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| Lundi-soir Vladdy, c'était nous |
It wasn't the Mariners' first home run, a Julio Rodriguez three-run shot off young Trey Yesavage in the first, that was the problem, really, as we grinded out the three runs we needed to tie it back up in cheeringly short order. Nor was it the the Mariners' third and mercifully final home run of the evening, a two-run job from Mississauga's perpetually stoked Josh Naylor (he does not get stoked so much as arrives stoked, and stokes further as events dictate), as things were already fairly out of reach at that point. No, it was that three-run homer right in the middle, the Jorge Polanco one off of Louis Varland, that really felt like the one that truly sunk us (nautical metaphor). A drag! (Ships have drag.) And yet I could not help but notice, as it was all unfolding, just how less tense it feels to be losing a postseason game than it is to be clinging to a narrow lead in one. It is, if not unpleasant, very nearly unpleasant to be leading a playoff game, unless you are really, super-duper leading it; anything less than that, and each pitch feels so fraught as to compel, if not outright require, near-constant snacking (which is also fine, so long as snacks be near at hand [oh, they have been; and oh, they will be]). Much like the top-seeded National League team, those cheap (relatively speaking) and cheerful (in absolute terms) Milwaukee Brewers, our own top-seeded Toronto Blue Jays find themselves down 0-2, each team having dropped their first two games at home to their league's west-division champion. Probably better to be down a couple games to the Mariners than to the Dodgers? And yet, all the same, not good! I'm not minding any of this nearly as much as you might expect, though. The Mariners' starting pitching has looked really good so far, and is only likely to look better as their top arms now stand at the ready (to the extent that arms can stand [the mixed-metaphor minefield of synecdochic metonym has exploded yet another guy]), and the scene shifts to lovely and spacious Safeco Field (they're not calling it that anymore but those initial lead-sponsor naming rights have not yet lapsed in my heart [how can you not be romantic about naming rights?]). In game three—a pretty big one? in that we emerge either down 2-1, and very much in a series, or down 3-0, in which case, that becomes somewhat less true?—we are running Shane Bieber out there, and even though things did not go especially well for him in his game-three start in Yankee Stadium in the previous round, I remain not just hopeful, but genuinely optimistic, perhaps in no small measure because of the strange relationship that develops when you obtain a player in one of your simulation baseball games only for Blue Jays Actual to later obtain the services of that selfsame player in the primary world of our experience (this is sort of what happened between me and Yimi Garcia, honestly). I would not be surprised if he pitches well! And if he doesn't, I mean, what are you gonna do. I'll tell you what the Blue Jays are gonna do, though, one way or the other, is start Max Scherzer in game four. This, to me, is a move at once by (John Schneider, Pete Walker, Don Mattingly, perhaps even Ross Atkins et al.), of (Max Scherzer himself), and for (me) absolute madlads. Max Scherzer has pitched just awfully for ages now, almost certainly tipping his pitches in at least one of his disastrous late-season outings. And yet I love this move. Let's see if this absolute psycho (I say it with love) has one more big game left in this surefire Hall-of-Fame career. Wouldn't it be neat if he did? Wouldn't it be neater still if that game brought us back even at 2-2 in the series, and guaranteed a game six back home at [the] SkyDome (camel-case forever)? Even if all it did was bring us back to 3-1, and bought us one more day of Blue Jays baseball, I would be totally into that much, too. And if it just goes ruinously, hot on the heels of Shane Bieber maybe not going so great tonight, well I mean so it goes. You can't win them all, I have heard tell, even when you have very nearly won them all, which is how one ends up still playing baseball on October 15th, one of only four teams left, still just four wins away from the World Series, and eight wins away from winning the whole blessèd thing. At this point in this deeply wonderful baseball season, I am literally down for whatever, and choose to approach whatever remains in the come-what-may spirit embodied by this unknown (in the sense of unnamed [I suppose I just mean anonymous]) yet iconic fellow right here:
Though much separates us—time, place, whether or not we enjoy to smoke cigarettes very much at all—what unites us is our devil-may-care enjoyment of Blue Jays baseball, particularly on the Baton Broadcast System, as Fergie Oliver used to say somewhat confusingly at the start for a few years there (because we were pretty sure we were mostly just watching regular old CTV still?), very much at the height of when you could enter to win a V-Tech cordless phone whenever the Blue Jays hit a home run. But our shared enjoyment of and enthusiasm for Blue Jays baseball, his and mine, began before that era, and has long-since survived it, too, I would imagine. Unless the fellow pictured above is no longer with us (sad), or has perhaps simply moved on to other hobbies that he has found he enjoys more instead (understandable). Either way, let's play ball.
KS
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