just go ahead with literally all the same guys just one year older (which of course will not be the whole of the approach; there will be at least a little nuance). The Blue Jays managed five runs today, though, which you would always take, even if it was achieved (as it indeed was!) with really quite a number of fortuitous bounces and clanks and near misses. It was a very merry twelve-hit showing, but not a thunderous kind of twelve-hit showing, you know? But beggars, I have read, cannot be choosers, and we have been begging these guys to score, so let's not fuss about the specifics now that it's happening a bit (fourteen runs in the three-game series! let's go!). 

Regrettably for me personally, it looks like an off-day tomorrow (I'm sure the team is relatively okay with it), and then it's three against the Cardinals at home in Toronto for what is sure to be a strange weekend of roster comings and, mostly, goings. Our scheduled starters are Dylan Cease on Friday, Kevin Gausman for Saturday, and Max Scherzer Sunday, but aside from that first one, it's really anybody's guess how things actually shake out. We'll know soon enough, I suppose. 

KS

Nationals 8, Blue Jays 6: And Yet Dingers

 

it's probably fine

Once the hour-long rain delay (complete with tornado warnings!) was behind us, Tuesday night's game was played under skies that were "charismatic but troubled" (think Elizabeth Bishop, or Lord Byron, or Drake). Also troubled: Shane Bieber's first inning! Holy cow! Or should I say Shane Bieber's two-thirds (of a first [of an inning]), as he did not make it through the frame, walking six (six! a Blue Jays single-inning record!) of the ten batters he faced, somehow escaping, after a fashion, having allowed only four runs. After his previous two extremely Bieberesque starts, this came as a bit of a surprise; I don't think that's unfair to say. I was surprised, too, by how well the perpetually wounded (in his aspect, I mean, and I say it with all sympathy) Brandon Little fared in his two-and-a-third innings of relief right after, striking out four, and allowing neither hit nor walk as he shaved like four runs off his ERA all in one go (it could still stand to come down a bit; I'm sure he's be the first to agree). Both Fluharty and Van Eyk ran into trouble behind him, though Jeff Hoffman was great in the eighth, so a mixed bag from the bullpen, all told? Meanwhile, the Blue Jays picked away at the Nationals' early lead, scoring runs in the third (Lukes coming around on a Vladdy infield single that forced an error [more on that in a moment]), fourth (Valenzuela to the plate on a Giménez groundout), and fifth (Kazuma Okamoto tying Eric Hinske's team rookie record for home runs at twenty-four), before George Springer's three-run shot in the eighth brought us almost all the way back. Ah well! 

Of greater concern than Shane Bieber probably not helping his trade value in what one might well expect to be his final start as a Blue Jay (it's been neat having him around, and I'm really glad it happened), or the loss generally (Winning: More Fun?), to me, is the sad fact that, after legging out an infield single in the third and then cruising into second on (fine, young) shortstop C. J. Abrams' throwing error, Vladdy clearly paused in discomfort and tried to stretch something out for a sec real quick. His back, which has been troubling him for months? No, this time it was a hamstring, we learned an inning or two later (thank you, Hazel Mae). Okamoto came in to play first in his stead, and homered, so that part of things worked out reasonably well, but I would be surprised if Vladdy is in the lineup Wednesday for a day game after a (later than usual) night game in which he was taken out with "a hammy" (it saddens me a little that I cannot find on YouTube a clip of Sesame Street's Horatio [an elephant] jumping up and down [it shakes the street! he's an elephant!] and proclaiming with great enthusiasm "This really works my hammies!" but the internet really hasn't turned out the way we'd have hoped in any number of ways, and this is probably not foremost among them). Trey Yesavage on the mound as we look to win the series! Might as well! 

KS

Blue Jays 3, Nationals 2: Scherzmaxxing As Long As We're Able

 

hey happy birthday! I remember forty-two!

Despite the Washington Nationals fielding a fine young team this season, and one that's been particularly good in particularly exciting ways (leading both leagues in runs scored and, better yet, in a way, stolen bases, amongst a host of other things), it was a fairly thin crowd on hand Monday night. A persistently audible portion of them chanted "U-S-A" as things wore on, which is very clever of them, as the Blue Jays do in fact play their home games in Toronto, a city which is in indeed part of country that is not the United States of America, but instead another country altogether; they're quite right. In fairness, it isn't until Tuesday that the Nationals are asking that fans "[j]oin [them] in celebrating Canada-US Friendship Day," in which the team is offering "an exclusive Canada-US Friendship hat," so until then I guess it is just the regular, default, ongoing, Baseless Antipathy Towards Allies and Partners Day at Nationals Park. When not busy lowest-common-denominatoring, the Washington crowd did take a moment to acknowledge that Max Scherzer, on the mound for the Blue Jays after a recent successful rehab appearance in Buffalo, had been a wonderful player for them for seven years, and is, when you check, actually the best non-Expo in the whole of those teams' joint history (and even then, it's only Gary Carter, Tim Raines, Andre Dawson [Hall of Famers all, much as Scherzer will be] and the unsung-but-excellent Steve Rogers ahead of him). 

And in this, first start back in kind of a while, Scherzer pitched more or less like someone doing so on their forty-second birthday, which this very much was (hey happy birthday): his seventy-five pitches took him nearly through the third, having allowed just one run, somehow, on four hits and three walks, striking out four along the way (oh that's how he got away with it). I suppose my hope for Max Scherzer right now is that he pitches well enough for a pleasant time to be had by all, but not so well that he becomes a compelling trade target in these final days before the deadline? It would be nice for him to stick around to wrap things up, even if that means more or less making his starts bullpen days, as this one more or less was, in that it had Spencer Miles and everything (in which "everything" is Fluharty, Macko, Rogers, Hoffman [who struck out three; his slider was dancing, and his splitter wasn't far off], Rogers, and Varland.) 

As for the bats, Luis Urias—who is somehow the easiest guy on the roster to forget is on the roster, even though he's played genuinely well when he's been in there—homered in the third, the same inning in which Ernie Clement doubled home Myles Straw's previous double; and in the next (the fourth, for those of you scoring along at home), Straw singled home Okamoto, who had stolen second. That's right! Kazuma Okamoto! Whose 日本野球機構 Nippon Yakyū Kikō single-season high in stolen bases is "three," a number achieved when he was a much younger man, a total that will perhaps not be threatened this year, or in any of those to follow, should he/we be spared (asked about his first MLB stolen base, Kaz responded simply, "I am fast"). Maybe the stolen base, generally, was just in the air, given the Nationals' excellence in this regard? The Nats grabbed four on the night, and it didn't even seem like a big deal for them. And actually Vladdy very nearly stole home, if somewhat indirectly, on a broken first-and-third situation in which George Springer left early and was hung up between first and second, gesticulating wildly for Vladdy to try to scurry home before Springer was inevitably cornered. The replay certainly seemed to suggest Vladdy swam his hand around promising Name Guy Keibert Ruiz's tag, but the call on the field had been out (I get it), and in such cases the replay centre requires incontrovertible evidence to overturn the call (I get it [I actually really like the nuance that calls can come back from replay centre not only as "confirmed" or "overturned," but also as "the call stands," which is a softer, epistemologically crucial third option, one that signals an admirably honest engagement with experience]). Oh hey I should note, too, that Vladdy's double last night brings him into a tie with the late great Tony Fernandez for eighth place on the Blue Jays' list of all-time leaders for extra-base hits (just a fantastic kind of hit, I'm sure you will agree). Just look at this great list of excellent guys whom (pardon me, whomst) we have enjoyed so much:

1. Carlos Delgado 690

2. Vernon Wells 592

3. José Bautista 519

4. George Bell 471

5. Lloyd Moseby 451

6. Joe Carter 449

7. Edwin Encarnación 445

8. Tony Fernandez 423

8. Vladimir Guerrero Jr. 423

10. Jesse Barfield 368

May I confess to you which names I was surprised to see appear where they do on this list? Is that an intimacy you will allow me? It's not too much? You're sure? Okay good: perhaps I have a([n] indefensible) centre-fielders-who-rake blindspot of some kind, but I almost certainly wouldn't have guessed Lloyd Moseby as high as fifth, and there is no way I would have had Vernon Wells trailing only Carlos Delgado, despite my significant enthusiasm for him both as a player and as an unusually thoughtful post-playing person (it may not surprise you to learn that I currently have a maxed-out friendship rating with Vernon Wells in the remarkably wholistic "MLB Life" portion of the inimitable MLB Power Pros 2008, part of the peerless パワフルプロ野球 Powafuru Puro Yakyū series [ongoing six-part {so far!} retrospective here], as emulated seamlessly on my phone . . . and maybe yours too, should you wish it? it's easier to do than you might think!).

We have strayed off course a little here, but to bring us back, finally, to last night's totally pleasing win, let us note how after Louis Varland appeared to have ended the game with a called third strike on a breaking ball which Luis García Jr. rightly challenged and had overturned (the Nationals had two on, the tying run standing at second), Varland then elected to blow a 101 MPH four-seam fastball (I like to say "cross-seam" fastball, not just because it is old-fashioned, but because it is more inclusive of those who throw the pitch despite tiny hands [we all start somewhere]) just completely by him—just completely by him—which feels like a truly liberating option to have at one's disposal. Imagine it!   

KS

Red Sox 6, Blue Jays 1: Maybe The Last Time Again

 

tagged him right up like *boop*

"I hope I don't go anywhere—I don't want to go anywhere," were Kevin Gausman's words after perhaps his last start as a Toronto Blue Jay. We got off light, really, given the reports that followed what figured to probably be his last start in Toronto proper last week: Gausman's wife Taylor, who he'd thought was at home in Louisiana, surprised him at the SkyDome after that last one, announcing her arrival by texting him a photograph of his first pitch as a Blue Jay that she'd taken from the stands in 2022 (I think the family section is in the really nice part of the 200s? I only sat in that general area of the 200s once, when a friend got tickets from the bank she worked for, and let me tell you, it was fancy, and this was decades ago [I don't imagine they've made it less fancy in the intervening years]). Before they left the ballpark, Taylor convinced him to sit with her for a little while on the field, backs to the wall about halfway down the third base line, and talk for a bit about the whole situation, reflecting on how lucky they were to have been in one place so long that they’d be sad to leave. He said to reporters later, "I would love to finish here, but at the same time, I'd love to have another opportunity. But at the same time, it wouldn't mean as much as it meant last year, you know?" Oh, we know! One's thoughts turn to Max Scherzer—and if his start tomorrow is a strong one, he might be off as well (though he has complete say over any potential trade, as you would expect in a Max Scherzer contract)—who told us through tears last year, "I'm forty-one years old; I never thought I could love baseball this much." It was never going to be any fun to watch further members of the Power-of-Friendship 2025 Blue Jays move along (Bo was the first; Vladdy will be the last), but this year's middling-to-worse performance is really very likely to hasten things along. Since Gausman joined the team in 2022, he has actually been the team's most valuable player, if you go to FanGraphs at all (note Max Scherzer at the far left in that historically significant Daniel Murphy video), more than Vladdy or Bo or Springer or Kirk (who are the other four in that laudable top five [if Vladdy's monster 2021 was in the mix, the result would be different, but even so]). Remember how the choice after 2021 was to try to re-sign our literal Cy Young winner Robbie Ray (he of the insanely tight pants and max-effort grunting, along with all the excellence), or take a chance on the late-blooming Gausman, best known to Blue Jays fans as an Oriole you could get to, rather than a Giant who seemed to have figured it all out? And that Kevin Gausman really did feel like the risker proposition, the gutsier move? Gausman, as it turned out, performed at a twenty-plus fWAR-level over the seasons since, while Robbie Ray has fallen on hard times, coming in sub-five (which honestly surprised me a little when I checked it just now despite my general sense of things not having gone well). Good call, Mark Shapiro and Ross Atkins! Everything turned out so enjoyably! 

Not that there was all that much danger of it actually happening once things got underway this afternoon (not our day!), but would you believe we'd have been just four-and-a-half back of Cleveland if we'd won? Wild, right? But the bats were all but silent, so despite Gausman's six fine innings (three runs on five hits and a walk, six strikeouts), that's a series loss to the still-hot Boston Red Sox (is that twenty-two wins in their last twenty-six?). On to Washington, then, where we nearly never play, and it'll be Scherzer against his old team (one of them, anyway) in the opener, then Bieber and Yesavage. It occurs to me that we can only really be confident that one of those three will be with us by the end of the road trip. But who knows, maybe all three will make it back home for the series against the Cardinals next weekend, as the actual deadline isn't until the Monday? If it's going to happen, I wouldn't mind if it happened early, though. Long goodbyes are tough.  

KS

Blue Jays 6, Red Sox 0: Dylan Cease Will Not Desist (Wordplay)

 

more like "Dealin'" Cease (further wordplay)

I will admit to a certain amount of inward oh-man-here-we-go-again-ISM when the Blue Jays' half of the second inning ended as it did early Saturday evening, with George Springer doubled off of second, having lightly misread a dying liner off the broken bat of Yohendrick Piñango that found its way into the able glove of the diving Ceddane Rafaela in very shallow centre field (in Springer's defense, it was a true "heck" of a play). "Oh man!," I thought; "here we go again!" And yet we did not: the Blue Jays scored a thoroughly glorious five runs in the very next inning, all of them coming with two outs after Andrés Gimenez struck out swinging and Brandon Valenzuela grounded to second—a ploy, perhaps, to lull the Red Sox into a false sense of security? Lukes doubled, Vladdy singled (he would go three-for-four with a walk, a run scored, and two RsBI on the day [the march to three-thousand hits continues in earnest]), Okamoto singled, Springer hit a three-run homer over the monster, and though that dinger felt like a culmination, a Daulton Varsho single and Ernie Clement RBI-double followed before the crafty Sonny Gray finally struck out Piñango to end the inning. We'd add one more in the ninth when Vladdy ripped one off pitcher Alec Gamboa's glove, scoring Nathan Lukes from second as the ball dribbled past a diving drawn-in infield after that fortuitous ricochet (that's the best kind of them, easily!).

All of that was great, but we really could have gotten by with a good deal less of it, as it turned out, as Dylan Cease pitched one of the best games in any of the Blue Jays' fifty seasons. How about that! And that's really saying something, because, as you will recall, we totally had Dave Stieb, and Roy Halladay, and arguably the best two-season stretch from arguably the best pitcher in the history of the sport (I speak here of course of Roger Clemens, with whom I am not broadly sympathetic, but whose 1997 and 1998 seasons offer the pitching equivalent of Barry Bonds' 2001 through 2004 as far as demonstrating the on-field merits of transforming one's already-Hall-of-Fame-self [oops! how'd that turn out, guys!] into a juicy, juicy juice-box). And a lot of those guys' games were excellent! But here's Dylan Cease's line from yesterday: nine innings, one hit (a sixth-inning double from Andruw Monasterio on a pitch several inches off the plate inside), three walks, and twelve strikeouts, including the final six outs of the game. There's only so much better anyone can ever be than that, right? The margins get pretty slim! Cease was a characteristic delight in his post-game interview, asking Hazel how many strikeouts he ended up with ("Twelve? Oh my . . . I was at like four through six, or something like that; that's crazy") and speculating on why he pitches so well in Fenway, a notoriously hitter-friendly park: "It is my favourite ballpark, to be honest; I don't know if that has anything to do with it. You know, when I played Nintendo 64, this was the ballpark. I just watched the '99 Home Run Derby here on YouTube." Nintendo 64 baseball? Like, say, All-Star Baseball 2001, which the even-tempered Nate Edwards described as perhaps his least favourite of the seemingly endless number of baseball video games and computer simulations he has played for his indispensable 30-30 Club project? I myself played an inordinate amount of that one in our first Toronto apartment a quarter-century ago, still kind of amazed that the guys who abounded in it were the very same I could (and very often did!) go see at the SkyDome for less than the cost of going to a first-run movie (the Bloor, admittedly, was cheaper), even allowing for the cost of the Spadina streetcar (optional [maybe you'd prefer the walk through Chinatown, if it's nice, and you've got the time?]). We revisited All-Star Baseball 2001 in the basement recently (the n64 I bought in high school still works perfectly, though the banana-yellow controller I prized quite highly has at last given up the ghost), and though I still found it quite compelling, in its way, I have learned that its charms, or at least a significant portion of its charms, are at times less charming to those of us born, say, this century, rather than at some unspecified time in the previous one (contrast this with the 8-bit greats, chiefly プロ野球ファミリースタジアム / Puro Yakyū Famirī Sutajiamu / R.B.I. Baseball and ソフトボール天国  / Softobōru Tengoku / Softball Heaven / Dusty Diamond's All-Star Softball, both beloved by children of all ages and eras). And that's fine! That's all fine! But I was pleased to learn Dylan Cease gets it.

KS  

Red Sox 6, Blue Jays 4: The Sweep Eludes Us (Game One of A Three-Game Series)

 

the biggest Oak we've got

Red Sox starting pitcher Patrick Sandoval could not find the plate for much of the first inning, throwing I believe ten consecutive balls at one point (not a single pitch amongst them adjudged strikable!) en route to walking the bases loaded, and yet the Blue Jays, perhaps in a spirit of fellowship and compassion, elected not to score any runs consequent to this sorry state of affairs for the struggling lefty. Whatever the reason (their hearts, their shoes), the Blue Jays left three on to open the game, and left really just a whole bunch of guys on throughout the rest of it, too, for a total of ten (that's plenty!). Let us agree, though, probably, that it is a step in the right direction that they are getting guys on at all, regardless of where they end up. And indeed, sometimes they end up just where you'd hope: take, for instance, Kazuma Okamoto's towering three-run home run to centre field in the seventh to set the MLB record for home runs by a Japanese-born rookie (nifty!), and to tie the game at four (Trey Yesavage had an imperfect outing, allowing three runs on two homers in just four innings, and Braydon Fisher got lightly touched up for the fourth Red Sox run). A brand new ballgame, as they say! After Jeff Hoffman pitched a scoreless seventh, though, things went south in the eighth, as C.J. Van Eyk, whom I absolutely could not have told you was on the roster right now (I have read, and am willing to believe, that he pitched two innings against the White Sox last week, though I possess no specific memory of these innings), was dinged for two runs on four hits in just a third of an inning's work, and although Vladdy (who had singled twice earlier) worked a walk against Aroldis Chapman to bring the tying run to the plate in the ninth, Chapman got Big Oak, Springer, and Kirk to end it. A tough one, in the end. 

Also tough: the Blue Jays announced yesterday that the promising Addison Barger, whose elbow, you will recall, pretty much exploded after making a truly incredible throw from right field to the plate in his first game back after injuring both ankles running out a grounder even earlier in the season, is definitely finished for the season, and perhaps part of the next, depending on whether he merely requires an "internal brace" in the elbow (which in and of itself does not sound great), or full-on, let's-harvest-a-ligament-from-elsewhere-in-your-body "Tommy John" surgery. The 2026 season is thus a completely lost one for Barger, who had just one hit in twenty-two at bats over nine games—and he's twenty-six years old, coming off a twenty-one-homer season (you may recall, too, his pinch-hit grand slam in Game One of the World Series? it was quite a moment!), so if he is to cook, the time to cook is very much now. It's a blow to the team, obviously, but much more so for Barger personally.    

A blow to me, personally, though admittedly on a much different scale (so different a scale as to make this transition distasteful?), was the late-breaking realization that last night's game was going to be an Apple TV game. I really think they should cut it out! I don't like it when they do that at all! The national broadcasters who don't really know your team are bad enough (through no fault of the individual broadcaster themselves), but Apple is still running those preposterous probabilities in the bottom right corner (rightfully assailed by FanGraphs' Ben Clemens here [four years ago! wild! I've been minding it that long!]). It is I suppose a mercy that the font they use for everything is, while stylish, super tiny, and difficult for me to discern (I am neither young nor particularly well-visioned), in that it limits how much I can mind the specifics of these still-preposterous probabilities, but they are a flickering little bother in the corner of the screen that would better serve us by showing a little bit more grass or dirt.

Anyway! Back to our old friend Dan Shulman and his Sportsnet pals Saturday, I'm sure. Let's reconvene after, and talk about how it went.

KS  

Blue Jays 3, Rays 1: Peak Performance

 

go Kirky

Here's a weird one: first inning, two outs, Ernie Clement on second, George Springer on first, Alejandro Kirk at the plate. Kirk, as we have long maintained here at Baseball Feelings without ever actually having really checked, seems to get way more infield hits than you might expect given that he is one of the slowest players in the league (first-percentile sprint speed of 22.9 feet/second [a bizarre unit of measurement compared to the way we usually talk about running, but basepaths are measured in feet, so it's fine I guess]). Part of this is on account of how he just makes a tonne of contact, and so some of that contact, like anybody else's, is inevitably going to result in unplayable dribblers, sure, but a crucial factor here seems to be that because Kirk runs so slowly (the man runs hard, of course; please do not mistake me), everybody knows you can and indeed should play the infield plenty back; so far back, in fact, that, coupled with how much contact Kirk makes, and how a certain proportion of that contact will inevitably be soft, he's going to get a bunch of infield hits—and indeed a weird amount of them, really—not despite of how slow he is, but, quite to the contrary, because of how slow he is. Paradox, or dialectic? Is this one best handled by the Anglicans among us, or the Hegelians? Or perhaps (dialectically) by some third thing? I don't know, but I sure enjoy it! And yesterday's first inning offered us just a tremendous instance of this. As I was saying: two outs, Ernie on second, Springer at first, Alejandro Kirk at the plate. Kirk hits the merest dribbler down the the third base line towards Junior Caminero (an absolute menace of a dude this series, even for him); Caminero charges in, needing a barehanded pickup to even make a play of it as Kirk dashes (in his wholly admirable fashion) down the line to first, but Caminero, understandably, cannot not secure the ball to even begin any of that (hey: it happens). Ernie, alive to all of this in his usual canny fashion, sees the ball roll past Caminero, if only a little, and darts home to score as Springer deftly takes third just ahead of the eventual throw to that bag. So that's an infield single—no error on the play, as the scorer could not deem it one that Caminero should have made with ordinary effort—that scored a run from second and sent a runner from first to third. On an Alejandro Kirk infield single.

That first-inning play left me delighted enough that I'm quite sure I would have been able to sustain a reasonable amount of delight throughout the remaining eight innings regardless of how delightful or undelightful those innings may have been on their own merit, but the delights just kept coming! Shane Bieber was their foremost architect, pitching exactly like you'd like to see Shane Bieber pitch: seven innings, one run on just three hits without any walks at all, all while only striking out three, which is to say, his six-pitch mix had everybody hitting grounders all day, which led to some nifty plays from Okamoto at third, Ernie at short, and Vladdy at first (Luis Urias, for whatever reason, went largely untested as far as I recall).  Vladdy was good for a pair of hits and a run knocked in, Springer likewise, and once you toss in a couple of clean innings from Tyler Rogers and Louis Varland, all of a sudden you're feeling pretty good about the world! As it relates to the fortunes of the baseball team you enjoy! 

On to Boston, then, where the Red Sox are coming off their longest winning streak (fifteen games!) since Ted Williams was on the squad, which really was some time ago. It's better for us to catch them now that they've got all that out of their system, I think. Hey has anybody else noticed during their daily scan of the standings (don't act like I'm the only one who scans daily) that if the Blue Jays were somehow able to sweep in Boston this weekend, we'd be only three games out with a week to go before the trade deadline? Wouldn't that be a ludicrous position, bordering on an impossible one? To do anything productive with, I mean? Fortunately, the act of watching baseball remains exactly as productive either way, but for the people who have to make decisions about things, I can see it mattering more. How pleasing, then, to be us instead.  

KS 

Rays 4, Blue Jays 2: A Truly Clanking Clank

 

nice night though

I would venture to say that you have probably never seen a ball clank off of Daulton Varsho's glove in centre field quite the way it did in the sixth last night, and I would venture further that, having seen it happen the once now, you will probably never see another one clank off his glove quite like that again, given Daulton Varsho's overall sure-handedness and fine fielding, even if he has maybe lost a step (who among us?) and has lost kind a good deal off of his arm, too (who again?). But clank it did, this clankmost clanker, and the next thing you know, you're looking at three unearned runs in the sixth inning of a game you end losing by two. Alejandro Kirk homered, though, and Vladdy doubled and scored, so let us agree that those things, at least, were really quite good. As was the pitching! Aside from the three unearned runs that arose due to the aforementioned clank in Jeff Hoffman's inning, opener Braydon Fisher allowed the only other run, and we ran all kinds of guys out there after him: Spencer Miles, Jeff Hoffman, Mason Fluharty, Tyler Rogers, Brandon Little (who has such a sympathetic look about him even when he is doing well), and finally Louis Varland, who has not had as many chances to pitch in recent days, as the Blue Jays are not so much finding themselves "leading late." Shane Bieber throws today, though, and last time out he very much looked like his old self, so who knows? It's a getaway-day game, and every instance of afternoon baseball is to be welcomed, in my view, even if you have lost four straight (which, arguably, we may have).

KS

Rays 12, Blue Jays 2: And Just Like That, We're Free

 

touch 'em all, Vladdy

This feels better, doesn't it? Now that there's no more worrying to be done about the shape of things to come? The 2025 Blue Jays, you will recall, followed their last-place 2024 season with a miraculous, ninety-four win run to the AL East title, an all-timer of a routing of the New York Yankees in the ALDS, a stirring, improbable comeback against the Seattle Mariners to win just the third American League pennant of their now fifty summers, and played the Los Angeles Dodgers and their historically great roster of future Hall-of-Famers, including the greatest baseball player who has yet lived, to extra innings in Game Seven of the best World Series I have ever seen (a view shared, as we have discussed previously, by several prominent baseball people even older than me, in some cases by significant margins [which is getting harder to do {glory to each of them as they grow super old}]). In 2026, though, it's all gone pear-shaped, friends, and that's really all there is to it. A baseball team that we expected to be very good has turned out, quite to the contrary, to not be very good at all. Such things, I think you will agree, happen all the time. It's no big deal.

 A month ago—to the day, actually—the Blue Jays' record stood at thirty-nine and thirty-nine, and it's easy to imagine things having unfolded differently from there, and much better than they have (in the primary world of our experience): our subsequent seven-and-sixteen would not have had to have been totally flipped to sixteen-and-seven for us to have remained very much in the thick of things, even with several other American League teams finally figuring it out (I did not necessarily see the Red Sox winning fourteen in a row [and counting!]). But the margins between good baseball and bad baseball, or even between great baseball and really very poor baseball, though they can present as glaring on the day-to-day, I-can't-believe-they-kicked-another-one level, are often slimmer than you'd think when approached in the aggregate. If we take the widest lens, and just look at runs scored and runs allowed (which, I would remind you, is how it all goes down), the 2025 Blue Jays allowed 4.5 per game, while scoring 4.9. And they were great! So much so that, late in the season and into the postseason, overly-excited pundits across baseball were speculating that the Blue Jays' approach under hitting coach David Popkins may not just have worked out remarkably well for them, specifically, but might actually offer all of baseball an excitingly new, contact-oriented model in contrast to the all-or-nothing, slug-heavy approach of recent seasons that many bemoan for æsthetic reasons (never mind that the Blue Jays were slugging the heck out of the ball all postseason, as the fine writer Mike Petriello noted repeatedly but to no avail as this narrative took hold). The Blue Jays weren't just good; they had figured out a new (old) way to play baseball that was not just successful, but good for the game. But in 2026, through the Blue Jays's first hundred games, though they've allowed the same 4.5 runs per game (despite being down like a million arms due to injury), have scored 4.0 rather than last year's 4.9. That difference of less than a run per game—you could fairly call it a tenth of a run per game from each spot in the batting order—is the difference between winning the pennant with a thrilling new approach, and being a great big mess nobody can figure out. So it goes.

Last night's game was as good a time as any to turn the page on the season in that sense, I think. I do not view this as a surrender to hopelessness so much as a return to the small pleasures of baseball unencumbered by the weight expectation. What remains to be enjoyed of this season are the kinds of thing that are to be enjoyed of any season, really, and I intend to enjoy them. It doesn't even take "intention," honestly, in that they're just things that I genuinely enjoy, and are why I have spent such a weird proportion of my life watching or thinking about baseball (it's the thinking about it, in my experience, that will really get you ["Hence it is that the sense of sublimity arises, not from the sight of an outward object," Samuel Taylor Coleridge wrote one time, "but from the beholder's reflection upon it"]). For instance, last night we had the beloved Kevin Gausman making perhaps his last start in Toronto as we near the end of his five very strong years as a Blue Jay, and we saw a bases-empty, two-out walk turn into a three-run, thirty-eight-pitch top of the first inning, which was an obvious and fairly weighty drag. And yet how about, a little later, his slick little shovel pass to Brandon Valenzuela to cut down the impossibly fast Chander Simpson at home on a safety squeeze? That was really something! I'll take as many of those as you've got! And even littler things, like people chanting the slumping Kazuma Okamoto's name to cheer him through a hapless at bat once the rout was already well and truly on; or the crowd singing "Mr. Brightside" a few bars more after Myles Straw's walk-up song faded; or, still with Myles "Kilometres" Straw, how about the crowd coming to its feat when Straw, pitching the ninth to get through the back-end of this enormous blowout (unintentionally inelegant phrasing; I see that now), having just swapped gloves on-field with Ernie Clement as Clement went out to left in Straw's place (what is this, ソフトボール天国/Softobōru Tengoku/Softball Heaven? [Urias into the game at second, Patrick Corbin to the showers]), got the final batter to a three-two count? The crowd went nuts! Baseball is fun! Normal baseball is fun! And after the emotional intensity and excess of all last season, and the ways in which that could not help but carry over into the early parts of this our present season, I welcome this return to truly normal baseball. What happened? We stunk, that's what happened. We've stunk, and we stink. Let's go.  

KS