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| 冷たい / tsumetai / [cold] |
Eric Lauer may not have quite gone the seven innings we asked of him in yesterday's post (I'm honestly not even sure he read it [it's okay; he's probably a busy guy]), but he did pitch into the sixth, and, by striking out nine, "announced his presence with authority," as Dan Schulman noted whilst also noting that he was quoting a great line from a great film (Dan Schulman: cinéaste? [oh, further to that, the Important Cinema Club boys Will Sloan and Justin Decloux are finally doing a baseball episode [if I am remembering my ICC lore correctly, Will Sloan actually played until he was in high school, and I know he loved Eephus, as did the GUYS guy]), and they plan to record a portion of it from the 500s with the Rockies in town this week! neat!]). There was just the two-run homer to Max Muncy (astoundingly, there are two concurrent baseball-playing Max Muncies [Maxes Muncy?]; what a time to be alive), and honestly I was mostly just relieved it was someone other than Shea Langeliers who'd hit it. I was surprised that we ran four deep out of the bullpen again—Fisher to Nance to Fluharty to Hoffman—but everybody did great, and struck out really any number of guys. As a matter of fact (the only matter in which would ever deal here at Baseball Feeling [no speculation or mere surmise]), Blue Jays pitchers struck out fifty batters—fifty!—this weekend, a truly wild total by any standard. Wilder still, this is apparently only the third three-and-oh start in Blue Jays history, alongside 1992 (a good year!) and 1996 (less good), and it takes the Blue Jays all-time record to 3858 wins and 3856 losses, putting us above .500 (if you go to enough places after the decimal, anyway) for the first time since May of 1995. Let's go! But before we do, I have somehow not yet even mentioned the Blue Jays three fine dingers from yesterday: George Springer's, on the first pitch he saw (his sixty-fourth leadoff homerun, I believe they said, trailing only Rickey Henderson's untouchable eighty one [you know who's third? Alfonso Soriano! just ahead of Hall-of-Famer Craig Biggio! who are perhaps both safe because although Mookie Betts is right behind them both, the Dodgers do seem to like to go with Ohtani in that spot, don't they?); the mighty Jésus Sanchez's first as a Blue Jay (there is something in his aspect that makes him feel like an utterly classic baseball player to me, one that would be perfectly at home in literally any era of Blue Jays baseball; I hope to bring more precision to this observation in the coming months); and the already-well-loved Kazuma Okamoto's first in these leagues we call major (our guy went oppo [taco], even, with that quiet easy stroke of his). As fine an opening weekend as you could hope for! In closing I will note briefly that I was struck by the truly enormous Saturday and Sunday crowds, which I suppose I shouldn't have been, but my thoughts turned to the extent to which, in my own 2001—2006 period of SkyDome attendance, the crowds that followed the Opening Day sellout (or near sellout, and this in a time when that meant north of fifty-thousand in the building) would be super sparse, consisting exclusively of sickos (all of the reasonable baseball enthusiasts having already enjoyed sufficient baseball at Opening Day). The second game of the season was, functionally, Opening Day for Sickos. But no more. Unless there are simply that many more sickos in our current age of Blue Jays baseball? I rule nothing out!
Anyway, here come the Colorado Rockies, of whom I can never remember much of anything, I'm afraid. The hope here is they still have that delightful Juan Pierre.
KS
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