Haunted Once More by the Rays

 

everybody just loves this guy, on account of how he is "neat"

I tuned into Tuesday night's game just in time to see Vladdy and Springer work two-out walks ahead of Varsho's second homer of the night—this one off the facing of the upper deck in right—to put the Blue Jays ahead 7-6 in the eighth. John Schneider got Hoffman up quick in the pen, as one would do, and I remained quite stoked right up until the moment Hoffman set the ball on a tee for a Junior Caminero grand slam that stood up for the win despite a pair of Blue Jays runs in the bottom half. "This game has had way too many events," I texted to a couple of pals in the immediate aftermath; "Fewer events next time please, guys." Having got my letter, the Blue Jays then played a tight game marked mostly by how rad Alejandro Kirk remains, throwing out one of the fastest players in the game early, and hitting a three-run home run to win it late. Then they got clobbered on getaway day. And so the Blue Jays are again below .500 as the excellent-so-far Tigers come to town (they're twenty-nine and fifteen!). I don't know, man. I don't know.  

KS

Counterpoint: Maybe West-Coast Road Trips are the Greatest?

go Bo

If our west-coast road trips are going to take us to Seattle, where thousands of Blue Jays fans show up every year and make things utterly delightful, and we're going to sweep our way back to the .500 mark, I am willing to settle down, at least in a preliminary sense, about west-coast road trips broadly. A little. 

KS 

West Coast Road Trips Exist to Make Me Sad Right Before Bed

 

Logan "Hippity" O'Hoppe

Even though we took the third game of the series on the strength of another fine outing by our agreeable psycho Chris Bassitt, the first two were just crushing, given both the particular pitchers who got lit up—first Yimi (Yimi!), then Hoffman—and, even more than that, the sheer time of night (or indeed morning). I was in the very act of getting ready for bed! The very act of it! This is the danger, I suppose, of having baseball on one's computer-phone, rather than on one's non-phone computer (or even "tv"). 

KS

Please, not Yimi; anyone but Yimi.

 

oh no

As a longstanding Yimi Garcia ultra, Saturday's 5-3 loss to Cleveland, in which four of those Cleveland runs came on an eighth-inning Daniel Schneeman grand slam allowed by that very same Yimi, was a particularly difficult one for me personally. I note, sadly, that things really aren't going very well at all so far, are they? Fourth place, a couple games under .500? It is certainly true that there is a lot of baseball left to play, but if the old Billy Beane maxim about the shape of the season—that you've got two months to figure out what you've got, two months to try to fix it, and two months to see if it worked—holds true, we are quickly getting towards the end of the first third of that eminently sensible way of thinking about things, and it's not great (aside from how I am really quite enjoying watching at least a little bit of baseball most days).   

KS

Comebacks! Dingers! Comeback Dingers!

 

they call him "Kirky," though the origins of that sobriquet remain obscure

Taking two-out-of-three at home against the Red Sox is a fairly normal outcome, but this pair of come-from-behind wins felt pretty special, in particular to the extent that they had homers in them. Blue Jays ones, even! It is a deeply weird to me that the Blue Jays are hitting so few homers, because I do not think it is unreasonable to look at their roster and think that there would be some homers in there? And not even tucked away too deeply? But just sort of self-evidently there? And yet no, that would not seem to be the case, at least not so far. I saw the other day that in terms of the straight-up differential of home runs allowed vs. home runs enbombened, the Blue Jays were a league-worst negative twenty-two (I am sure the exact figure is somewhat different these several days later). There are lots of ways to win baseball games, surely, but the dinging of dingers has proven an extraordinarily effective way of doing so over these many years, and I would invite wholeheartedly the Blue Jays to explore this possibility further as soon as they are able. Thanks guys. 

KS