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| touch 'em all, Kirky |
I don't think it was just the heightened emotional state caused by an afternoon of reading the poetry of Anne Carson that led me to actually well-up when Alejandro Kirk hit the first-inning grand slam that put the Blue Jays ahead 5-1 in their AL East-clinching, final game of the regular season, but to be fair to both (to Kirk, to Anne Carson), I do have to acknowledge that it may have played un rôle. What a game! You would think 13-4 would have just been a laugher, and by the end it was, sure, but this was the most fraught 13-4 game I have ever experienced: the Rays scratched out a run in the first (Kevin Gausman, who only pitched three-and-two-thirds, alas, did not have his best stuff), only for Vladdy to single-home George Springer to tie it in the bottom half, just a little bit ahead of the biggest hit of Alejandro Kirk's already quite delightful career; but the Rays pulled back to within a run, which is where things stayed until Kirk's second home run of the day put two more on the board in the fifth, and a jubilant five-run romp of seventh inning sealed the deal. For Kirk to have had this game, of all games, just a few days after being on the wrong end of a 9-3, right-fielder-to-first-base putout to end an important game against he Red Sox (one poster described this, in all sympathy and solidarity, as "every chubby kid's little league nightmare"), is I think as much a factor as The Autobiography of Red in how feelingly I felt his trip around the bases in the first. The end of that Red Sox game clearly tore him up in a way that was uncomfortable to watch, and to see the usually low-key Kirk swing from that dark display of emotion last week to this was really something (there was an intervening home run Saturday, let us not forget, but this was of a different order and register entirely). I've just now watched it again (you may do so here, should you so choose), and honestly it got me again, and at the exact same point, just as he rounds second (I just watched it again, and it got me again, what is going on). This should be unsurprising, though, I suppose, in that I have found this era of Blue Jays baseball—these 2025 Blue Jays for sure, but really this whole era of the team since the sad and awful yet crucial 2020 season—to be strangely emotionally resonant. I'm sure no small part of it is simply that I am older, and increasingly soft-hearted, and, for sure most importantly, these are the baseball summers that I'm sharing with my kids when they're at the perfect age for all of this to be happening. Maybe that's the entirety of it. But I'm thinking, too, about Davis Schneider's answer to the stock question of what makes him proudest of this team this season: the not-especially-bashful Davis Schneider looked down, as though he was a little shy about what he was going to say, which was "just the way we all treat each other." Chris Bassitt, asked about the challenge of integrating so many new pitchers into the staff this year, said that it wasn't hard to bring people in when you show them "that you genuinely care about their well-being." Vladdy, asked when it was that he knew that this season was going to be different from last year's last-place finish, said that it was in spring training, and just how it felt when they were all playing catch together. These were unusual answers to usual questions, and felt genuine, and—perhaps unsurprisingly—I was moved. I believe that these answers at once arose from, and subsequently gave rise to, baseball feelings.
And so here come the New York Yankees, fresh off their Wild Card Series win over the Boston Red Sox, to begin this first ever postseason meeting between these two AL East teams that finished with the same excellent ninety-four win record. The way things played out with the seeding, the Blue Jays' half of the draw ends up the tougher side, despite having the top record in the league, but what can you do—and the whole reason we got to skip a round, and the reason this series begins in Toronto, is that the Blue Jays got the best of the Yankees in their head-to-head games this year, so there's nothing to worry about here, except for the usual stuff, and plus Aaron Judge. The other half of the AL draw seems perfectly agreeable (Detroit and Seattle: why not?), and so too the NL matchups, really (Dodgers vs. Phillies feels classic, and Brewers vs. Cubs isn't hurting either). The attentive reader may recall that I am a regular-season guy, generally preferring the half-year dailiness of baseball to the lightly-related tournament that we have for a few weeks in the fall (it can be good too, but it insists on itself), and so I am less invested in this coming series than you might expect from someone who thinks about baseball as much as I do (it is arguably excessive!). But it would be really great to beat the Yankees, wouldn't it? Whatever should befall us after that?
KS
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