"La saison morte," comme on dit en français

every night my dream's the same

Hello friends! It has been some time, hasn't it, since last we spoke? If you can cast your mind all the way back to November last (first off: were we ever so young?), you may recall that we had just then enjoyed (to varying degrees, certainly) quite possibly The Best Postseason in Baseball History, as The Atlantic's Steve Rushin posited in his fine article bearing that very title (but with a question mark at the end [needlessly, in my view; needlessly]). I find no fault with his argumentation: it was certainly the best postseason of my own long experience (it occurs to me that the 2020s are the fifth decade of my baseball enjoyment), made all the more rewarding/untenable by the deep involvement of my favourite iteration (the 2025 one) of my favourite baseball team (the Toronto Blue Jays) by a lot (on both counts). That it ended as it did, well, that's baseball! And that is of course precisely what we have been without in these late-autumn and winter months since—baseball, I mean. Or have we though? Does not the offseason set before us a months-long opportunity for deeper study and engagement, unburdened by the baseball season itself and the many exigencies of its dailyness? Probably, right? So what have I been up to, baseball-wise? Great question! 

I) The Literary 

After a season richer and more harrowing than any of my previous experience, what better companion with whom to sort it all out emotionally than Roger Angell, the inventor, essentially, of baseball feelings in the contemporary understanding? To that end, I have spent time with The Summer Game (1972), Five Seasons (1977), Late Innings (1982), and, at present, Season Ticket (1988). It seems inevitable that I will turn my attention to both Once More Around the Park (1991) and perhaps even A Pitcher's Story: Innings with David Cone (2002) once Season Ticket is behind me. More exciting still: as part of the New Yorker's 100th Anniversary, the complete archives have been properly webified, and all Roger Angell pieces are there! Every one, so far as I can tell! This is a great relief, as I have misplaced the thirty-five-or-so years of them I photocopied over the course of several days at the Robarts Library at the University of Toronto in one of the early summers of this our present century. And while you need a New Yorker subscription to get absolutely everything (and hey, fair enough [maybe you could do it through a library, though?]), there are lots and lots of excellent things that are just there for everyone to see without one. Have a look! Before diving headlong into the Roger Angell œuvre, my first stop this offseason was the fairly remarkable Joe Torre/Tom Verducci The Yankee Years, which I have read several times now. Composed at a time when Torre was really quite bitter about the way it all ended for him in New York, it is a much more revealing book than you might expect, and Verducci's framing of everything offers us, almost incidentally, perhaps the best single-volume overview of what we have come to call The Steroid Era. From there, I finally polished off Robert Coover's 1968 The Universal Baseball Association, Inc., J. Henry Waugh, Prop., a postmodern novel of baseball simulation surely of interest to the postmodern baseball simulationist (if to perhaps few others). That there is a fairly gross and utterly witless undercurrent of misogyny to the whole thing is how you can tell it's a postmodern American novel of the 1960s! Ah, the life of the mind! Oh hey, on the topic of baseball simulation . . .

II) Simulacra/Simulation

In addition to some rousing games of ソフトボール天国 Softobōru Tengoku/Softball Heaven (the superior Japanese original of the already sufficiently awesome Dusty Diamond's All-Star Softball), in which I was able to defeat (before witnesses! I have witnesses!) the final "Amazons" team— a Nintendo challenge more daunting, in my experience, than defeating 8-bit Mike Tyson—and some delightful RBI Baseball with updated 2025 rosters (an extraordinary public service, the creation of these rosters), I spent a good deal of time playing a full season with the expansion Chatons de Montréal in MLB POWER PROS for PS2, and whilst setting astonishing single-season home run records with both Vernon Wells and David Ortiz en route to our World Series title before the multitudes gathered at Local Ballpark (the "Bean Tank" advertisement on the left field wall adding a crucial new term to the baseball lexicon [usage: "Vernon Wells with a three-run bean tank to put the Chatons ahead for good in the eighth"]), I have become completely POWER PRO'd: in addition the IRL Power Pros PS2 disc that has lived in my basement for many, many years now, I have assembled, well, an assemblage, I guess, of Jikkyō Powerful Pro Baseballs on my computer, and find them to be my favourite actually-controlling-the-guys baseball games ever, for sure. You know the way that some people are, understandably, about EA Sports MVP 2005, the one with Manny Ramirez on the cover, that those guys in Burnaby made one time? Or the way others are about MLB: The Show 2010 (the first of the back-to-back Joe Mauer covers), rather than anything that has come out since? Well, I have become that way—I have become at least that way—about Power Pros. I don't think I'd ever actually felt compelled to play every single game of a franchise mode season in an actually-controlling-the-guys baseball game before, but I sure did this time around, and, beyond that, the World Baseball Classic mode in 実況パワフルメジャーリーグ2009/Jikkyō Powerful Major League 2009 is probably the most fun I have had playing a baseball video game ever (young Joey Votto? on Team Canada? yes please!). There has also of course been a good deal of Baseball Mogul (and a little Out of the Park, but I continue to have much more fun with Mogul). This time around, I began with the formation of the American League in 1901, and moved the Athletics from Philadelphia not just to my city, but specifically to my neighbourhood; my park (like the actual park by my house) has become their park. On account of how I entered the economic and population data accurately, we do face certain (acute!) financial challenges, but have Moneyballed our way to the pennant in both 1902 and 1903, taking the World Series from the Pittsburgh Pirates in seven games in the latter (can we replace Nap Jajoie? no, but we might be able to recreate him in the aggregate). Have we fallen a few games behind the pace set by the Boston Pilgrims in 1904? Sure we have, but I'd much rather be us than the St. Louis Browns right now! Or, worse still, the New York Highlanders! Good luck to those guys! They're gonna need it! Running more Baseball Mogul, and listening to/reading any old Clay Dreslough interviews I can find (here's a great SABR talk he gave a few years back), and watching some pretty nifty videos at the Baseball Replay Journal YouTube account, has me thinking more than usual about the history of baseball simulation broadly, which (along with just being sort of old, and having been with all of this stuff for a long time now) has led me to reflect on . . .     

III) Baseball Nerdery from A Lowkey History of Science Perspective

It's been five years now since FanGraphs' David Laurila asked Bill James to update the player rankings he published in 2001's New Bill James Historical Baseball Abstract as the twentieth anniversary of that weighty tome's publication approached. (You'll recall, perhaps, that book being the partial début of Win Shares, a conceptually important but soon surpassed effort at an all-in, Wins Above Replacementesque measure.) Even if Bill James has largely spent the intervening decades being just an awful crank who beclowns himself fairly regularly with statements that are utterly indefensible (both morally and intellectually!), these twenty minutes or so with David Laurila are great fun, probably the only post-Carson Cistulli FanGraphs Audio material that I have returned to several times since it first aired (perhaps not an apt term in the steaming age). Put those two intervals together (the five years, and the the twenty before), and man, it has been a good, long time that I have been interested in all this stuff in this particular way, it occurred to me. There is, of course, an element of "yikes" to this, but also, I am feeling like trying to sort the chronology of all this stuff out, a little? Here's something concrete that occasioned a bunch of reflection along these lines a little while ago: one of the most useful sortable statistics available to you in Baseball Mogul, should you be looking to upgrade your batting performance at a particular position, say, is RC/27 (Runs Created per 27 Outs). Runs Created is an old Bill James statistic that you can complicate in any number of ways to make it both more precise and more accurate, but that you can express as simply as OPB (On-Base Percentage) times TB (Total Bases). If you do that on the level of the team, you'd be surprised how closely that lines up to actual runs scored (give it a try!). For most players, that super simple formula is good to within about 5%. Neat, right? Now divide that RC number by twenty-seven (the number of outs recorded, you will recall, by most teams in most baseball games), and you've got the number of runs you would score if your whole batting order was made up of that one guy. Compare that to whatever league average has emerged in the league you are simming, to name one of surely a million uses, and you're having a great time! OR ARE YOU, if you are doing anything other than playing Baseball Mogul, where RC/27 still thrives, or Out of The Park, where I am pretty sure it is still there but as I have not updated since the one that came out in 2020 I cannot say for certain? Outside of those very, very specific contexts, RC/27 has proven to be too beautiful for this fallen world of ash and soot, except if you go to Fox Sports, click on "Batting II" (it didn't even make "Batting I"!), and there you will see that an army of Aaron Judges would have scored 12.02 runs per game last year, whereas a like squadron of Shoheis Ohtani, though next in line, would produce a still-remarkable but comparatively scant 8.83 runs (they'd pitch better, though). And would you look at that, old man George Springer comes third at 8.54, a fair bit better than Juan Soto's 7.75. "Unc's still got it," as they say! See how much fun we're having already? 

And yet the modern world seeks to deny you such pleasures. Witness this December 12, 2008 post by FanGraphs Dark Overlord Dave Appleman, innocuously titled "wRC and wRAA." Weighted Runs Created? Weighted Runs Above Average? I love those guys! Those guys are great! They'd never hurt me! No, they wouldn't, but Dave Appleman would, purportedly in their service: "Tonight we’ve completed the phasing out of Runs Created (RC) and Runs Created per 27 Outs (RC/27). In their place you will find two run stats based off wOBA, which is a sounder metric than the previously used Runs Created." Sounder, sure, but as neat? Anywhere near as neat? And even if it was, why get rid of RC/27? Fielding Independent Pitching is a sounder metric than Earned Run Average, but you didn't ditch ERA! You still have that one there! Among others that we know longer esteem all that highly! "Big thanks to Tangotiger," Appleman continues, "for both creating the stats and walking me through how to calculate them correctly!" (Curse you, Tom Tango [also not his real name], whom I remember well from the boards; even before I knew it was you, I knew it was you.) And so we're left scrounging around "Batting II" at Fox Sports, of all places, for RC/27, as it has held no place of privilege—indeed, no place at all—at FanGraphs since late 2008, and, to my not inconsiderable shame, I can't for the life of me remember if it was ever even a thing at Baseball Reference.  

Ah yes, on Baseball Reference: for about a week in January, I spent an absolutely inordinate amount of time on, in, and around Baseball Reference as I decided to finally sign-up for an account to play the Immaculate Grid game in a way where it would track first my stats (they're pretty good!) and also which guys I pick the most to fill out the various squares (by kind of a lot it's two-time Nova Scotia Senior Baseball League MVP Matt Stairs! [he tied for the NSSBL league-lead in saves, too, in his first MVP season {1987}). As an outgrowth of playing the better part of a thousand grids in a matter of days, and clicking through to who-knows-how-many different guys' pages, it really got me thinking about the whole edifice of the thing, and how pleasantly unchanged it is, in terms of its basic presentation (you can query it in a zillion ways now; I just mean the way it looks and feels), since I first started visiting it in 2001 (I do not think I visited in 2000, the year of its founding). This led me to seek out all recent material I could find on Baseball Reference founder Sean Forman, which I found to be pleasantly in keeping with what I remembered of him from those early days (of Baseball Primer and the baseball priming it so oft occasioned). Stating his goals simply one time, Forman said that the project was essentially to connect the pages of The Baseball Encyclopedia, a copy of which (first edition! 1969! great condition! these remain fairly inexpensive!) sits beside me as I type this (Roger Angell reviewed the 1974 second edition as part of a New Yorker piece, bemoaning its sad inferiority to the first, then added a cheerful note when that essay was later collected, once the 1976 third edition had righted many if not all of those second-edition wrongs).   

In short, I have been trying to reconstruct my own personal engagement with (gestures broadly) all of this, which has led me to try to reconstruct aspects of the history of these things in general so far this century, much of which, unfortunately, has been documented much less thoroughly than Dave Appleman's (lamentable, lightly offensive) late 2008 note about RC and RC/27. A precursor to all of this reflection, actually, was a notable walk to the store where I attempted to lay the groundwork for a screening of Moneyball by asking my exceedingly patient teenaged interlocuter, "Not that you'd ever need to, but if you had to limit yourself to one single baseball statistic that was the most important in evaluating batters, what would it be?" When the answer returned was "it'd have to be Wins Above Replacement" as though this were self-evident (it is! if you were born this century!), I was struck by how much has changed in what is really not all that long, but which is also long enough to begin to consider it all historically, a little? Hey, do you know what else is both i) little and ii) historical? Well, I'll tell you . . .     

IV) Old Baseball Cards, Which Are Cheap and Plentiful, The Way I Do It

Team sets! Why not just put together team sets! Of your favourite team! You already have so many of them, if you are willing to un-set your existing complete sets, and that'll get you started! From there, you can find team sets readily available from online sellers, or just build them out of listings of common cards, and so long as you are looking at things from the last fifty years (rather than before), and provided you are after no rookie cards of Hall of Famers (an Expos team-set-buildist is a little bit cursed in this regard; the Blue Jays team-set-buildist is in this respect comparatively unencumbered [a further note on rookie cards: if you look at baseball card pricing guides from as recently as the late 1970s, rookie cards weren't valued in any significant way, and were roughly on par with cards of established star players in a given set! Rookie cards are a social construct! You can simply refuse it! It only has the as much power over you as you grant it!]). Common baseball cards are interesting, in that nobody values them especially highly, yet at the same time they are valued highly enough to be kept tidy and neat for decades, listed for sale, and then mailed to you for scarcely any dollars at all (plus shipping, which is only fair) compared to the price of packs of just about anything current you'll find at the store (if only Topps would sell one series a year of no-insert, guaranteed-to-be-worthless cards for like two bucks a pack, I would buy a box or two every year; but no, they will not). I'm telling you, friends: team sets. Team sets.  

V) The Literary Again, But In French This Time

I continue to make my way through l'édition intégrale (1969-2004) of Il était une fois les Expos by Jacques Doucet and Marc Robitaille, and I'm all the way up to 1987! That's like seven-hundred pages in! Only five-hundred or so to go! It is both a lovely read, and also a dark one, because the authors—both of whom clearly love the Expos as much as anyone can love a baseball team—do not shy away from just how early and just how doomed everything was: le Stade Olympique was only ever a miserable boondoggle that kept you miles away from the field (unlike the intimate and mourned Parc Jarry [my mother went once, before I was born]); virtually nobody would show up to Expos games in the spring until after the Habs were knocked out of the Stanley Cup playoffs (which, in those years, was often late); ownership immediately regretted and bemoaned paying Gary Carter any money at all (not great for player relations!); André Dawson, after he left town for Chicago, was so relieved to play in front of fans that did not boo so much (I have always felt a kinship with André Dawson, as his name appeared on a glove of my youth [the finger parts never felt great but I did not hold it against The Hawk then, nor do I now); and as early as 1986 there were serious concerns about the long-term viability of the team as a business—none of this is any fun! But amidst all that sadness about baseball, there's still the baseball itself, and the month-by-month, week-by-week, series-by-series accounts of each season of Expos baseball are so enormously fond that I am enjoying this as much as any non-Roger Angell baseball book I have read. It is a shame that no English-language edition has appeared in the fifteen years since Doucet and Robitaille finished their extraordinary work, and I wonder if the comparatively slim Up, Up, and Away (the title goes on from there, but it's awful) by the rightly disgraced Jonah Keri that came out a few years later satisfied whatever English-language appetite that may have existed for Expos history. A shame! Perhaps Les Éditions Hurtubise will have a change of heart about it at some point? Until such, personal translations for private use are as close as we'll get, I suppose.

VI) Cinéma, But Only Lightly

You have perhaps heard of Eeephus, a small film by Carson Lund that played the festivals and was enormously well-liked critically? I enjoyed it, but I think I am even happier about its reception than I was with the actual film itself, maybe. It's nice when a movie of this modest scope and scale garners as much fond attention as Eephus did. I was surprised but pleased to hear Will Sloan of The Important Cinema Club list it as among his favourite films of the year. The GUYS guy loved it, too. Bill Lee's appropriately Bill Lee-ian cameo in the film led me to watch Brett Rapkin's 2016 Spaceman biopic (it's on Tubi) with Josh Duhamel (as the titular spaceman), which, oddly enough, I hadn't done before. I found it well-intentioned but careless, full of unidiomatic French baseball expressions and signage (needlessly so! Baseball Reference has you covered! Jacques Doucet coined a lot of this stuff! it's all coming together!) and seemingly nobody who could pronounce "Longueuil," which came up a lot (Eric Gagné, who appeared briefly, no doubt could have, but the script did not call upon him to do so). (I watched Bull Durham [also on Tubi!] real quick right after on that same night to restore my faith in the potential of baseball cinema.) As a further and final instance of everything coming together here, which I mentioned a moment ago parenthetically but will now say openly and unencumbered, only recently did I learn that the 2009 edition of Baseball Mogul was marketed as Bill 'Spaceman' Lee's Baseball Mogul 2009, with a cover that more than overcomes any deficiencies in its graphic design (if any can even be said to exist [I claim no expertise]) with the bold inclusion . . . of tarp. 

my friend Mike looked into buying
a sealed copy just to watch
the surely disappointing DVD
but it was like thirty bucks

Amazing, right? I even found a less cluttered version of that same cover image, where you can see that Bill isn't wearing a glove, which removes the possibility that what he is trying to do in that photo is track a pop up or fly ball:

deep tarpcore æsthetics

We are forced to conclude that Bill is trying to read the title of the game, but that it's tricky, on account of how he is behind it, and it would be all reversed to him. 

And so we will end here, I suppose, as we began this post, with sports photography of exceptional quality and accomplishment. If you scroll all the way back up to that Muppets shot (of unknown provenance, I am afraid), you'll note that not only is Kermit a lefty, but that Fozzy is that rarest of bears, a left-handed catcher! Look closer still, and you'll see that Animal, batting left, has taken a cross-grip on the bat as though he were a young Henry Aaron before he was coached out of the habit (it all worked out well enough for Henry Aaron; I'm not knocking the move). These are the sorts of details the off-season provides us an opportunity to weigh and consider, and I am grateful. Pitchers and catchers do report this week, though.

KS

2025 World Series, Game Seven: Dodgers 5, Blue Jays 4 (F/11)

 

nearly enough

Of all the teams that have ever lost the World Series, none have come closer to winning it than my favourite baseball team, the 2025 Toronto Blue Jays. We can say this, confidently, without even taking into account the shattered-bat Alejandro Kirk double-play grounder (off of a zero-days-rest Yoshinobu Yamamoto splitter) right to Mookie Betts that left Vladimir Guerrero Jr., who had ripped a double to left field to open the home half of the eleventh inning, stranded as the tying run at third base to end the game, the series, and the season all at once. We needn't reflect in any great detail, either, upon Will Smith's home run in the top of that same inning against the stalwart Shane Bieber, nor yet the top-of-the-ninth, game-tying Miguel Rojas home run against Jeff Hoffman, who had pitched a stronger October than anyone could have hoped for, for this to be true. All we need to attend to, to clearly demonstrate this to have been the closest anyone has ever come, or could possibly come, to winning a World Series without in fact winning it, is a bottom of the ninth that first saw catcher Will Smith's foot lightly lift off of, and then just as surely barely return to, home plate just ahead of a sliding Isiah Kiner-Falefa, and then, a batter later, bear witness to defensive-replacement centre-fielder Andy Pages' headlong run both over and through Kiké Hernandez at the warning track to snag, and somehow hold onto, an Ernie Clement drive that, off the bat—and for a little while after, too, as Kiké desperately twisted and turned, dashing back helplessly, if not hopelessly—seemed all but certain to walk it off, and place Ernie Clement's name close enough alongside Joe Carter's for there to have been little to choose between them. Had either of those moments gone even the slightest bit differently, think what that would have made of Bo Bichette's towering three-run home run to the deepest part of the ballpark off of short-rest Shohei Ohtani a single pitch after Vladdy had been intentionally walked in the third; or of the incredible performance turned in by Max Scherzer, who shook off a miserable season to deliver another October befitting his inner-circle Hall-of-Fame career; or of Varland and Bassitt and young Trey Yesavage coming on in fine relief; or of the incredible defensive plays turned in by Varsho in centre and Vladdy (again and again) at first; or even of Ernie Clement (who now holds the record for the most hits in any postseason ever, at thirty, with Vladdy just behind at twenty-nine) and Andres Gimenez, at the bottom of the order, scraping out a fourth run late enough in the ballgame to feel like it might be just enough. All of those moments happened—they were real, and they mattered—but of course figure much differently now, given what followed, set against what might have.

As things unraveled—first in slow motion, then all at once, as is so often the case—there were moments in the game that were enormously difficult to watch. But, at the same time, I don't want to overstate that aspect of things. It took me about half an hour, I can see now, as I look at the messages I sent to some of the friends I share baseball with, to shift from the obvious and unavoidable sadness of it all to a feeling of genuine gratitude for the season. In fact, I used that exact language of sadness and gratitude; that is how hard I go in the chat. "This was my favourite baseball team ever, and they lost in extras in the best world series I have ever seen," I seem to have continued a moment later, at 1:54AM (all times Atlantic). "Will that 9th, and to a lesser extent that 11th, haunt me forever? Sure, a little!" When talk understandably turned to Hoffman's ninth, I offered only that "he was fantastic all October," and that I had no appetite for pinning it on him, even if that is precisely what he himself did, I would learn a little later, as he spoke in sombre tones to the press (I'd expect nothing less of him, honestly, but it's not how I feel, and I don't think it's how his teammates feel, either). In fact, here's the rest of what I posted (just as the autumn time change turned 2AM back into 1AM) to give you a sense of how raw I felt about things in the immediate aftermath, which you will see is not in actuality all that raw, I don't think, given the circumstances: 

"the bats had every opportunity in the 9th and it just didn't happen

if you want a single moment, imo it is IKF's lack of a secondary lead off third on the Varsho grounder

if he's even close to a normal amount down the line, I think that play goes differently

but at the same time Varsho is a guy who gets the ball in the air a tonne, so what are you gonna do   

Will we ever get closer during Vladdy's fourteen remaining years with the team? Probably not!

On the other hand, if we won this year, what purpose would Vladdy even have for the rest of his many playing days? It's good to have goals to work towards.

Let's keep trying to achieve them together, Vladdy."

My friends, as you have no doubt already surmised, are enormously patient people. But the morning after, I don't even feel right to have been as passingly hard on Kiner-Falefa as I was last night. Did we not see innings cut short earlier this selfsame series by liners hit right at guys, and guys subsequently doubled off of bases they hadn't been leading especially far off of? It happens! It's real! Is Daulton Varsho not a left-handed batter, which clears a throwing lane for the excellent Will Smith to fire a back-pick attempt to Max Muncy, playing reasonably close to the bag at third, should IKF be caught dangling? Kiner-Falefa was not on the roster, and was not put into the game, because he is any kind of burner with high-level baserunning acumen; rather, he was on the roster, and put into the game, because he can play a solid second base, and run better than this still-injured version of Bo Bichette who could only, for instance, go station-to-station in an early-inning rally that ended up scoreless this very same game. (It's incredible that Bo played at all, let alone hit as he did, but he simply could not run in his current condition.) If Miggy Rojas had not made an excellent throw (while falling!) after fielding a tough top-spin hop, or had Will Smith's foot lifted off the plate for a fraction of a second longer before returning atop it, nobody would have any interest in IKF's secondary lead, or would have anything to say about it at all; they'd instead be talking about how sharply he scampered home from third to win the World Series on a ball that never left the infield. But so it goes.

In the clubhouse after the game, there were some enormously poignant moments. I've already mentioned Jeff Hoffman's self-recriminations, which were hard to hear. A lot of attention is understandably being paid to Ernie Clement, whose heart is never far from his sleeve: "All I care about is just hanging with these guys for another couple hours." Vladdy, now one of the greatest October performers in the history of baseball, stood fully in his station, thanking the fans, apologizing to the city, but speaking almost exclusively about how proud he was of everybody. A reporter asked a question about seeing Vladdy comforting his crying daughter, and wondering, who will comfort him? "It's a game, it's a game. We lost a game," he said through his translator. "God will help my daughter, and myself." Shane Bieber was extremely grateful to have been a part of everything; Bo Bichette, taciturn as ever, said it was a great group that achieved some pretty cool things, and that he was proud of the guys (hey me too, Bo; me too). Of all the interviews I've seen, it was Chris Bassitt's that really got me, though. It's always been clear that he's an intense, emotional guy, but this was really something. "You can try to replicate this," he said in response to a question about next year. "But it's hard to replicate true love." I didn't actually see or hear Max Scherzer speak, and it's probably just as well, given what I've read of what he had to say. I don't think I'd have done too well with it. "I'm forty-one years old," Scherzer is reported to have said, wiping tears from his eyes. "I never thought I could love baseball this much."

KS

2025 World Series, Game Six: Dodgers 3, Blue Jays 1

 

oh no

When potential Game Seven starter Taylor Glasnow, of all people, came out of the Dodgers' bullpen in the bottom of the ninth inning of Game Six, with runners on second and third and nobody out in a 3-1 game, Ernie Clement had a chance to win the World Series with a single swing of the bat. It had taken a moment for the madness of Addison Barger's double-that-got-stuck-in-the-wall to settle, but as soon as it did, the full weight and potential of Ernie's at bat came into focus. For the third inning in a row in this closely contested, thoroughly well-pitched game, the Blue Jays had two runners on, but this time with nobody out. You look ahead only slightly, and think: even if neither Ernie Clement, who has been hitting everything all month, nor Andres Gimenez, whose nearly every hit this postseason has produced a run, manage to make things happen here, we'll still get to the top of the order, and George Springer will come to the plate as the potential winning run (the potential World Series winning run). The three-run, World-Series-winning homer is asking an awful lot, obviously, but consider, too, that were Ernie able to so much as dunk a little chip-shot single into the outfield, it's probably a tie game (Barger, though no burner, but runs well enough). But Ernie, swinging on the first pitch as he so often does to such great success, popped out to Freddie Freeman. One down. 

And so it was Andres Gimenez, whose cool and calm professionalism all admire, with 2017 World Series MVP George Springer on deck behind him. This still all felt pretty good! But two pitches later, Gimenez popped out to shallow left, and Kiké Hernandez doubled Barger off at second, with ancient gloveman Miggy Rojas heroically digging the ball out of the dirt on a wicked hop before Barger—who, in his bottom-of-the-ninth eagerness, had taken a step or two too many towards third—could scamper back. The gross improbability of this finish was made all the grosser by an unusually compelling Kiké Hernandez postgame interview (and Kiké Hernandez is, to me, already a compelling guy generally), in which he noted that he was playing even a little shallower than he had been instructed, and that he'd totally lost the ball in the lights, but had dashed in upon hearing Gimenez's bat break (in real time, I had neither heard it break, nor did I see it do so, at first). It was an extraordinary read by a player who has long been extraordinary in the postseason, for whatever reasons, and the adeptness of Miguel Rojas' dig at second really can't be overstated—how many times does Rojas scoop that out of ten? I say in all appreciation of his fielding acumen that I don't know that it would be most. It was not lost on me that, on this team of future Hall-of-Famers, with hundreds and hundreds of millions of dollars in salary (hey: get it while you here, boy), it was Kiké and Miggy Rojas who made the deeply improbable play that keep the Dodgers season going at least one more day; this turn of events, as so much of what happened in Game Six, felt like baseball in its truest expression. Addison Barger, for his part, as he himself noted after the game, made a bad read. Simple as that. He was not alone in it: Joe Davis, the fine Fox broadcaster, seemed to think the ball was going to drop in (off the bat, I thought so too, and not merely out of hope), whereas Dan Shulman's voice turned towards dread pretty quickly (perhaps he had noted Kiké's unusually shallow positioning?). You may recall that in Game Seven of the Blue Jays ALCS win over the Seattle Mariners, the one George Springer turned around with his three-run homer in the bottom of the seventh, it was Cal Raleigh left standing in the on-deck circle as Jeff Hoffman struck out the side in the ninth. As Game Six of the World Series ended last night, it was George Springer standing with the bat on his shoulder. So it goes.  

Lest the whole game shrink to that one wild inning, let's remember that the Blue Jays' pitchers retired the Dodgers in order in seven of the game's nine frames. That's right: seven three-up, three-down innings. Kevin Gausman struck out the side to open the game to the cheers of maybe the loudest first-inning SkyDome crowd I have ever heard, and had the splitter dancing all night. The three-run third on big hits from Will Smith and, at long last, Mookie Betts was, of course, the ultimately insurmountable problem, but three runs on three hits and two walks, striking out eight batters in six complete innings, you'll take that from your World Series Game Six starter against the Los Angeles Dodgers for sure. And the Blue Jays again had their chances against this peak version of Yoshinobu Yamamoto, but two double plays in the early innings ended any real threats beyond Springer knocking home Barger's double in the home half of the third. The Blue Jays never led this game, not for a single moment, which is what makes the feeling at the end of the game so strange: we never led, never even seemed likely to lead, but kept it close enough that we brought two batters to the plate in the bottom of the ninth with a chance to win the World Series on the next pitch. But then we didn't.   

This was a tough one, for sure, and though I am not a person especially given to gloom after baseball games, I did sit for a good while afterwards with the feeling that we may very well have missed the best chance we're going to have to win this thing, even if that chance came in a game we were never, in fact, winning. I spent a little time last night saying goodbye to the season. But of course, at this point, goodbye is really the only thing that remains to be said to this, the most wonderful baseball season I have known, or feel likely to ever know, in that it ends tonight (or early tomorrow), regardless of how this final game plays out. There can't be any more baseball. It'll be Max Scherzer, of all people, on the mound for the Blue Jays, followed, of course, by everybody (Yesavage up next? Bieber?). While there remains some question as to how the Dodgers will arrange their pitching, the alignment that makes the most sense to me (for what that's worth!) is Shohei Ohtani as the opener, to keep his bat in the lineup when Tyler Glasnow comes in to pitch afterwards. If anyone but Ohtani, Glasnow, and Sasaki touches the ball for the Dodgers, I would be very surprised (unless, I suppose, it were Yamamoto, on no-days rest; I think that would leave me surprised, but not very surprised, given all that we've seen). 

Taking the broad view, this has already been an all-time classic World Series, one that in a sense deserves a Game Seven. And so, as baseball fans, we should be grateful that that's what we're getting. It's true, too, that there is no one who would not, at the start of any given baseball season, eagerly accept the chance to see their team play in Game Seven of the World Series that October (or indeed November, as we have it now). All of these things are exceedingly the case. But, at the same time, I really can't tell you how much I wish this was already in the bag! In this, I am a very small and narrow-minded partisan. And I will live within that smallness for at least this last day, hoping for a truly lopsided, Game-One-style, endless-dingers, Blue Jays trouncing of these excellent Los Angeles Dodgers, though I hold no real animosity towards their very likeable players, their amiable manager Doc Roberts, or the seemingly agreeable fans that gather in such multitudes at their beautiful ballpark. Do I anticipate such a drubbing? Or even, necessarily, a Blue Jays win? Oh by no means! I am actually feeling unaccountably resigned and fatalistic! But all the same, I'll be here, enjoying the snacks that I've already arranged (and that have, in kindness, been arranged for me), amidst this last game of the season of my favourite baseball team ever, the 2025 Toronto Blue Jays. "Okay, Blue Jays," they will sing at tonight's seventh-inning stretch, as at so many before, but for the first time—the only time it'll ever happen, you'd have to think— at the seventh-inning stretch of the seventh game of the World Series. "Let's play ball." 

KS   

2025 World Series, Game Five: Blue Jays 6, Dodgers 1

hey good job Trey

You would think that back-to-back home runs to open a World Series game for the first time ever—Davis Schneider's on the game's very first pitch, Vladimir Guerrero Jr.'s on its third—would be the most remarkable aspect of the contest in which that actually somehow occurred. And it did rule a lot; please do not mistake me. But both of those mighty wallops (Schneider's was sufficiently mighty, while Vladdy's felt almost excessively so [it was the hardest swing measured in like forever {save a little wallop for the rest of the guys, please, Vladdy}]) went down before Trey Yesavage had even taken the mound. Once he did, it didn't take all that long to see that something probably even more significant (in the baseball sense) was taking shape. Before Sandy Koufax himself (he turns ninety in two months! and he stayed for all eighteen innings the other night! what!), Trey Yesavage struck out twelve, walked none (he did hit Freddy Freeman's foot, bouncing one in on an 0-2 count), and allowed just three hits (a home run to postseason stalwart Kiké Hernandez, and two dribbling infield singles for the usually-clubbing Téo) in his seven totally riveting innings. As the evening played out, there would be a new "first rookie pitcher to" or "first World Series game in which" every few batters, it seemed, but the one that stands out most to me, I think, is that this was only the third time a pitcher had struck out the complete starting lineup of an opposing team—like all of their guys, at least once—in a World Series game, the other two having been Bob Gibson in 1968 (arguably the greatest season by any pitcher ever, though he took the loss in Game Seven of the World Series that year after striking out seventeen in Game One and ten in Game Three [baseball, man; what can you even say]) and Randy Johnson in 2001 (some say 2001 Randy Johnson is striking out Yankees to this very day). 

Aside from these two historically wild occurrences—the game-opening dingers from Davis Schneider and Vladdy; Yesavage repeatedly slicing up a lineup with three definite Hall-of-Famers (poor Mookie, by the way) in full-on Bob Gibson/Randy Johnson mode—it was Blue Jays baseball the rest of the way: a great catch from Addison Barger on a screaming Ohtani liner that, given its apparent trajectory and exit velocity, should be a base hit roughly infinity percent of the time (I have not looked into the specifics); an Ernie Clement sacrifice fly to plate Daulton Varsho's triple (a gift from the irrepressible Téo and his enigmatic routes, that triple); and a few more late runs eked out on good baserunning, Dodger miscues, and a Bo Bichette liner ripped to the wall (which, in Bo's current state, was but a single). (On Bo, briefly: his .313/.389/.313 [average/OBP/SLG] in the World Series feels nearly miraculous after seven weeks away and a knee that is obviously still a huge problem, and you can see that his slugging mark has taken a huge hit not because he isn't hitting the ball hard so as that he literally cannot run to second base even when he rips it to the wall; this is all just so wild.) After Yesavage got the ground ball he needed to end the seventh (much to Max Scherzer's delight/sunflower-spitting rage), Seranthony Dominguez and Jeff Hoffman took it the rest of the way. 

And so here we are, back in Toronto for Game Six, and a chance to end the World Series—indeed, to win it, many are saying—this very night. George Springer, who seemed to have hurt himself significantly with a swing roughly halfway through the eighteen-inning Game Three, looked like he was going to possibly pinch run for Bo late in Game Five, should Bo have reached in that instance, and he's thought to be ready (in the loose sense of "playable," not in the sense of "in good health") for Game Six. Maybe he's got enough left for one more big swing this season? Just the one? Maybe? If Springer's back in at DH, that'll put Bo at second, which has gone pleasingly well so far, though one still hopes too many plays do not come his way (or rather, that if they do come his way, they come very much his way, rather than all that many steps to the left of his way, or, worse still, to the right of it). We definitely need their bats, both of them, as it's Yoshinobu Yamamoto on the hill for the Dodgers, about whom it turns out we were extremely correct to worry. Surely he doesn't have a third consecutive complete game in him, right? The Dodgers' bullpen really has been a problem for them, outside of its extraordinary showing in Game Three, and Dave Roberts will be in no rush to get Yamamoto out of there, you wouldn't think, unless we can really hang some runs on him early. Will Tyler Glasnow, lined up for Game Seven, be available tonight if the Dodgers need him? What about Blake Snell, having thrown so many pitches just two days ago? One assumes Ohtani could pitch in relief, and if it was against anybody but the Blue Jays, I am sure I would thrill to the sight of him jogging out from the dugout to the bullpen late in the game to warm up real quick. Instead, given our present circumstance, the thought fills me with a dread, a little. For our part, it's Kevin Gausman, whose strong Game Two performance was understandably overshadowed by Yamamoto's, but he really had the splitter going that night, and he was locating the fastball just as he needs to in order to get those chases on the splitter. So maybe? 

I will admit that, even though on the whole I have remained calmer than I would have anticipated throughout this extraordinarily wonderful October run, I am pretty stirred up about tonight! I would really, really prefer for this not to go to a Game Seven, even though Max Scherzer has been throwing so well that it is not that hard to imagine Saturday night's game, should it be played, as an opportunity for an all-time finish to a clear-cut Hall-of-Fame career, and a fitting end to a great World Series. We all love Max Scherzer, and what baseball fan doesn't love a Game Seven, but right now I cannot properly express to you how little I would like my Saturday night to have anything to do with either, given the opportunity that has been set before us tonight. The Blue Jays have done nothing this series to suggest that they can't do this—they have shown themselves to be every bit as good as this Dodgers team—but nearly anything can happen in a single baseball game, which is usually a thought that presents itself as promise, but less so in situations like this? Once it gets going, of course, for better or worse, it'll just be a baseball game, but in these last hours before it (fate hovered near, certain but unknowable), there's a real need for a baseball game, or something like it, to take our minds off this baseball game.   

KS

2025 World Series, Game Four: Blue Jays 6, Dodgers 2

 

une balle cassante suspendu

In the third inning of Game Four of the 2025 World Series, not so many hours after the conclusion of an eighteen-inning all-time classic Game Three, Vladimir Guerrero Jr. of the Toronto Blue Jays hit a two-run home run off of Shohei Ohtani of the Los Angeles Dodgers in what early reports indicate is real life, somehow. (You might enjoy, if you have not already, this "All Calls" video [it is at best "Most Calls," but let's set that aside for now] of that particularly compelling sporting moment.) It put the Blue Jays on top, and the way Shane Bieber was dealing, and the Fluharty-to-Bassitt-to-Varland bullpen after him, that's very much where things stayed. We should note, probably, that while Shohei Ohtani is surely the most talented baseball player who has ever lived, he is still capable, mercifully, of at least reasonable approximations of human frailty and fallibility: not only did Ohanti give up that Guerrero rocket to left, but he went oh-for-three at the dish, too, striking out twice along the way (nobody reaches base thirteen times consecutively against the Toronto Blue Jays in a single World Series; nobody). Ohtani did pitch into the seventh, mind you, before being chased by an Ernie Clement double after a Daulton Varsho single to open that inning, but the Dodgers' bullpen did him no favours, allowing both of those runs to score, plus a couple more (Gimenenez single, Ty France pinch-hit RBI groundout, Vladdy intentional walk, and a Bo Bichette liner off the wall that could only be a single, given the shape of things). This was such a solid outing all around, from all involved, that it seemed inconceivable that these same Blue Jays had lost a six-hour, forty-nine-minute just before, but maybe it shouldn't have? "I slept like a baby," Vladdy answered when he was asked how he dealt with his emotions in the immediate aftermath of that wild game. "I was so tired." Andres Gimenez slept well, too, he told Hazel, because he knew Bieber was starting the next game. 

It's young Trey Yesavage who starts the next one—about fifteen minutes from now, in fact. We're down to a best-of-three to decide the World Series Champion, so each of these games is beyond enormous (in the baseball sense), but whatever happens tonight, it's remarkable, isn't it, that, one way or another, this 2025 season is going to end at the SkyDome? Isn't that a weird thing to actually be happening? It sure would be sweet to have to shots at that fourth and final win, though, so I really would prefer everybody do a really good job again tonight, please, guys, if you maybe could.

KS   

2025 World Series, Game Three: Dodgers 6, Blue Jays 5 (F/18)

 

if it had to be somebody, it might as well have been Freddie

At some point late last night—maybe it was the top of the thirteenth? whichever inning it was that they showed Vladdy thoroughly finishing an apple, I think—a faint but discernible "Let's Go, Blue Jays" rose up briefly before it was deliberately and of course understandably drowned out by the excellent Dodger Stadium crowd (still not sure how they put up with the loudest "in-game ops" in the game; it's brutal! just stick with the lovely organ!). It's all a blur, honestly, as is bound to happen in the longest World Series game there's ever been (a tie, at least—none longer, we can say), and what certainly seems to one of the best baseball games in living memory (I was remarking last night that this game surpassed 1991 WS Game Seven for me [how many times did I rewatch my VHS-taped copy?], and that was before we were even into extras). In the early going, I was pleased as could be with Max Scherzer, who allowed just two solo home runs (that we do not get upset about solo home runs is a longstanding maxim in our house; I trust the youth to carry this forward)—one to Shohei Ohtani (more on him later!), one to Téo—in another fantastic outing, all things considered, and I was even more pleased when Alejandro Kirk parked a Glasnow curveball over the centre-field wall and staked us to a 3-2 lead, as they say, scoring both Vladdy and Bo, neither of whom should have even been on base but for Tommy Edmond's whiff on a seemingly bespoke (I am working that one in more) double-play ball to his right. The Blue Jays added another, and that four-run inning felt like almost enough to work with until Ohtani's second double of the night tied it up. But then Vladdy! Dashing madly around the bases and scoring from first with a wild slide on what turned out to only be a Bo Bichette single (he's not running "well"). When Ohtani homered again in the seventh to tie it once more, it was of course remarkable, but it still felt like we were playing a normal, if wonderful, baseball game. Then things got weird. Oh hey before that, let me say: lots of nice defensive plays, too! Big throws from Vladdy and Barger, Tommy Edmond with two great throws and a nice relay from Téo . . . just tonnes of great stuff. (The less said about the game's one true gaffe—the deeply botched and delayed ball/strike call that led to Varsho heading up the line, and Bo therefore understandably thinking it was ball four and a walk, only to be picked off—the better; it was just a poor scene all around.) But deep into the bullpens, that's when things really got strange, and stayed that way for really a lot of hours. After Glasnow, the Dodgers went, Banda, Wrobleski, Treinen, Dreyer, Sasaki, Kershaw for perhaps the final time (to get Lukes with the bases loaded, the Blue Jays' best chance in extras), Henriquez, and finally Will Klein for four innings, and for many more pitches than he'd ever thrown as a professional. You will note that that is literally everybody they had, as far as relievers goes (Yamamoto, who pitched Game Two, was loosening up in the pen, that absolute madlad). For the Blue Jays, they emptied it out too, going to Fluharty, Varland, Dominguez, Bassitt, Hoffman, Fisher, Eric Lauer for four-and-two-thirds somehow, and finally Brendon Little, who pitched out of big trouble in the seventeenth, only for Freddie Freeman (who has actually not been hitting that well?) to take a three-two pitch just a little deeper than the several balls Daulton Varsho had run down on the warning track throughout this game's previous six hours and thirty-nine minutes for Freeman's second World Series walk-off homer in as many years (no one else has ever had more than just the one). I felt bad for poor Little, who I can't imagine anyone sensible is in any way blaming for the loss, but I was also just relieved that the game ended on something clear-cut and definitive from a truly great player, rather than some error or mental lapse or meltdown that could have really hurt somebody. A strange concern, perhaps, but after eighteen innings of baseball, and as the clock drew very near to 4AM, it is very much how I felt. Had this seemingly endless spectacle of suffering and failure, now ended, summoned from me a renewed sense of empathy and the essential dignity of all living things? Or was I just super sleepy? Could easily have been both, just as soon as either. 

The game was incredible, in the true sense that it was difficult to credit what it offered us: Shohei Ohtani became the first player to reach base seven, eight, or nine times in a World Series game (he took care of all three, so that nobody else needs to), as his two doubles and two homers were followed by four intentional walks (man, Mookie Betts isn't really making all that much of those chances yet, is he?), and another walk where Little didn't seem too upset that his curveballs were ending up in the dirt. It is wild that the question surrounding a player who was walked five times is whether or not he should have been walked even more times, but for my part I will say that the times they went after him all made sense to me, both on a pure numbers level (take Shohei's obviously laudable home run rate, and compare it to the run expectancy of the first batter reaching base with no outs, for example, and you will see why walks with nobody on are as uncommon as they are; repeat this for any number of game states and/or just watch [maybe even sim!] a bunch of baseball), and also on the level of just straight-up competition, like, here is one of my guys I trust to get outs, and Ohtani, although quite clearly the greatest baseball player to ever live, is nevertheless a person who sometimes makes those—outs, I mean, and indeed even he makes more than half the time! At a certain point, you've got to play baseball. A little more on the subject of managerial decisions: it has been noted, too, that the batting order the Blue Jays were left with throughout extra innings was not their most desirable, which is of course true, but this loses sight (I would argue deliberately! as though in bad faith!) of the specific circumstances of each individual move at the time it was made, each rational in its turn (Springer hurt himself on a swing, and so Ty France, who did well, and then Davis Schneider to run for him; IKF to run for Bo and replace him at second is self-evident; Straw as a pinch-running late-inning defensive replacement for Barger has been the correct practice for ages; Heineman as a pinch-runner for Kirk when his run would have put the Blue Jays ahead well into extras is the right move). John Schneider used his bench aggressively, playing first to protect the lead with defensive replacements, and secondly to try to pinch-run his way to the lead in extras, all of which is exactly how you have to play it on the road; if you are the visiting team, you are functionally losing a tie game, and need to manage accordingly. I find no fault! The only managerial move all night that had me exhaling audibly was Braydon Fisher after Hoffman, rather than straight to Lauer, but my concern was misplaced: Fisher was given a pocket of the Dodgers' lineup to deal with, and he dealt with it admirably. The bullpens for both teams were the biggest concern going into this series, and so of course they just combined to turn in one of the great all-time displays of relief pitching we have seen or will ever see, allowing no runs over ten-and-a-half innings after the seventh. Unreal.

For all of this game's endless intrigues and complexities—some of them half-forgotten already, but the stuff that hasn't been, or the overall impression of it, at least, seems likely to linger in the mind—where do we actually stand in its super sleepy aftermath? At a two-one series after three, is all, which is the only place we can ever be after splitting the first two, I would remind you (I am sure you appreciate this reminder). The Blue Jays are still in the not-unenviable position of needing just the one win in Los Angeles to bring things back to [the] SkyDome for a Game Six on Friday night (Hallowe'en! spooky!). If Shane Bieber throws well in Game Four tonight against (sigh) Shohei Ohtani, who surely must be at least lightly tuckered after all of that (oh hey Kirk threw him out stealing second! I meant to mention that eariler!), that's the win we need right there, simple as that. And if he doesn't, our season will be on the line Wednesday night. Nothing announced, but that would be Yesavage? With everybody available out of the pen? This actually sounds okay to me, having seen "everybody" really put together something genuinely special last night. Great job, everybody! Thanks for all the baseball.

KS

2025 World Series, Game Two: Dodgers 5, Blue Jays 1

 

welcome, Téo; bring your cheer

Well, we got Yoshinobu Yamamoto'd, my friends. That's about the size of it. To say that the Blue Jays lightly squandered early chances in Game Two would not be inaccurate, but fails to truly the capture the lived experience of a game where you don't get anybody on after like the third inning, as Yamamoto retired twenty straight Blue Jays en route to his second consecutive complete game this postseason (last World Series complete game? the admirable Johnny Cueto for the 2015 Kansas City Royals, a team that actually needed no one to go the distance ever [an unreal bullpen, as longtime Baseball Feelers may recall]). Kevin Gausman turned in another excellent start, for his part, retiring seventeen Dodgers in a row at one point, allowing just one run until the seventh got lightly away from him with two solo homers on unideal but not terrible pitches. That the Dodgers tacked a couple runs on against the bullpen is frankly immaterial, as this game was fully and completely about Yoshinobu Yamamoto, the Dodgers' pitcher about whom I had been, and totally remain, most worried.

On to beautiful Dodgers Stadium, then! If we win one of three, we're in good shape; two of three, tremendous shape; and if we win all three, my deep analytics suggest we would be World Series Champions even without winning any more games after that. There's really only one Dodger Stadium outcome—losing all three in a row—that would be anything less than really quite wonderful. And even then, what could you say? What could you even say? What I will say now, in closing real quick, is that the Blue Jays have always hit Game Three starter Taylor Glasnow fairly well, going back to Tampa days, and whether the great Max Scherzer has another tremendous day (like last time!) or a pretty terrible one (like several times just before!), it promises to be insane.  

KS 

2025 World Series, Game One: Blue Jays 11, Dodgers 4

 

Vladdy (to the left) had few if any doubts

Until Friday night, the last World Series pitch thrown in Toronto had been the one Joe Carter hit over the left-field wall to end Game Six in 1993, as Dan Schulman helpfully pointed out just before Trey Yesavage struck out Shohei Ohtani to get things underway these thirty-two years later. Of course it was, right? But as is so often the case, Dan had a neat way of saying it. I really like that guy. I also really liked this game! Like right from the start! Yesavage breezed through the top of the first— which might not sound like that much of an accomplishment, but run expectancy is higher in the first than in any other inning, even when the top third of the order does not consist of obvious first-ballot Hall-of-Famers—and the Blue Jay put pressure on the excellent Blake Snell, a lanky and likeable lefty, pretty much at once: after Springer and Davis Schneider grounded and popped out (respectively), Vladdy drew a walk, Bo singled (in his first plate appearance in weeks and weeks!) on a 3-0 changeup (if you're not giving Bo the green light on 3-0 against a lefty, I suppose, why even play him?), and Kirk walked before Daulton Varsho got under a breaking ball to pop out and end the inning. Leaving the bases loaded is for sure no fun, but all of that took really a lot of pitches, and the only undeniable weakness of this Dodgers team is middle relief; the earlier we can chase the starting pitcher, the better (this is of course pretty well always true, but especially in this case). It was Yesavage, though, who got touched up first (a run in the second), and also second (a run in the third), as he pitched into, around, and largely out of a good deal of traffic. Things could have been way, way worse, though, as his splitter really wasn't doing what it normally does, and you don't want to face bases-loaded Shohei Ohtani without your best stuff too many times (even the once felt bad). But Yesavage kept things close enough that I remained hopeful we'd have a chance to even the score once we got into the bullpen. 

Happily, we didn't have to even wait that long, with Varsho's home run thudding off the batter's eye to bring in Alejandro Kirk's single with Snell still on the mound in the fourth. In fact, Snell stayed until the sixth, and left with the bases loaded, in what turned out to be one of the biggest offensive innings in the history of the World Series. How about that! Thirteen batters came to the plate, three of them pinch-hitters (plus IKF running for Bo after his lead-off walk), and put up nine runs—nine!—highlighted, I think it's fair to say, by Addison Barger's pinch-hit grand slam (the first one in World Series history) the day after he slept on Davis Schneider's pull-out couch (sleepover! [Myles Straw apparently no longer had room]). That Varsho and Barger both homered off lefties is honestly maybe the most surprising thing about this whole wild happening; that our other home run came from Alejandro Kirk was less surprising, I would suggest, but no less delightful. 

All of this romping meant no Varland or Hoffman out of the pen, and instead Fluharty (who figures to be super important throughout the series as the lefty whose assignment will be Ohtani and Freeman), Dominguez (who has been totally solid in a somewhat unsung way), Fisher (who allowed a homer to Ohtani [I'm not even mad]), Chris Bassitt (whose stuff is "playing up" in relief, and who is by far the most stoked I have ever seen him), and Eric Lauer for the ninth. Different looks! For their guys! Let's go! 

There is of course no reason to think that any other game this series will go anything at all like this, and I am deeply alive to the fact that each Blue Jays win could easily be their last of this wonderful season. This might have been it! Who knows! It's Kevin Gausman on the mound for us tonight, and I can only ever feel good about that, but it's Yoshinobu Yamamoto, who worries me the most, going for the Dodgers. The recent FanGraphs headline "Does Toronto, or Indeed Humanity, Stand a Chance Against the Dodgers Rotation?" is no less true today because we managed to get to Blake Snell a little (and the bullpen a lot). But I guess we'll see. In closing, I would note real quick that we're just one win away from guaranteeing at least a Game Six at home, and also arguably just three wins away from winning the whole thing. Both seem good.

KS

 

ALCS Game Seven: Blue Jays 4, Mariners 3

the last instant before he knew for sure? or the first one after?

I watched it as it happened, of course, and I couldn't even tell you how many times since. I've also spent a good deal of time just sitting with it, like Tony Kemp (out in the left field of the human heart). George Springer's seventh-inning, three-run homer to flip a 3-1 score around and give the Blue Jays their only lead of the night in this, their first ALCS Game Seven (or Game Seven of any kind) in forty years, felt enormous in the moment—how could it have been bigger?—but it occurred to me nearly simultaneously (and not even in an especially doomed, fatalistic sort of way) that unless we got those last six outs, it would be forgotten pretty quickly, almost out of necessity (we can only bear so much). Experience teaches us that this is so. Who remembers Téo's two home runs against the Mariners in 2022 with anything like the clarity with which they recall Springer and Bo colliding amidst the hours-long bullpen implosion that followed? Is that even a part of how you think of that game? Those home runs? "If this holds up, they'll call this the Téo game," I definitely said aloud at the time, but it didn't, and so we don't. And without Bassitt's crisp ten-pitch eighth inning Monday night (find me another 72MPH curveball that clips the top of the zone like that, and then I will have seen two [maybe three]), and white-knuckle/lights-out closer Jeff Hoffman's ludicrous three-up, three-down, all-swinging-strike-threes ninth (poor Julio Rodriguez) to leave Cal Raleigh in the on-deck circle to end the Mariners' season (and need we even note that Hoffman allowed more home runs this season than any other relief pitcher in all of baseball? and that Raleigh had already homered this game against workhorse Louis Varland's 94 MPH change-up? the on-deck circle was the perfect place to leave him—great call on that one, Jeff Hoffman!), what is now rightly celebrated as the second-biggest home run in the Blue Jays' forty-nine seasons wouldn't have been that at all, would it? It's the precariousness of the whole thing that I'm left with, and not just of everything that came after, but of what came before, too: Barger works his five-pitch walk to open that crucial (we say now) seventh, as the very fine Bryan Woo could only find the zone once in the at-bat, but the thing that in a way I found even harder to believe than Springer's home run—both in the moment, and even more so afterwards—is Isiah Kiner-Falefa's ground-ball single up the middle, just past a diving J. P. Crawford, on an 0-2 Bryan Woo sweeper. That IKF was picked up late this season for his glove—off of waivers from the Pirates, mind you, and I say with no ill will that "waived by the 2025 Pirates" had to be a fairly low point for him professionally—is self-evident, and in that respect he's delivered throughout this series for sure. But how many times out of a hundred do you think IKF gets enough of that 0-2 sweeper to get it past Crawford? Consider the initial conditions right off the bat (both literally and figuratively) that kept that ball a hair to Crawford's left, rather than sending it right into his glove for a tailor-made (I think we should start saying "bespoke" more in this context) double play to turn a promising and ultimately season/team/career-defining inning into nothing at all—at least nothing good (for us). Or what about the Shane Bieber innings, as he pitched his way around a slugging Mariners lineup without the benefit of the usual break and depth on either his curveball or his slider? (They curved some; the slid a little.) And what about Gausman coming out of the bullpen, a rad move in the truest spirit of Game Seven—he didn't really have it either! But he turned a leadoff-walk into a double play, and after two more walks (one of them intentional, to Cal Raleigh), another groundball ended his seventh. Even Varsho's RBI single in the first came on an off-speed pitch he was clearly fooled on, and was way out in front of, but he stuck with it just enough to push it through the infield and tie the game. All I mean to say with all of this, I suppose, is that, once they've happened, Big Events (in the baseball sense) seem to take on an aspect of inevitability pretty quickly, but I remain low-key haunted by their contingency.

Even that fateful sinker! On the Springer home run, I mean! (I swear I will stop soon, just one more.) The great Trevor Plouffe, foremost among his generation of players-turned-analysts (and by a lot, in my view), said of Eduard Bazardo's sinker that caught too much of the plate and ended up more "middle-in" than "in," that "you know what George Springer does with pitches like that: he puts them in the fucking seats." A great way to say it! And certainly sometimes true! And of course I couldn't be happier that it was the case in this particular instance. But this was the third time Springer had seen Bazardo this series (should it have been the closer Andrés Muñoz, seen in a lovely photo here supporting Seattle Feline Rescue, in his stead?), and a study of postseason series over the last ten years has shown a discernible jump in OPS when a hitter sees a relief pitcher for the third time in a series (recall, if you will, John Schneider's explanation for bringing Little into his ill-fated game-five appearance: he was trying to give the Mariners' bats some different looks). The first two times Springer saw that same pitch, from that same pitcher, he rolled over it, and grounded out. Not this time, he didn't, but those first two times, which were no less actual. And so here I am, totally caught up in the wonder of the thing that has somehow happened, but at the same time I find myself, more than anything else, lingering in the several/many/endless ways in which it nearly didn't. This is perhaps a question of temperament, or disposition.

So anyway, now that we're here—in the 2025 World Series, against a Los Angeles Dodgers team that has three surefire Hall-of-Fame players at the top of its lineup (one of those three, the greatest talent the sport has ever seen, will also be the game-four starter, looks like), and that has another definite Hall-of-Famer who they might not necessarily even roster (Clayton Kershaw [oh okay, just checked, and he made it {will he even pitch, though?}]), and that could not have dispatched the ninety-seven-win Milwaukee Brewers with greater ease in the NLCS—how might we proceed? Fundamentally, I think we look to bash, and, indeed, to monster bash. As a team, the Blue Jays' 143 wRC+ (weighted Runs Created+, in which league-average is by definition 100) is far and away the best in this postseason, with the Dodgers' 113 the next best. Let's just go straight-up OPS, and look at the extent to which our boys have been boppin':   

Vladdy 1.440

Ernie 1.063

Springer .930

Barger .889

Varsho .804

Lukes .791

Gimenez .764

Kirk .753

IKF .571

League-average OPS was .719 this season, and so you will note that in addition to ALCS-MVP Vladdy putting up an all-timer of a run, Ernie Clement being unreal, and George Springer springing as georgily as he has ever sprung in his long, excellent, postseason career, our only starter whose OPS is below regular-season average (please keep in mind these are the numbers we're putting up against excellent pitching, too!) is the previously discussed (see above) Isiah Kiner-Falefa, whose bat, it seems, is about to be replaced by that of Bo Bichette, ready to play in some capacity (DH? SS? 2B, where he has been taking ground balls for the first time since minor-league days?) for the first time since that ruinous slide directly into the catcher's shin-guard just ahead of a rain-delay in Yankee Stadium weeks and weeks ago. The Blue Jays have been hitting so well, and Andres Gimenez has been so impressive at short in Bo's absence, that I had been half-thinking, why mess with any of this? But if Bo is ready to go, or even not-really-ready-to-go-but-let's-find-him-some-ABs ready to go, just out of basic human decency you've got to give him a chance to play. Bo Bichette has been an enormous part of these last six years, as important to this team as anyone, and I will go so far as to say that even if it slightly hurts our perhaps-slim-yet-discernible chances of winning the World Series, I want to see him at least given a shot. As one wag on the boards had it earlier this year, Bo and Vladdy are a bonded pair! They need to be out there together. (As an aside, would you believe that Bo and Vladdy are within 0.7 fWAR for their whole careers so far? That's pretty remarkable!) At a certain point—as John Schneider asserted after the game-five loss led to all kinds of nonsense—your guys are your guys, and those are the guys you play. How fortunate, then, that one of our guys is Bo Bichette, one of the best pure hitters in the game.  

Kind of to my own surprise, I hadn't checked the updated FanGraphs World Series odds until just now, halfway through the composition of this very sentence, in no small part because, what does it even matter? This is all amazing! I love it all already! If the Blue Jays get smoked in four games, this would still be a banner year (literally! they'll put up a banner for it!), no worse than the third best we've ever had, and my own personal favourite one for sure, no question. It's been thirty-two years since the Blue Jays were last here, and without getting too heavy about my own mortality, I'm not sure precisely how many more thirty-two year intervals I have left in me (can't be more than a few). We all know the Dodgers are the more imposing team, the defending champions, looking to join the Yankees, Blue Jays (thank you), and Reds as the only teams to repeat as World Series champions in the last fifty years (the A's did it just before that, too). But there's a reason games one and two (and maybe even six? how about seven?) will be played in Toronto, rather than in Los Angeles, and it is that the Blue Jays were actually the better team in the regular season by one game—just one!—and I have chosen as that one game (it could be any) a Sunday afternoon in August, at Dodger Stadium, in which Mason Fluharty got both Shohei Ohtani and Mookie Betts with runners on to seal a 5-4 win that turned on late homers from Vladdy, Addison Barger, and Ernie Clement. The Blue Jays took just one of three that weekend, and I see here, coincidentally, that the FanGraphs projection has the Dodgers at 65%, the Blue Jays at 35%, a perhaps rare instance where the model corresponds almost perfectly to the general sense of thing. But let's go. "I actually love that the Blue Jays are playing a seemingly impossible foe," I wrote to some longstanding pals in a chat the other day, "because i) failure is more romantic than success, and ii) if something weird happens, and we win, it will be insane." 

KS

ALCS Game Six: Blue Jays 6, Mariners 2

 

yes sir, there she goes; let's admire that one

Game seven begins imminently, so let me say now in just these few moments that remain before it what a wonderful thing game six was, and not just Vladdy's homer, or the joyous havoc he caused on the bases (no Vladdy, don't run! that ball in the dirt has not skipped nearly far enough away from Cal Raleigh for you to do so prudently! oh wait no okay he threw it into left field and now you have scored with ease! never mind, Vladdy, great job! [how fortuitous for us all that he was born ready]), or even Addison Barger's two-run shot to bring home Ernie Clement's two-out triple, or any of those obviously wonderful things, but consider please, if you will, young Trey Yesavage, in literally just his sixth major-league start, who kept his head sufficiently amidst a considerable amount of traffic on the basepaths in the early going to induce three—three!—consecutive inning-ending double plays, two of them in near-NOBLETIGER fashion from the perspective of the Seattle Mariners (they were OOBLETIGERs, I suppose, in that the bases-loaded-ending-in-team-incapable-of-getting-easy-run[s] began with one out in each such instance). All of that, obviously, could have just as easily gone the other way should even one of those three crucial groundballs found a hole; or if the Mariners had not uncharacteristically kicked the ball around for three costly errors; or had either Varland or Hoffman faltered even slightly in relief (which they extremely did not); or really any number of little things along those lines (or others!). But just about everything broke our way, which, along with everybody doing an especially good job, is really all you need to win a postseason baseball game. "We’re trying to win one game in a row," John Schneider said ahead of game six. "We’ve done that ninety-nine times this year." Now that they've made it an even hundred, would it be to much to ask for just the one more? It might well be, but at the same time, I see no harm in merely asking, right? Shane Bieber, in whom my faith is unwavering, takes the hill, with literally everybody available out of the pen, up to and including Kevin Gausman and Max Scherzer (let's get nuts). Of course, the most agreeable outcome would be one that sees the Blue Jays ahead early and easily and in such comfort that nothing weird has to happen at all, but if things are even remotely close beyond the earliest innings, I hope to see starters—perhaps exclusively starters—up in the bullpen in the truest, darkest, yet at the same time most exuberant spirit of game seven. Could be good!  

KS

ALCS Game 5: Mariner 6, Blue Jays 2

 

hoooooo boy

I am probably less hung up on that calamitous eighth inning than just about anyone who watched it, or has even heard tell (and word seems to be traveling fast!), but there's for sure no getting around the disaster of it (in the admittedly limited sense that disaster is possible in the outcome of a baseball game). The Blue Jays had traffic on the bases all night, but had only been able to score twice: Barger in the fifth, on the Springer double, and a scurrying Kirk in the sixth, on Clement's soft single to right. There was even a NOBLETIGER in there at one point, one that ended when an Ernie Clement groundball traveled directly down, right in front of the plate, and just totally stayed there for an easy double play. I've never seen anything quite like it. Colleagues stranding colleagues, suffice it to say, as happens against good pitchers who are bending but not breaking, which was what the Mariners were able to achieve. But Gausman had been so good himself (just the Eugenio Suarez solo shot in the second), and Varland, too, as the first man out of the pen, that we carried a 2-1 lead through seven. It never felt like enough, but a one-run lead in a playoff game, especially on the road, never will. Given the context, it seemed curious, then, that it was Brendon Little who got up in the pen, and desk-guy Joe Siddall was profoundly and transparently pre-spooked by it when the broadcast threw things back to the studio between innings, even before it was entirely clear Little was even going to come in (Siddall was tense and terse [he was ternse]). If Jeff Hoffman and Seranthony Dominguez—in that unusual but compelling order—had been brought in to pitch the eighth and ninth the night before in a game we were leading by kind of a bunch, why not those guys now, in a similar situation, but one made all the more pressing by this scant one-run lead? As the eighth began to unfold, Dan Schulman and Buck Martinez speculated that it must have something to with using the lefty Little to turn the switch-hitting Raleigh and Polanco around, and then dealing with the lefty Naylor behind them as his third batter, rather than leave that to Hoffman (who does not have particularly troubling lefty/righty splits) or Dominguez (who kind of does). Even if it had worked, this move to Little, it would have been quirky, but it didn't work at all, and so the word "quirky" really hasn't come up in any of the immediate reaction (people getting worked up on Reddit, as they say, is the first draft of history). Cal Raleigh's homer tied it, and, after two walks, a switch to Seranthony Dominguez, and a hit batter, Eugenio Suarez (remember him? he's from earlier) hit a grand slam to right field that might as well have been a walk-off. Not great!

And yet, while in the immediate aftermath, this move to Little—an up-and-down reliever who has definitely struggled with his command in the second-half (slightly less so in September, but problems against righties persist)—is being characterized as an all-timer of a bad managerial decision, not just on "the boards" but also on the Blue Jays broadcast itself (and it totally might be! everybody might be right!), I find that I am not actually minding it all that much? Or at least not as much as you might expect. Brendon Little had nothing tonight, poor guy, but neither, as it turned out, did Seranthony Dominguez, who followed, and Dominguez was definitely part of everyone's plan for those last six outs (I have not seen anyone argue that Hoffman should have been tasked with all six, though I'm sure if we had it to do over again, we'd all ask him to give it a real good try). John Schneider, asked about it all afterwards (if you can believe it), said he wanted to give the top of the Mariners order a different look than they'd seen last night (mission accomplished on that front, no denying it) with a guy that he trusts in big spots (more than Fluharty or Lauer, if you really wanted a lefty in there?). Really, what else could he say at that point? It was a bad decision, followed by two bad performances, but this really isn't hitting me any differently than any other bullpen loss. Actually, I think if you replace the "but" in the previous sentence with an "and so," it gets closer to the heart of it. It was a shame not to have brought more of those baserunners home in support of yet another very fine Kevin Guasman outing, but one-run road-game leads are just not something experience has taught me are especially likely to stand up, and so this loss does not sting like a bee so much as it feels like the attenuated bite of a cat you have scooped and held slightly longer than the enscoopened cat has chosen to enjoy. A disappointment, yes, but only a minor one, and understandable almost to the point of predictable.  

So, what did we actually do here, what did we actually get done this week: turns out we took two out of three games in Seattle to bring the series back home to [the] SkyDome for game six Sunday night, and quite possibly a game seven beyond. If Trey Yesavage pitches even passingly like he did against the Yankees, and Shane Bieber, aided by the full weight of the Blue Jays pitching staff, can put together a game anything like the one he just pitched against the Mariners, then even a handful of runs of support here and there (from an offense that has been the best of any team so far this postseason) means we're headed to the World Series. Not a bad place to be in October, and I remain really very stoked about it. Oh hey also, switching topics for just a sec, did you notice, too, that Shohei Ohtani pitched six scoreless innings tonight and struck out ten whilst also hitting three home runs? In what is almost certainly the finest game of Major League Baseball anyone has ever played? To finish off the Dodgers' sweep of the ninety-seven win Milwaukee Brewers (hey congrats on a great season guys)? A cynic might say that the Mariners and Blue Jays are really only competing to see who is to be granted the privilege of getting rolled by the Dodgers in the World Series, but I would suggest i) that would definitely still be pretty neat to be a part of, and ii) you never know! Baseball's pretty weird sometimes! 

KS