2026 Wild Card Round Workrate Report

 

in defiance of the "digital rights management" tyranny that 
prevents me from screencapping the Sportsnet stream I have taken
a photograph of my computer screen with my camera-equipped computer phone
(pictured: Joey Votto in a nice coat)

Rather than sensibly pausing my Rogers Sportsnet subscription immediately following the strangely cheering end of this strangely strange fiftieth season of Blue Jays baseball, I have instead chosen a different path, and it is the path of watching literally every inning of postseason baseball these many playoff rounds afford us in our contemporary moment. This is not a course of action (which may prove to be a course of study [it's too soon to say]) that would be advisable or at all reasonable in many contexts, but is a viable one for me at present on account of how: i) my time is largely my own at the moment (a massive prerequisite to watching this much baseball, obviously); ii) rather than having these many games spread across any number of different networks and expensive streaming services (the case, as I understand it, in the fallen American context), in Canada everything is quite simply all on Rogers Sportsnet (their evil is, in this instance, a boon), allowing me to proceed without accessing an undue portion of the equity in our home; and iii) if you are not totally beholden to watching everything just as it happens (should, say, your interest be more æsthetic than informational), you can really blaze through a baseball game by starting a half-hour or so late and zipping through the commercials between innings (and indeed betwixt inning-halves), for one thing, and, just as importantly, you can watch the west coast games the next morning when there would otherwise be no baseball to watch at all (a dark thought) until the mid-afternoon games get going. That it has never been easier to immerse oneself so fully in one's predilections to the exclusion of engaging with the culture more broadly is probably not altogether to the good, and yet, at the same time, play ball? 

Watching so much baseball in so little time (nine full games in three days [though it took me into a fourth to get to through that ninth one]) is clarifying as to what I am really looking for in a baseball game contested between two teams about whom I am largely indifferent from a partisan standpoint: mostly, it seems, I want to see the home team do well, so that the crowd remains totally locked-in in full-on postseason, watching-a-loved-one-try-to-defuse-a-bomb mode (as a Philly sportswriter had it some years ago; it was in a "social media" post and alas I can no longer source it properly). And so as much as I have no problem whatsoever with the Chicago Cubs, for example, it did not trouble me especially to see them swept away with first an 8-0 romp, and then a classic Kevin Gausman playoff outing (in which he pitched well against a lineup full of monsters only to lose 4-1), because everybody in San Diego was just so happy about it all. The Cubs brilliant centre-fielder Pete Crow-Armstrong, coming off an all-time great 45HR/41SB season (10.6fWAR or 9.8bWAR, an Ohtani/Judge/Bonds level of performance relative to his league), went oh-for-seven with four strikeouts, and got super sad. "We were challenged this year," Crow-Armstrong told The Athletic, a union-busting scheme orchestrated by The New York Times. "This team showed a lot of heart and a lot of fight through all the challenges. But [for things to have gone differently—ed.] I would say, to start: I show up. I show up when it matters in these games. That would help us immediately. But that's all I got right now. You can look at the scoreboard, you can look at the stat sheet, wherever you get your numbers from, and it is clear to see that I didn't contribute." I do like that despite his profound disappointment, PCA was able to remain broadminded and ecumenical about where we go for stats. It's a good message. 

My enthusiasm for home-team performance was tested, perhaps understandably, by the Yankees' full-on drubbing of the Red Sox by a total combined score of eighteen to two (a good portion of the Yankees' scoring was backloaded in each game, so neither game felt out of reach immediately, though both sure did by the end). I find there is little to choose between these two avowed Blue Jays enemies whom stink to me. So far this century, at least, the Red Sox have been the bigger problem (four World Series championships to the Yankees' one), and I also find my thoughts returning, at times, to how throughout my 2001 through 2006 experience of SkyDome attendance, visiting Yankees fans, often from upstate New York, were largely agreeable, and would say things like "this is a beautiful city you've got here," whereas visiting Red Sox fans were often fairly obnoxious, and would say things like "Yankees suck," and chant rude sayings regarding Derek Jeter, which felt immaterial to baseball games that the Yankees (Jeter or otherwise) were not even there to contest. At the time (just after their four World Series titles in five years, with many of the key players still around), I felt like the worst thing you could say about Yankees fans is that they seemed to take maybe a disproportionate amount of pride in essentially cheering for gravity, whereas Red Sox fans seemed, by contrast, genuinely disordered. So it's never been clear cut for me, or at least it hasn't been since those days. Others in my home, though, take essentially the Buck Martinez approach ("Never cheer for the Yankees") and it serves them at least as well as all this complication serves me. But, to return to the general point of home-team happiness being pretty much the thing when watching as a more-or-less neutral observer, Yankee Stadium was a thoroughly stoked place throughout, and pleasing in this respect, at least.

But what, we might ask, if the opposite were true? What if, perversely, one were to derive pleasure not from the rapturous ovation of tens of thousands, but by their disapprobation? Is this not precisely what was offered by the papally sanctioned Chicago White Sox unseating of the Houston Astros? Astros fans did not show up in the numbers one might have expected for either of these games, and those that did started booing early (the second inning of game one; the first inning of game two). "What purpose does that serve in that moment?" Astros first baseman Christian Walker asked his postgame interlocuter, but also just the universe about it. Actually, full quotation, why not: "We’re here, playing at home; we need cheers. We need energy. We don’t need boos. What purpose does that serve in that moment? Whatever fans are feeling, we’re feeling it tenfold. We’re the ones out there. We’re the ones in the fight. We worked our butts off this whole season to put ourselves in this spot, and for guys to get booed, it’s frustrating." Totally understandable! Walker didn't seem to take as much heat for those comments as reliever Bennett Sousa took for his, which, if you are willing to read one whole sentence rather than just the first half of one whole sentence, isn't really all that bad at all: "The fans here are definitely spoiled with a lot of ALCS and World Series runs, and we have to earn that right to bring this team back to that position." People sure don't like being called spoiled, though, so this went poorly for him. "If we were in Chicago," he added, "it’d probably be loud as shit." I bet! These White Sox, coming off of back-to-back hundred-loss seasons, newly invigorated in any number of ways but most notably by 東京ヤクルトスワローズ Tōkyō Yakuruto Suwarōzu-legend Munetaka Murakami, have been a singular delight this year, and I think would probably be the unattached-partisans' plurality favourite to win the whole thing? They sure are neat!  

It seems obvious to say that the Atlanta/Philadelphia series was the best of the bunch, in that it was the only series to go the full three games rather than just the two, but its first game was better than any of the other games any of the other teams played this whole round, as was its second: back-and-forth baseball with excellent starting pitching (much of it from starters! elsewhere there has been a surprising amount of bullpen-gaming it, which is of course intriguing in its own way), late-inning and even extra-inning home runs by the big stars (Matt Olsen, Kyle Scwharber, Bryce Harper) to swing things suddenly, and just an overall sense of two serious contenders who could just as easily be meeting in the NLCS rather than a three-game Wild Card series. That Atlanta moved on worked out well from our all-else-being-equal, let's-see-the-home-team-win-on-account-of-vibes perspective (though the Tomahawk Chop business, back in full force, remains gross [I don't think they do Truth and Reconciliation Day down there, of if they do, theirs feels different]), but I am a little sad about the Phillies, in part for my old friend Tosh, a true fan, but also just for a perennially strong team that is probably starting to age out of its best years, and that's always a little sad (you know who else is kind of getting old, though I am not exactly suggesting we should start to feel bad about it yet? the Dodgers! again, we can hold off on our lament for them a bit still).

These best-of-three series are over before you know it, aren't they? Less so than the one-game Wild Card play-in game that had been the deal for a while though, clearly. Someone (on the internet, I mean) pointed out the other day that of the now twenty Wild Card series to be contested in this best-of-three format, the team that has won the first game has gone on to win nineteen of the twenty series, which really is a wild rate of success, and in a sense argues on behalf of the old one-game play-in, aside from how more games means more tickets/broadcasts/revenue, but naked commercialism aside (please, guys, do not sully the good name of Major League Baseball with any of that), I am pretty much okay with the three-game series for really any number of reasons, and we will discover together that precise number as I enumerate them below: 

i) The three-game series is a standard unit of baseball, one familiar to us.

ii) A five-game or even a seven-game series statistically doesn't give the "better" team a particularly strong advantage (I think the last study I read on this was like "the World Series would need to be twenty-something games long if you wanted to get it 'right,' but that's obviously stupid, so I guess we should just do whatever," a view I support, unless I am incorrectly recalling this view, in which case I prefer the one that I have just now advanced).

iii) The only teams that wind up in the three-game series are teams that either didn't win their division OR won the softest of the three divisions in their league, so the near coin-toss nature of the three-game series does not seem to me an affront to their dignity. 

iv) Even though it has only occurred once in twenty times so far (almost precisely five percent of the time!), it does afford the possibility for a stirring comeback, and so in this respect probably beats the one-game Wild Card play-in just as a thing (even though Edwin's eleventh-inning walk-off three-run homer in the Blue Jays 2016 WC win over the Orioles is one of the great moments in team history).

But in truth I remain fundamentally a Regular Season Guy, and don't especially care how they want to go about the playoffs; they could go back to two leagues, no divisions, top team in each league makes the World Series, and I would be like "tough but fair," so I am not a good participant in discussions like these at all. I may be wasting your time (not mine, though; this is a relatively good use of mine).

As a final point, and to me it is not an insignificant one, I would like to note the overall excellence of the NBC (and "Peacock") coverage of this Wild Card round. Even the least adept of the four crews covering these series for NBC put together afternoons and evenings of baseball so far ahead of the nonsense Fox visited upon us as soon as the Divisional Series started up yesterday as to be, like, ludicrous (the Turner networks, TBS and TNT, handle the non-Fox half of the Divisional Series games, and do a great job, as they have for years now). The Atlanta/Philadelphia crew was especially and exceptionally strong, with deeply MLB 10: The Show-coded play-by-play from Matt Vasgersian (the way that game imprinted on me, you would think I was a child when it came out, but I was, quite to the contrary, literally thirty-one), Phillies-centric colour commentary from the Falstaffian John Kruk, and Atlanta-focused analysis from C. J. Nitkowski, who was no worse than fine. At field level, we had the ineffable Joey Votto, who, to the extent to which he speaks with a gentle urgency but without hyperbole, and speaks seriously but not humourlessly, about a subject (hitting a baseball) that is ultimately quite trivial but which he manages to elevate to an object that feels worthy of perhaps lifelong inquiry, seems to me, in the best sense of the term, perfectly academic. This does not save him (as it does not save us) from the occasional ridiculousness (it may in fact engender it!) or complete error (who among us!), but it seems to me admirable all the same (although, of course it would). Great job, Joey Votto! And great job everybody, really. What a fun round of baseball. Let's see how it all shapes up from here.

KS

Blue Jays 5, Reds 1: Keep Going.

thanks, George

unsettling, isn't it

"I'm gonna keep going!" Max Scherzer yelled to everyone's immediate and obvious delight as he walked off the field and into the Blue Jays' dugout after striking out two more to end the top of the sixth in what may well have been the final start of his Hall-of-Fame career. "Keep going! Keep going, motherfucker!" was George Springer's unmistakable off-camera reply as the broadcast faded into the break. Springer, batting at the top of the order as had so long been his custom (though not of late), had already had his moment—a single in his second at-bat of the day, one that saw him scoot into second on the left-fielder's bobble, after which he was pulled for a pinch-runner to a truly wonderful ovation, one befitting his standing—in this, the final game of his six-year stint in Toronto, and quite possibly the last game of his own very fine career. His arrival in Toronto ahead of the 2021 season, like Hyun-Jin Ryu's the year before, were clear signs that the team had decided to spend whatever it took to build around Vladdy and Bo (who, it's easy to forget, were only twenty-two and twenty-three, respectively, at the time of Springer's signing) and see just how far it could take them. The answer, as we saw last year (a season in which Springer, incidentally, at thirty-five years old, was the third-best hitter in either league, behind only Aaron Judge and Shohei Ohtani), was as far as baseball goes (in some ways farther), and it took George Springer's seventh-inning, ALCS Game Seven three-run homer on one good knee (one good knee at most) to get them there ("Exactly the part of the lineup you'd want up in a situation like this," Dan Shulman calmly intoned an instant before it happened [hear all calls here, including, right at the end, the Mariners' heartrending radio broadcast, in a way the truest among them]). For Springer, who has done enough to fairly be said have done it all (2017 World Series Champion and MVP, four-time All-Star, made all the money anyone could ever spend), but not so much that there's any kind of final push towards the Hall of Fame to be had (I'm afraid our guy has neither two-hundred more home runs nor fifteen-hundred further hits in him at this point), and whose third child just arrived this summer, I would be very surprised if we ever see him in a major league uniform again. For Scherzer, whose kids are older (though of course still young), and who is, in a baseball sense, fundamentally unhinged, nothing would surprise me.    

And so ends what can only be said to be a disappointing season, of course. That the Blue Jays went from last place in the AL East in 2024 to extra innings of Game Seven of the World Series against the historically great Los Angeles Dodgers the very next season was really all the evidence we needed of just how slim the margins in all of this are; we didn't need a last-place finish this year to underscore the point. But that's what we got, just to make good and sure. In baseball, when things are going well, they're only ever barely going well (this part, we feel), and when they're going terribly, we're rarely quite as far off as we might think (this part, we don't). It's all so tenuous. We learn this early, from minced-oath television airings of Bull Durham, and the speech Ron Shelton writes for Crash Davies about how the difference between a .250 hitter and a .300 hitter over the course of twenty-five weeks of baseball is (inexplicably, impossibly) somehow just twenty-five hits. "You get just one extra flare a week, just one, a gork, a ground ball—a ground ball with eyes!—you get a dying quail, just one more dying quail a week and you’re in Yankee Stadium. You still don’t know what I’m talking about, do you?" We do, though (unlike Ebby Calvin "Nuke" LaLoosh, but it's okay; he'll get there; he's still young). That it's true on the level of the individual, then, is well-established for us, but it's no less true for the team, as impossible as that feels by the end of the long season. Last year, the Blue Jays won ninety-four, and kept going; this year, just seventy-nine, and there's nowhere else to go. But what's fifteen games over twenty-five weeks (what's Hecuba to him, or he to Hecuba)? If we'd won even one more game every other week, we'd be in clover, well and truly. But with a full rotation's-worth of hurt and hurting starters, and very nearly nobody hitting all year, this is where we've ended up, and quite rightly, I suppose. Still, it was wonderfully heartening and legitimately moving to hear the ninth-inning chants of the standing 42,131 who filled the SkyDome for the last Sunday afternoon of this strange fiftieth season. In some ways, it was a tough summer. But with a little luck, we'll see another. Let's go, Blue Jays.

KS

Reds 5, Blue Jays 1: Honestly A Little Sloppy

 

the undeniable Elly de la Cruz, ladies and gentleman

Statistically, the Blue Jays have been, on the whole, an above-average defensive team this season, which is undeniable in the aggregate, but it sure hasn't been evenly distributed, has it? Vladdy has been really good at first; Valenzuela and Kirk have been even better at the plate; Giménez remains one of the top infielders in the game; and young voltigeur Brett Bateman has impressed already. But outside of that, it's been tricky: left field, in particular, has been a sore spot all year (and think of how many balls get hit to left field! it's so many!), of course, but its the strange plight of Ernie Clement that has proven the most troubling. He still makes the occasional semi-spectacular play (a nice dive to his left after an able scurry on a groundball in the eighth Saturday, for instance), but he's made a hash out of far more routine (or nearly routine) plays this year than you'd ever have expected. That drag of a fact, coupled with Ernie's sad decline at the dish in the second half (he is among the worst hitters to receive regular playing time since the break), makes one wonder if a return to a utility role (rather than an everyday second baseman) may be in his future? I say all this, but neither of the Blue Jays' two errors yesterday (not that errors necessarily tell the whole tale of course [they did not on this day]) in a fairly flat 5-1 loss were Ernie's, but rather one was charged to young first baseman Sean Keys, and the other to the not-just-gold-but-indeed-platinum-gloved Andrés Giménez. But both in Saturday's game, and the season more broadly, the defensive troubles, such as they were (again: still above average! believe it or not!), would be much easier to ignore were the Blue Jays anything other than the lowest scoring team in baseball (six-hundred-forty-three runs sounds like a lot until you divide [usually division is fun, but in this instance, it is not]). But we sure are! And that, even putting aside the truly insane number of injuries sustained by our starting rotation, goes pretty far in explaining why we enter Sunday's final game of the season already assured of last place in the AL East (the Orioles hold the tiebreaker on account of their recent sweep [you may, alas, recall it!]), rather than last year, where Alejandro Kirk's first-inning grand slam against the Rays in game one-sixty-two helped us clinch the division with a ninety-four win season. We all agree that was better; there's no reason to belabour the point.  

KS

Blue Jays 6, Reds 5: A Four-Run Seventh! Like, For Us!

 

is first base, socially, a "third space"?

Counseled by his lore-wise father Vladimir Guerrero Sr. (aka Dadimir Guerrero [I can't believe this has not caught on outside of my home]), Vladdy offered brief words of regret Friday about the totally reasonable and indeed sympathetic things he has said recently about the way things have weighed on him throughout this difficult season that now draws to its close. "Sorry you got mad about it, but this says way more about you than it does about me" (words, to be clear, he did not speak) would have totally sufficed, in my view, but Vladdy arguably chose the more sensible path of trying to get beyond it all as soon as possible. "I regret my comments the other day," Arden Zwelling reports Vladdy to have said. "I felt from my heart that my fans and my teammates needed an apology from me. I'm going to continue to work hard to make my contract great." This seemed to largely appease (if I may) "the haters," which is quite odd, in that that final sentence is no different from anything he has said or done previously, and yet "the haters" are seemingly now like "uh, finally" about it. Baffling! And yet it seems to have been the thing to do; his father was right. "He told me what I did was wrong and to make sure that I do what I’m doing right now—to give my fans an apology." Senior has been around for a minute; he knows how these things work (also do you remember how it was almost heartbreakingly beautiful to watch him play baseball? because that's something I remember quite clearly). For my part, I found this discussion between Nick Ashbourne and Andrew Stoeten to contain so close to all of my thoughts on the subject that it might as well have been literally all of them (there's no practical difference), including, but not limited to, that, yes, if you chose to take everything Vlad said in the absolute least charitable way possible, it's true that anyone already mad about him, anyone looking for the coarsest possible explanation for the inexplicable ("Vladdy is not trying to be good at baseball anymore because he is like 'got paid, lol'"), was pleased to feel that they had yet more reason to be mad, or that their existing grievance had been validated by Vladdy's scheming indifference, or whatever, but that if we afford him anything even remotely approaching the amount of charity and grace we would do well to afford all people at all times, it is entirely impossible to have minded any of this at all. Ashbourne, with whom I find myself often in agreement, ventured, too, that the way in which Vladdy plays and carries himself (joyously, as Ashbourne characterizes his aspect simply and perfectly) inevitably crashes, and at times crashes hard, against the craggy shore of "playing the game the right way," a fading (yet persistent) miserable redassery that, as Ashbourne notes, is inescapably racially (we can add, too, nationally) coded. And if we think any of that can be avoided, even in a city as wonderful (and with as many historical and ongoing ties to the Caribbean) as Toronto, the answer to that is of course a regrettable but hard "nope" (indeed, it could be argued to rank highly amongst our hardest and most regrettable nopes). Anyway, if you would like to listen to a discussion of all of this silliness by reasonable people ("reasonable" in the sense that they broadly agree with me, rather than with my foes [who don't even know they are my foes; it's sad, really {for them, not me}]), I would say the above-linked podcast is really your only hope to do so. 

To baseball proper, though, as in the game itself from Friday night: oh hey we won! And in a fun way! A four-run seventh to come back from a game we'd been trailing five-two for seemingly ever! The highlight, for me, was Vladdy's RBI single, and I like those to begin with, but this time, the broken barrel of Vladdy's bat followed the ball as it made its way towards the pitcher's mound and redirected it into right field beyond the second baseman's reach; I have honestly never seen anything like it. Have a look! The Reds' dugout afterwards was kind of like, is that okay? Is that a thing that is okay? And the umpires, to their credit, all got together, shrugged for a little while, and essentially concluded that, I mean, yeah, I guess it has to be, right? And play resumed, as it so often does.

KS

Orioles 4, Blue Jays 2; Orioles 4, Blue Jays 2 (Doubleheader!): Formally Cooked / De Jure Washed

 

tell me a tale, Sad Vladdy

The blow of the Blue Jays' second 4-2 loss to the Orioles on the day arrived pre-softened by the first, I think it fair to say, the one that mathematically brought our postseason chances to their material end (their spiritual end, for me, came late Saturday night, when, as we have previously discussed, I felt compelled to start a Samsung Note anticipating next season's twenty-six-man roster [I honestly think we'll be better! .500 at least!]). I have less experience of doubleheader baseball than most baseball fans of my age and interest, I would suspect, since the guys of my ongoing choosing have played in a (sky)domed stadium since I was ten, and the other team I very much enjoyed but whomst are alas no more (nos amours) played very much beneath a(n unspeakable, in their case) roof also for a good long stretch (and certainly by the time I visited their doom-cursed stade). Of the several hundred baseball games I have attended in classic reality (this number comfortably exceeds two hundred, but falls well short of three, I believe [I should check my notes]), none have been threatened by rain for more than a few minutes (quick quick close the roof it is raining so hard and the field has no proper drainage oh no), and so no doubleheaders for me. They're neat, though. 

Between games one and two, on this occasion, a good deal of silliness, in my view, began to pop off when a clip from a long interview Vladimir Guerrero Jr. had recently sat in Spanish began to be disseminated and widely derided. Vladdy, rather than answering all questions in the manner the Toronto media demands (oh yah definitely; gotta keep the shifts short; get the puck deep; shots on goal; set the tone; oh yah definitely), spoke honestly and openly about his struggles this season and his feelings about them. I am only capable of catching as much Spanish as anyone who is comfortable in French but with little proper experience of the language, which is to say, it's not nothing, but it isn't any good, and in particular, anything colloquial or idiomatic at all is going to elude me completely, so I am entirely beholden to translation, in this instance credited to Veronica Batista, as I understand it (my apologies if this credit is mistaken). Several reputable Spanish speakers of the baseball internet as I experience it are of the view that this translation is fair, and I for sure take them at their word: "I want people to understand one thing. The money they gave me wasn't for what I'm going to do. It was for what I already did. They didn't pay me because I'm going to hit forty every year. They paid me for what I already accomplished. People are confused about that, but I think the same way they do. Like, sometimes I even say to myself: bro, they gave you all that money and you're out here doing nothing. I try. You know how it is with fans: when you're good, they're with you one-hundred percent. But when you smell like shit, like we like to say here, nobody supports you. The ones who support you are the ones who stay with you. Those are my fans. My family." You can probably guess which parts of this, excerpted infelicitously, have people who have spent the season literally mad (like actually mad) about Vladdy's baseball-playing troubles even madder still. Asked about all of this between games, Vladdy elected to remain a human being with dignity. In response to a question about his season-long back injury, Héctor Gómez reports him saying, "I've been dealing with a back injury all year; it's not a very serious injury—some days I wake up feeling fine, and other days I wake up in pain—but that's no excuse for the bad season I've had. I've felt depression and anxiety. There are times when I've called my dad late at night to open up to him." Keegan Matheson shared another Vladdy utterance: "Every at-bat when I fail, I think about my contract because I know all of these people who go to the games, they pay to see me being successful, to do something good every at-bat. Every time I think about that." Though a clamouring press offered repeated opportunities to reconsider and recant his humanity, Vladdy declined: "No. I don't regret myself. I'm not lying with what I say. I understand some fans, they don't understand the way, what I was trying to say specifically, but what I said is the way I feel."    

Perhaps predictably, I am not upset about any of these several things that Vladdy said about this difficult season (indeed, I am in sympathy with them), and I mind a good deal the way that seemingly many have chosen to be unkind about all this (though the fault here is certainly my own for reading and listening, obviously). I don't even want to get into the specific grievances I have come across other than to say that I find none of them even slightly compelling. One of the ways a good number of people seem to want to engage not just with baseball, but with sport generally, is to be angry about it, and unsparing, and I don't have any interest in being either of those things as part of the fun hobby that I enjoy. To each their own on this, I suppose.   

And with all that, we head into the final homestand of the season, three against the Cincinnati Reds, who we rarely see, and with whom I have no real quarrel. You might be surprised how often I recall the Reds' four-game sweep over the Oakland A's in the 1990 World Series, a feat that seemed inconceivable at time given the existential fact of Rickey Henderson and Oakland's overall propensity to bash. Mind you, that was a number of years go.

Let's all do our best to enjoy this final weekend of baseball, friends! The last games are always more than a little melancholy (melancholic?) but I bet we'll get through it. Maybe there should be hot dogs, and even root beers (root beer floats?); I don't know. 

KS

Orioles 4, Blue Jays 3: Not Yet Mathematically Cooked (And Yet Cooked)

 

that's right

Among the many things that have changed throughout my forty-or-so years of baseball interest (but who's counting [haha I'm very old!]), the use of relief pitchers (and their "relief pitching") certainly ranks fairly high as far as the overall impact on the game goes, probably; I do not think this would constitute even a lukewarm take, would it? Within that broad category of bullpen usage, and the several changes attendant thereto, one difference that seems fairly minor compared to some others, I would say, is how the modern manager is loath to deploy the same reliever three days in a row, lest both efficacy and indeed elbow-non-explosion be risked somewhat. Only in rare circumstances—like, say, you were by necessity in a "win-out" approach in a last-ditch effort to snag a postseason spot in the final week of the season—would the modern manager likely deploy even the heartiest reliever three days in a row. And so it was that John Schneider sent the steadfast Tyler Rogers (who, if you go to FanGraphs at all, has been even better than you probably think this season) to the mound Monday night in Baltimore, his third appearance in as many days, and so it was that baseball's most loveable doofus Pete Alonso (this video of how nice he was to the guys who caught his three-hundredth home run is so nice, like just insanely nice) hit his second home-run of the night, this time a two-run homer to give Baltimore a lead (for the first time all night!) in the bottom of the eighth. A drag, from the perspective of this Blue Jays partisan! And all of it happened later than it otherwise might have on account of a fairly significant rain delay, which made the experience even more "oh fine" than it would have seemed at a more reasonable hour. The rain, or more specifically the rain-soaked outfield, seems to have cost us everybody's new bestie Brett Bateman, too, temporarily at least, as he went down in a heap after sliding awkwardly to make a hard-charging catch (you'd have sworn it was his knee, but apparently the brunt of it was borne by his hip, which to me is a terrible body part to injure, because it happens rarely enough that part of the problem one experiences in addition to the discomfort is also the disbelief that it is your hip, of all things, that is hurting this much ["no, it's my freakin' hip," one can sometimes be heard to remark {about it} in such circumstances]). The rains kept coming, too, moving Tuesday night's came to Wednesday afternoon, as part of a doubleheader that is actually just getting underway at this, our present moment of composition. If the Blue Jays lose either game today (or if a few other things happen, none of them esoteric or obscure), that will be a wrap, officially, on the long sought-after WC3, but I am totally ready for it; you will perhaps recall that I have already started the Samsung Note that implicitly concedes defeat (to the White Sox, specifically, but to the universe more broadly, too). Max Scherzer today, though! Let's enjoy it! He's so weird!    

KS

Blue Jays 7, Rangers 2: Hey Man I'll Take It

 

you know who has been okay? Nathan Lukes, is who

The four-run seventh was fun! It did, however, come after Vladdy (one-for-two with a single) had been pulled from the game with further tightness in his back, and after it had been revealed that Dylan Cease had flown back to Toronto for an MRI that would, in the fullness of time, reveal no concern greater than generalized inflammation, though that is concern enough to end Cease's season, unless, say, the Blue Jays were still in some sense in business (the business of getting into the postseason, specifically) next weekend as we wrap the season against the Cincinnati Reds (such a classic team; let us welcome them as such). All of that feels ever more doubtful with each passing day, of course, as the Blue Jays remain three games behind the White Sox with just six, now, left to play; and, what's worse, the White Sox hold the head-to-head tiebreaker, meaning that, functionally, we'll need to play four games better than they do over, again, just six games. Tough to do! FanGraphs playoff odds down to 3.6%! Despite how we were in the WC3 spot just a few weeks ago! Mutability is indeed our tragedy, but it is of course also our hope (the worst of times, like the best, are always passing away). "No man can ever truly be secure until he has been forsaken by Fortune," Lady Philosophy told a guy one time, and it can be hard to know how to feel about that sometimes.  

KS 

Rangers 6, Blue Jays 2: Seemingly Quite Sunk

 

I do enjoy a good "ready position" regardless of context though
(Alejandro Kirk is such a beauty)

By the time Vladdy walked in the fourth to give the Blue Jays their first baserunner on a night when Texas starter (and Team Canada WBC stalwart) Cal Quantril (son of Paul! remember Paul?) left in the second due to injury (we wish him the best), we were already down by three, and one of those three Texas runs had come in on, of all things, an Andrés Giménez throwing error. As I remarked to a pal at the time via the medium of SMS text messaging, when it gets so bad that even Giménez is making run-scoring throwing errors, it feels like that's pretty much a wrap, doesn't it? Last night made it eight losses in our last twelve, which I think we will all agree has been way, way less fun than that long stretch where we won twenty-three out of thirty-five and were among the top teams in baseball over that fifth of the season (it was our best fifth by so much!). Though we remain the yet-to-be-dismantled elms (to say nothing of the geese) as far as actual mathematical elimination goes, to be three games back with seven to play, and with a rotation as patchwork as ours, and with the bats still largely scuffling (credit to the recalled Davis Schneider where it is due, though, as his first-pitch pinch-hit homer in the seventh left the yard in a hurry), things are feeling pretty de facto, with de jure just stopping off at the store for a couple things on the way home real quick. A dark confession, friends: things felt to me so certain after last night's loss that I found myself composing a Samsung note (on my computer phone) speculating on the composition of the twenty-six player major-league roster for next season. I share it with you now.

What is perhaps more damning still is that I found myself earnestly thinking what an awesome group that could be, even without any additions via trade or free agency, and how almost nothing would actually have to break our way to get us back not just to .500, but, with any luck at all, well beyond it, too. I am truly hopeless (which is to say, I am hopeful).

This afternoon, it's borderline-Hall-of-Famer Jacob deGrom on the mound for the Rangers against our own Spencer Miles, who I suppose will probably be used more or less as opener, but whom, as you can see from the legally-binding Samsung note posted above, I think would make a very fine addition to the starting rotation next season should be be sufficiently and successfully "stretched out," as they say. If we can squeak one out today, and the White Sox lose, it's two games back with six to play, with only the Astros (just yesterday bumped from the AL West lead by these same Texas Rangers) tucked in between. Not impossible! Still 4.8% at FanGraphs! That's down a little from 43% a week ago, sure, but, at the same time, it's only the second-lowest of any non-zero odds listed in the projections! Take that, 1% Baltimore Orioles! Who are literally just a single game behind us! Anyway, there's still baseball to be played, and still afternoon chores to be done, and satisfactions to be found in both. So let's go. 

KS

Rangers 7, Blue Jays 1: Unideal!

 

that's about the size of it, Dylan Cease; that's just about the size of it

In what was I suppose the worst start of his Cy-Young-votes-for-sure season, Dylan Cease was charged with but one earned run, though two more came in on an Ernie Clement error (our concerns about all aspects of Ernie Clement's game only deepen), and he walked six guys (six!) whilst throwing seventy-four pitches (relatively few of them strikes) in just two-and-two-thirds innings. As a worst start of a whole season, you'd generally take it, right? The timing, though, made this one a drag, in that the Rangers, about whom I have never worried even once this season, have now snuck past us by a game. It is worth noting that a White Sox loss leaves us the same two games out of WC3 that we were when the day began, but two games out with eight games to play is really a good deal worse than two games out with nine games to play (the 14.5% playoff projection at FanGraphs reflects this). Not a lot to enjoy in this one, in all honesty, aside from young lefty Brendan Cellucci continuing to impress, and a major-league début for the enormous José Rodriguez, whose windup is reminiscent of nothing so much as the NES Bases Loaded series (to me): 

This is a six-foot-six man all scrunched and coiled as though he were participating in an 8-bit representation of Japanese baseball; and I am, of course, here for it. I am here, too, for José Soriano's start tonight (I will set aside for a moment my strong preference for Saturday afternoon baseball, rather than the evening), which seems crucial to anything we might hope to accomplish in what remains of this strange season; it very much figures as a load-bearing start, which I'm sure must be at least as much fun for Soriano himself as it is for the rest of us.  

KS

Blue Jays 5, Tigers 1: Hoo Boy, We Needed That One, Didn't We

 

remember when those condos on the third-base side 
started showing up in video games? it was, and remains, neat to see

Even before our ancient, AL East-of-yesteryear rivals the Detroit Tigers made errors on three consecutive plays in the sixth, we were already doing just fine ("Hey, no, listen, listen, I was winning before this guy got here," Matt Damon pleaded truthfully [though it was an incomplete truth] before things went poorly for both he himself and his silly little buddy Ed Norton at the state troopers' poker game). But we'll take all the help we can get! Thanks guys! Those three errors paired wonderfully with the Blue Jays' nine hits and, even better still, with Max Scherzer's five innings of one-run baseball (that is a premium kind of it, obviously). Mason Fluharty, who has appeared in a fairly ludicrous seventy-nine games this season, Rule-5-legend Spencer Miles, and Louis Varland (back on the horse!) took it the rest of the way to salvage all that could be (salvaged) of an on-the-whole somewhat dispiriting series against these Tigers. That first game was a real stinger, wasn't it, and will no doubt prove memorable should we end up precisely a game short when all is said in done in another week-and-a-bit. I'm not sure if I have mentioned this previously, but although my preferred outcome the rest of the way would of course be that we squeak on into the final playoff spot and, by virtue of the the fairly reasonable matchup that would offer us against the underwhelming AL-West-leading Astros, and the strength of the front-end of our rotation (Cease, Soriano [let us not speak just now of how nearly all the rest of our guys are in various stages of rest and/or rehabilitation], away we go into a three-game opening round series that would realistically be a coin toss, the second-best outcome, as far as me and my feelings go, would just be to fully crash out, drop like four or five in a row, and finish like six or seven games back—far enough out, that is, that things end up too far gone to pin the season on any one particular blown game, or on a single underperforming player, or anything like that at all. In the increasingly likely scenario that we miss, I would like the margin of that miss to be such that the culpability must, by necessity, be broadly shared. It's better for everybody that way, and perhaps unaccountably, for me in particular?   

I let the above (baseball) feelings just kind of chill about for a bit while I awaited the results from the (Home Hardware) out-of-town scoreboard on the Blue Jays' Thursday off-day, and they indeed broke relatively well from our perspective: a White Sox win (go, Murakami; do it for the pope) knocked the Guards out of first place in the AL Central and cast them back down into the realms of wild cardery (which is where we want them, as we hold the tiebreaker over them [but not, alas, over the White Sox]), and a late Red Sox comeback over the Rangers leaves us tied with them (the Rangers, I mean, not the Red Sox [haha oh no not nearly the Red Sox; oh my no]), two games behind Cleveland for WC3. And so the road ahead is really quite clear: this weekend, in Texas, where the centre-field camera in their new ballpark is just way too high and everything looks bad because of it, it would behoove the heck out of us to take no fewer than two of three, which shouldn't be altogether too much to ask, given that we've got our big three scheduled to take the mound (Cease, Soriano, and "bullpen day"). I honestly haven't even checked who Cleveland will be playing this weekend, though that is of course totally relevant, too; let's just see (we'll learn together!) . . . okay, the Guardians play the league-worst-but-for-the-Angels Athletics, which is not super promising for us, unless perhaps, as losers of their last three, the A's are due? What if the gambler's fallacy is not only real, but in fact a friend to us, one that will engender the realization of our innermost wishes desires? You can't rule it out! Not entirely!

KS

Tigers 10, Blue Jays 1: The Path Narrows

 

altogether too much of this sort of thing

Well that's no good at all! Our bullpen days have been, as you know, really quite something this season, but now that we are down to just the three healthy starting pitchers (of the eight or more [depending on how you figure things] with whom we started the season), it is proving taxing-as-all-heck to be doing this every few days, as opposed to once out of every five. That the bats did not especially bat last night is immaterial, if we were going to pitch like that; and, if we weren't going to hit at all, how we pitched doesn't matter a lick either, so maybe everyone is blameless? A plausible line of argumentation, I think, but another is that we quite simply stunk, and did so considerably. Cleveland won, so we're now two full games behind with just ten to go, and Texas won, so we're even a half-game behind them, too! Oh man! If we go on some kind of wild tear over these final ten games, we can still totally get to where we we would like to be (or at least where I think we might like to be [I find it complicated {emotionally}]), but with the starting rotation in just a ravaged shambles of a bunch of guys, with Yesavage and Bieber still a little ways off (and with Jameson Taillon, who we'd suspected was finished, now officially done for the season), it's going to take some genuine weirdness of this to break our way. We've got Max Scherzer going this afternoon (getaway day! always a pleasure!), and his most recent start was quite poor after a couple of really good ones (and one legitimately great one). He'll always give you everything he has, Scherzer will, but, at age forty-two, there is always a non-zero chance that his arm will literally fall off of his body and onto the mound, which, among other complications, makes it difficult to grip the slider. So I guess we'll just see. 

KS

Tigers 6, Blue Jays 5: What About My Heart, Though

 

tell me about it, José Soriano; tell me about it

After putting two runs on the board in the first (an Alejandro Kirk RBI single, then a wild pitch to bring George Springer scurrying home), the Blue Jays loaded the bases in both the second and the third, but failed to add to their early lead. But no matter! Because, would you look at that, José Soriano has a perfect game going through five! And a no-hitter going through six! Anyone who has watched a significant amount of baseball will recognize the dark phenomenon which unfolded before us in that seventh, though, in which a no-hitter becomes a multiple-run several-hitter in alarmingly quick fashion. It's no fun when that happens! By the time we got through that doomed top-half of the seventh, we were on the wrong end of a four-two score and yet it was no great matter on account of a characteristically towering three-run home run from the hot-as-the-super-hottest-fire Kazuma Okamoto (his thirty-third of the year, which is really something) to put us up late! And our bullpen rules! So we're good! And yet we were not: Joe Mantiply, who has given us no trouble at all this season, got touched up in the eighth such that the call for a five-out save fell upon Louis Varland, our stoutest of stalwarts (and most stalwart of stout guys), who just could not, on the whole, get it done Monday night: most troublingly, in the ninth, he was charged with a straight-up-whiffing-on-the-ball error on a nice throw from Vladdy on a tough play at first; Louis turned his head to look towards the base just an instant ahead of when he should have, and *whoop* there goes the ball, trickling away as the soon-to-be-winning run scampers in. Weighty though all this felt (the crowd was awesome), it was only Varland's second blown save (le sabotage!) of the season, and he has been so great (exceeding even the loftiest expectations) all you could do was accept it all as a true "pobody's nerfect" moment. The White Sox, thankfully, handled the Guardians in the first meeting of their three-game series that is sort-of-possibly for the AL Central title, and so we remain just a game back (and a half-game ahead of the lurking Rangers) with now eleven games to go. Just eleven! I see that Braydon Fisher is the scheduled starter tonight, which no doubt means he is "opening" more than starting, and one would assume a good deal of Spencer Miles (as much as we can get!) behind him? Had a bullpen day not been in the cards for the Tuesday game, one wonders if Spencer Miles might have appeared Monday? But there's no use worrying at it: Sewald to Mantiply to Varland was obviously not a bad plan at all after Soriano; it just didn't work out. That's baseball, Suzyn, as the late John Sterling would famously say (to Suzyn, primarily, but its wisdom exceeds those bounds, too).

KS

Blue Jays 8, Orioles 1: Vladdy Got One

 

"yes sir, there she goes; let's admire that one" as an old friend used to say

When Vladimir Guerrero Jr. hit a fifth-inning home run off of a lightly hanging Logan Gilbert curveball to put the Blue Jays up five-nothing in Game Six of the 2025 American League Championship Series against the Seattle Mariners last October (watch it here, should glory rank amongst your interests at all), who could have believed that it would be Vladdy's last home run in the SkyDome until the following September? Probably pretty much no one! For sure not me! And yet this turned out to be very much our situation. When it finally came, this long-awaited dinger, it did so as the middle-dinger in the Blue Jays' first back-to-back-to-back home runs struck since 2012: then, it was Colby Rasmus, José Bautista, and Edwin Encarnacion (I bet you would not have guessed more than two of those names, and I furtherly bet I know which two [same here!]); Sunday, it was George Springer, Kazuma Okamoto, and also Vladdy, tuckled right in between the two as previously mentioned. The crowd did not treat it lightly, nor did they treat it even the slightest bit Bronx-cheeringly, or anything, but instead greeted the moment with earnest celebration and encouragement, so much so that, with a little nod from John Schneider, Vladdy gave them a curtain call at the end and everything. I will admit to feeling a lot of feelings in that moment, and to have, in the realm of the spirit, fallen to my knees in the Mr. Sub located on Bloor Street West opposite the old Varsity Stadium (in the material world, I was simply at home, conventionally seated). The broadcast handled it like the strangely big moment that it was, too, offering no fewer than five commentary-free presentations from different cameras (having just watched some Vladdy postseason homers, and now this one, something that I prefer about regular-season home runs is watching first a few, then a few more, then just about everyone in the crowd stand up as they realize the ball has a chance; this is of course less the case in postseason contexts, where most if not all of the crowd is already standing in anticipation of the big moment [they sneak up on you a little more throughout the course of the long season), and playing CeCe Peniston's "Finally" not once but twice (two non-consecutive occasions!). "I believe in God, you know," Vladdy told Hazel Mae afterwards. "And it's not when we want, it's when God says, 'today's a homer.'" And how did it feel, Vladdy? "To me it's like, it feels so fucking good. Sorry guys. Sorry for the language. Sorry, sorry. But it feels good, you know, it feels good to hit it. I hope many more to come." A swear! A palpable swear! On a Jr. Jays Sunday no less! The crowd understandably loved it. The television broadcast was on enough of a delay that they caught it and muted their way around it, but it came through on the radio loud and clear, proving yet again that radio truly is the medium most decorous with the game (baseball on television? a great time, no question, but a little obvious; baseball on the radio? a gentleperson's pursuit).

Amidst all the understandable relief and excitement of the Vladdy dinger, let us not overlook that it came as part of a four-hit day for him, too, in which Statcast data suggests Vladdy's earlier double high off the wall in right-centre would have itself been a homer but for small swirl of wind that knocked the ball down eleven feet. Is Vladdy back? One always wonders, doesn't one? You may recall that after a long, late-season homerless stretch last year, Vladdy's remark to his teammates in the dugout (and indeed the call from Dan Shulman and Buck Martinez in the booth) following his ALDS Game Two grand slam against the Yankees (his second home run of that still-young series, and my preferred home run in all of Blue Jays baseball, no big deal) was the he was "back." The expectations surrounding Vladdy since he signed as a sixteen-year-old have only ever been such that when he's doing anything less than being more or less the best hitter you've seen (consider, for example, the whole of last October), the question "what's wrong with Vladdy?" persists. Obviously this season has been significantly different, as there really has been something wrong with Vladdy (though by fWAR, he has already surpassed his 2023 season on the strength of much-improved fielding and baserunning), but Bo Bichette made a great point when he was back in town with the Mets earlier in the season: though Bo did not dispute that Vladdy was undeniably having a down year, he reminded us that "what's wrong with Vladdy?" questions had been a feature of every season the two had played together, despite all the All-Star appearances and MVP votes and the lot of it. Pressure is a privilege, and all that, I suppose. Hazel Mae's last question after the game was, "You've told me that the support of your fans and your teammates has meant a great deal. Why?" To which Vladdy replied, "Because they know I'm human. I try. Believe me." 

All of this would perhaps have been for naught, we should note, had it not been for the performance of Dylan Cease, whose start had been pushed back a day for extra rest given velocity concerns arising, no doubt, from his huge workload in his Cy-Young-contending season (he seems likely to finish behind only Cam Schlittler). It was another one of those weird ones where you can see Cease struggling, and throwing just so many pitches that it's not reasonable to ask him to go more than five innings, but at the end of those five, he's allowed just one run and struck out nine. It's been remarkable. The first started poorly for him, with a walk, a single, and another walk to load the bases with nobody out. But a crucial full-count ABS challenge by Brandon Valenzuela turned what would have been ball four and a run into strike three by the slimmest of margins, and two swinging strikeouts later, everything was cool, and Ricky Tiedeman, who was already up in the pen in case the first totally fell apart (a true playoff feel in this one right from the get-go), could, in relative terms, relax a while.

The Twins, alas, did us no favours against the Guardians in their Sunday afternoon affair, leaving us a game behind for the final Wild Card spot . . . or are we, we might well ask, having come across this medium-depth dive into the remaining schedule not just for the Blue Jays but the Guardians and, curiously, the slumping White Sox in equal measure. Its encouraging conclusion: because of the Cleveland/Chicago series that begins tonight, and the fairly incontrovertible fact that no fewer than one team is going to lose each of those games, the Blue Jays are in no meaningful sense trailing in their pursuit of WC3, in that, should the Blue Jays "win out," as they say, the worst-case result would be a tie with the Guardians, over whom we hold the tiebreaker. No one is expecting, certainly, that we're going to win all twelve remaining games (wouldn't it be weird though?), but the point (and it is well taken!) is that with this dozen games to go, it's all right in front of us: we are not in a position where we need any help or lucky breaks on the (Home Hardware) out-of-town scoreboard for this to happen (though, personally, sign me up for all the help and luck you've got). I am pretty stoked about it. 

KS

Blue Jays 7, Orioles 3: Also It Was Sunny

Vladdy, having been sent

An RBI-double and a couple runs scored for Vladdy, plus home runs from both Alejandro Kirk and Brett Bateman (his second in as many days! also the only Blue Jay to have ever had more hits in their first thirty games with the team is Bo Bichette!) gave our <<bullpenistes>> (Miles, Mantiply, Arrighetti, Fluharty, Sewald, Rogers, Varland [also the actual French for bullpen is l'enclos des releveurs; I am just joshing about) more than they needed on this pretty much ideal Saturday afternoon of baseball. What's more, the Twins (aided by a scoreless inning from Jeff Hoffman) held on against the Guardians, so here we are again, just the one game back of Cleveland for WC3 (should you ever find yourself wondering about WC2, I would say probably don't, as the Red Sox are six games ahead, which at this point of the season is functionally infinity-minus-one games [and the less said about WC1, the better]). It really is looking like it's going to all come down to the final weekend of the season, isn't it? The last time that was really the case for us, in an in-or-out sense (last year's AL East title came down to the very last day, thrillingly, in the Alejandro Kirkk game, but those are different stakes), was of course 2021 (as Baseball Felt here), the season that ended, as you may recall, with Marcus Semien's all-too-true statement that "we became the best team in baseball, but it was a tick too late." Even given the insane extent to which last year was obviously the year, I still sometimes find myself feeling that maybe 2021 was the year? However our weird present season ends up, exactly, it seems unlikely that it will lay as heavy as that one. But who knows!  

KS

Orioles 7, Blue Jays 4: And Yet It Was Never Nearly That Close

 

that's thirty-year-old rookie Rudy Martin Jr. to the right,
called up in the wake of the Jésus Sanchez DFA
(he seemed really nice but, alas, stopped catching
[and also sort of hitting])

We all remember Chris Bassitt, right? A three-year stalwart of the Blue Jays rotation who selflessly pitched crucial innings out of the bullpen as part of last year's miracle run to the World Series? One of five Blue Jays pitchers to allow a single run in the ill-fated eleven-inning Game Seven of that very same series? One among the relative few pitchers to wear a glove with a modified-trapeze web, far and away the most æsthetic of all baseball glove webs? (I admit that this last point will be invisible to all but the true baseball-glove sicko [it is okay if you haven't noticed that we are living in a baseball glove golden age right now but we completely are.]) Well, there he was, Chris Bassitt, pitching for the Orioles Friday night! And he pitched well (two runs over five), not that he especially needed to, given his old pal Max Scherzer's disastrous second inning, in which the O's scored five runs on, among other things, six straight hits (that's actually so many hits to happen all in a row). Homers from both Kazuma Okamoto and, later, Brett Bateman (his first! he's been so great! he is already the best part of the Kevin Gausman trade! isn't that weird!) gave the final score the appearance of a much more competitive game than this one ever really felt like after that brutal five-run second. The Friday night crowd was a little better about it all than you might expect, with many more chanting "Vladdy" in encouragement than the few lightly booing his groundouts, but it it was a dispiriting affair; there's no getting around it. This one-sided loss, coupled with the news that Saturday's game is scheduled as a "Big Spaghetti" Spencer Arrighetti-heavy bullpen day now that Dylan Cease is being given an extra day of rest (his velocity is noticeably down as we near the end of the long season [hey: mine too, man]), doesn't make for a super cheerful start to the weekend. It of course remains true, however, that you never know. 

KS

Athletics 2, Blue Jays 0: A Relatively Rare Bullpen-Day Loss

honestly a little surprised at how Braydon Fisher grips
his knuckle curve but that's good; I am here to learn

I'm sure "bulk guy" Michael Lorenzen would have rather not allowed those two runs (one each in the third and fourth), and I imagine he would have hoped to have added more bulk to the game than his two-and-two-thirds innings provided, but you'd definitely have to say that this was another bullpen day that worked: six guys (Fisher, Lorenzen, Sewald, Mantiply, Rogers, and Varland) allowed a combined two runs on just four hits and two walks, and as I look at the box score now (which always offers something pleasingly different than our direct experience of the game itself, doesn't it?), I learn that it was Lorenzen who allowed all four of those hits, and one of those walks, meaning I guess that the walk issued by Tyler Rogers in the seventh was the only other A's batter to have reached in the whole game? Really? Man, everybody did even better than I'd thought! Except for the the bats, though, the beleaguered bats: six hits, three walks, but a couple of double plays, and a couple of deep fly balls that died on the track, and that's how you end up shut-out on a day where almost anything at all would have been enough to take the series and turn a totally fine five-and-four road trip into a profoundly triumphant six-and-three one, but alas. I was hoping we might benefit from a little nominative determinism when A's pitcher Scott Blewett entered the game, but no. 

At least it all happened on a day when the teams directly ahead of us (Cleveland) and behind (Texas) both lost (we extend our thanks to the Orioles and Mariners respectively), and so we remain a game back of the Guardians as we head into a weekend series against the Orioles, whom we actually play a bunch over these final fifteen games (six times!). If this weekend goes poorly for the Orioles, that might be more or less it for them; if it goes poorly for us, there's a chance we're still in it, but I would like our chances a whole lot more were we able to grab two out of three. It looks like we'll have Cease and Soriano ready to go, and Friday night, if I am not mistaken, is shaping up to be Max Scherzer vs. Chris Bassitt, which sounds pretty neat to me. September baseball! Scoreboard watching! A generalized sense of unease! Let's go!  

KS

Blue Jays 4, Athletics 2: (Still In) The Thick Of It

 

Big Oak, watching it go

How can there only be sixteen games to go? The baseball seasons, like the seasons themselves, seem to leave us faster every year. If they are going to keep on receding at this present pace (or worse!), how pleasing then, that sometimes Josh Smith and Kazuma Okamoto will hit back to back home runs; that the Blue Jays will tack on two more in a sixth-inning rally; that José Soriano, who came to us in our best trade for a starting pitcher since the José Berrios deal, will go seven strong innings on a night when the bullpen really needed the rest (ahead of Wednesday afternoon's bullpen game); and that Rule-5 legend Spencer Miles can take it the rest of the way. Just a genuine pleasures, this one. And so here we sit: back at .500, still a game back, with the Guards winning earlier in the evening, but pretty hopeful. Wouldn't a win this afternoon to wrap-up the road trip be just the ticket?      

KS 

Athletics 6, Blue Jays 5: On A Cease Day, No Less

 

there was kind of a lot of this (five stolen bases is plenty)

Two constants throughout this, our weird fiftieth summer of Blue Jays baseball, have been the top-of-the-league excellence of both Dylan Cease and Louis Varland in their closely related respective fields (of striking guys out in slightly different portions of baseball games). Though it is an unfair and unrealistic expectation, it's gotten to the point that you don't really figure Varland will allow any runs at all, ever, though last night, he did (just the one, on an unplayable walk-off infield single not all that long after what replays showed should perhaps have been an inning-ending third strike on an imperfectly checked swing, but what can you do). And as for Dylan Cease, you'd never expect five runs in five innings, though that's how things went last night (one run was unearned, as a botched rundown between home and third saw poor Kazuma Okamoto pick up two errors on the same play, the second logged as "throw," which happens to everybody, but the first as "missed catch," which stings [and in fairness to him, the rundown should probably have ended before Kirk's throw that Okamoto officially missed]). The game-tying, top-of-the-ninth home run from Andrés Giménez, much like the Blue Jays' three-run rally in the seventh (that ended, alas, with Giménez picked off at second), was rad, but ultimately proved just ever-so-slightly insufficient. A drag! Especially when a win would have put us right back into that final playoff spot. There's still time for that, though, and we've got José Soriano going tonight, which is promising. It is a shame (though an entirely understandable one) to have used both Rogers and Varland in what turned out to be a loss, as one wonders about their availability if not today, then in tomorrow's bullpen day (I had incorrectly thought Scherzer would start Wednesday, but no, he's going Friday, after the off-day Thursday). Maybe we should put up a bunch of runs early and just coast?   

KS

Royals 6, Blue Jays 1: Big Spaghetti In Ruins

 

the pronated wrist suggests a changeup, does it not? unless our guy
has started throwing a screwball without telling (I would tell everybody if I could throw a screwball) 

A couple of big swings—one off the bat of the venerable Sal Perez for three runs, the other coming from that of the Pasquatch himself, Italian WBC legend Vinnie Pasquantino, for two more—had Spencer Arrighetti and his pals (your Toronto Blue Jays) down early, and down they stayed, a condition aggravated somewhat by the Guardians' third walk-off win in four games (all coming against Detroit [figure it out, Tigers; jeeze louise]). And so the Blue Jays fall a game off the pace. However! We are off to Sacramento to play the long-suffering A's, with Cease, Soriano, and Scherzer lined up for the series, whereas the Guardians will be dealing with the still-slightly-in-it Baltimore Orioles to start the week. The good news and the bad about that Guards/O's series is the same news, and it is that in each of those three games, one team we would like to lose will for sure lose, but but one team that we would prefer to see lose will necessarily win (did you know they still do tie games in the ol' 日本野球機構 Nippon Yakyū Kikō? kind of neat, right?). So long as we're winning, though, we're in good shape! And actually, at this, our very moment of composition, I see now that the Guards fell to the Orioles 6-4 in Baltimore earlier in the day, and we've got Dylan Cease going for us tonight, so you've got to like those chances, right? 

KS

Blue Jays 4, Royals 3: I Guess This Is Happening?

 

Vladdy and Big Oak at the corners

All it took against Kansas City on a sweltering Saturday night (thirty-six degrees at first pitch!) was Max Scherzer to be good, the bullpen to be great, Kazuma Okamoto to put up four hits, Nathan Lukes to add three more, and just like that, the Toronto Blue Jays have won seven of their last eight to tuckle right in to that final playoff spot (we hold the tiebreaker over the Guards) with a record of seventy-one-and-seventy, which, I am sure you have already noted, puts the Blue Jays above .500 for the first time since they were four-and-three back in early, early April (it also brings the team's all-time record from 1977 to present to an even-steven 3927-3927, though I recognize not everyone will be as interested in that aspect of things [personally I feel like taking the long view]). Chief amongst this game's many delights, to me, was Vladdy's first inning, indeed both halves of it: in the top, after having singled tidily to right, Vladdy scored from first on an Alejandro Kirk infield single (we have spoken about those so many times) and a Josh Rojas throwing error that afforded just enough time (not an instant more!) for Vladdy to chug all the way around and evade Carter Jensen's swiping tag at the plate with the niftiest little hook slide; and in the bottom half, Vladdy scooped up a ground ball at first and fired a laser to third to hang up the stutter-stepping Joe Caglianone dangling of third, tagged out by Okamoto to help Scherzer get out of a tough inning (is Vladdy the best-throwing first baseman you have ever seen? I ask because he is the best-throwing first baseman I have ever seen [I think they should still play Vladdy at third a few innings a season just for fun and also for the glory that may be won]). Even in just about the worst season you could imagine for Vladdy, he remains a truly delightful guy.

Do we dare dream of a series sweep with "Big Spaghetti" Spencer Arrighetti on the mound Sunday afternoon? He will not be working behind an opener, I have read, but is rather just going out there and starting. It's a bold plan, unconventional in its conventiality, and I am keen to see how it plays out. 

KS

Blue Jays 9, Royals 2: The Tremendous Gift of A Four-Run First

 

our new friend Michael Lorenzen with that rare-most of saves 
(the one you get for pitching three innings in a blowout)

Name-Suffix Guy Daniel Lynch IV's very first pitch of the ballgame came at Brett Bateman as though Lynch had meant to hit him, a fastball just absolutely buried in Bateman's front hip, nowhere to go. Nobody thinks it was on purpose, and there is absolutely no discernible reason why it would have been, and nobody reacted as though anything untoward had happened at all, but that's how badly he missed, is all I mean to suggest. From there, three straight singles from Vladdy, Kirk, and Okamoto combined with an Ernie Clement double gave us a four-run lead in the first, and you've really got to work to blow one of those; you've almost got to go out of your way. Instead, we took it easy, and cruised to a 9-2 win over these nattily-attired Royals (the best City Connect jerseys in the game, now that the Padres have switched theirs up? the Out Sports publication, for their part, note that "[t]he new Royals City Connect jerseys are super bisexual") in what turned out to be a sneak-attack of a bullpen game: Jameson Taillon, newly returned from the Injured List, pitched just two innings, and is headed right back to it (the Injured List, I mean), with a problem he descries as feeling "more nerve-y" than the previous one (uh oh), and is probably out for the rest of the year (would you believe we have had ten starting pitchers hit the IL this year? not ten pitchers, which would be bad enough, but ten starting pitchers, as though the starters particularly, rather than the pitching staff broadly, had been visited by an especially specific witch's curse). But everybody did great! And that we got three innings from our new friend Michael Lorenzen (who, when pitchers still hit in the NL, could totally hit; perhaps we should approach his time with the team from a "we have Shohei Ohtani at home" perspective?) sparing the rest of the bullpen its precious, precious pitches (you only get so many, unfortunately, and then your arm explodes).

And so with that, the Blue Jays are back to the .500 mark for the first time since June 23rd, when the astronomical summer was but days old, and the lived reality of summer (the school-year summer, the one that begins in earnest with Canada Day) still a week away. Were we ever, it is customary to ask, so young? Dare we venture a game above .500 for the first time since April, when we were four-and-three? This is a clear "dare to be great" moment, and my sincere hope is that we seize it.  

KS