Blue Jays 8, Athletics 7 (F/11): Alejandro Kirk, Fastest Man Alive

 

this is Ernie, though, walking it off (more like Ernice, arguably)

I will admit, dear reader, to thinking ourselves entirely cooked when the seemingly unstoppable Shea Langeliers took Brendon Little very much over the centre field wall ("it's deep, but Varsho's got it," I said to my young interlocuter right off the bat in what turned out to be a half-truth at best) for the grand slam that put the Athletics ahead of the Blue Jays 6-2 in the seventh. It felt like a real shame, in that it made a hash of the débuting Dylan Cease's twelve-strikeout, one-run outing over six (or into the sixth, I should say—he pitched five-and-a-third, I see as I check it now). Little had relieved Mason Fluharty, who, for his part, had faced just two batters, each of whom had ripped one back to the mound, the second one injuriously so (right off the knee). All bad stuff! But over our supper hour, the Blue Jays worked their way back into things, at times delightfully so. Have you ever, for instance, seen Alejandro Kirk tag up from second on a fly ball to medium-deep right? And then scamper home on a Jésus Sanchez grounder to third mere moments later? Me neither! Until now! I can report that it rules! By the time the bottom of the ninth rolled around, we were only down one, when Alejandro Kirk (that guy? again?), his baserunning bona fides now firmly established, decided to park one in the the bullpen behind the left-field wall this time around to tie it up (a decision I respect). I have come to fear extra-inning baseball in the Manfred Man era far more than I ever did before, certainly, but the Blue Jays survived several innings of it, before Ernie Clement singled in the pinch-running Nathan Lukes to win it in the eleventh. 

Great game! What fun! Two walk-offs in as many days is a better start than we could have asked for from the perspective of pure Baseball Enjoyment, certainly, but the particular shape of this latter one, in which eight Blue Jays pitchers appeared (your standard Cease to Fisher to Fluharty to Little to Nance to Rogers to Varland to Rule-5-draftee Spencer Miles path to victory) has to make you hope Eric Lauer goes like seven or so tomorrow. And I for one do not doubt him, as he sneakily pitched the fourth-most innings of all Blue Jays pitchers last year (weird, right?). Perhaps he will strike a whole bunch of guys out, even, as his forerunners have been doing at a mighty rate so far: I have read that this is the first time since 1901 that two pitchers (Gausman and Cease, in this instance) have opened the season with consecutive performances of eleven strikeouts or more, but nobody has said who, specifically, did it in 1901, surely a matter of interest to the early-twentieth-century baseball simulationist (or more precisely, I suppose, to the early-twenty-first-century baseball simulationist simulating early-twentieth-century baseball) if to no one else (also to owners of paper copies of The Baseball Encyclopedia, too, possibly? is this a Venn-diagram-is-a-circle situations maybe?). Maybe if Lauer strikes out eleven (or more!) tomorrow, they'll tell us then. Here's hoping!     

KS