Blue Jays 3, Red Sox 0: Trey Day, As They Say

 

who's got a ball / can I get a ball / who's got a ball

Amidst the long-awaited return of young Trey Yesavage (no runs on just four hits, no walks, three Ks, and a bunch of broken bats in five-and-a-third), Myles Straw's lovely sliding catch in right (a day after Davis Schneider's career-best dive in left), a nifty little two-run third (Giménez single, Vladdy double [just over the reach of five-foot-six third baseman Caleb Durbin], and Okamoto near-double [he was thrown out at second to end the inning] knocking in both), and some basically ideal relief pitching (Fluharty to polish off Yesavage's sixth, Hoffman striking out a pair in a clean seventh, Rogers with a characteristically excellent eighth, and everybody's favourite Louis Varland striking out the side in the ninth), a minor miracle occurred that was none of those fine things. And it was this: not only did Ernie Clement walk, but he did so twice, having done it only once previously this season, and never having demonstrated the least inclination towards the practice in all that we have seen and come to admire in him. He's third in the AL in hits, tied for the lead in doubles, and barely striking out, but our guy is decidedly not a walker. Nor should he be! In that he should do his own thing, and stick with the approach that allows him to be a useful major leaguer! It is indicative, though, of just how helpful both walks and home runs are to the overall cause of scoring runs that Ernie can be at-or-near the top of the league in both hits and doubles but, in the absence of a little more OBP and a little more SLG, he is an only slightly above average offensive player. Sabermetrics of the most ancient kind! Or, put another way, insights gleaned from Weaver On Strategy (1984) and enacted thereafter in Earl Weaver Baseball (1987)! (Foolish Bailey's "Earl Weaver Played Moneyball before Moneyball" is another good place to start on Weaver, if you have never Weavered, and the comment section includes this excellent information: "My favorite Earl Weaver fact is that even though he was third all time in managerial ejections, if you added the amount of times he was ejected before the game even started to his total then he's first all time.")   

I also wanted to mention that, at the end of play Tuesday night, only three American League teams—only three!—have winning records: only the Yankees (20-10) and Rays (18-11) have been legitimately good, the scrappy A's have been scrappy (15-14), and everybody else has been, if not bad, at least troubled. And so my unalterable belief that .500 baseball is pretty much fine (and then hopefully you rattle off a couple of streaks, maybe, and then you're all set) has never been more actually true than right now! The Blue Jays, somewhat absurdly, are at once three games below .500, and yet just a game out of both the WC2 and WC3 postseason positions. We have picked the perfect April, probably, for nearly all our guys to be hurt.   

KS