 |
| Big Oak is getting hit by so many pitches (please stop throwing them like that; it hurts him) |
The last time we saw our old friend Chris Bassitt, he was pitching in Game Seven of the 2025 World Series (in case you missed it, the 2025 World Series was really quite good—the very old Bob Costas and Tim Kurkjian [they are both older than me!] called it the best one ever; I think you'd enjoy at least parts of it), allowing the only run of his utterly nails eight appearances out of the bullpen throughout October (and even slightly into November [weird, right?]), a stretch that solidified his position as A Guy We Are So Glad Signed To Pitch Here For Three Years. And yet time marches on, and just a few months later, having not super duper been offered a spot in the Blue Jays' starting rotation, yet very much being offered one by the Orioles, here we find him, at Oriole Park at Camden Yards (first and best of the "retro" parks, twenty-four years old now), having kind of a rough start to the season. He was totally good last night, though: the only run he allowed amidst four hits and a walk through six strong innings came on an Andrés Giménez solo shot in the third (Giménez had a big night with the glove, too). The only other Blue Jays run came on a pinch-hit, bases-loaded walk from Yohendrick Piñango, who is just all over every game these days, even the ones he doesn't start. Blue Jays pitching was, quite frankly, incredible once again. The able reporter Ben Nicholson-Smith mentioned the other day that he wrote in his notes during Patrick Corbin's previous start, "Is Patrick Corbin good?", and that is indeed a question we are all being forced to confront. It is indisputable that, so far this season, Patrick Corbin has been good; there is quite simply no denying it (a 3.65 ERA [nearly a full run below his career number] in forty-nine-and-a-third innings). But is he good? I almost hope we never know. Let's embrace the mystery of it. The bullpen, for its part, continues to be among the best in baseball, this time going Fisher to Hoffman (who is throwing a thousand sliders for a thousand whiffs in each recent appearance) to Rogers to the pretty much incomparable Louis Varland for a four-out save. (That the first of those four outs came on a Brandon Valenzuela back-pick play to Vladdy at first to catch loveable doofus Pete Alonso taking too bold a secondary lead to end the eighth does not diminish the four-outness of this Varland outing, in my view, but rather heightens it, through its inherent radness.) Following a recent scoring revision, Louis Varland's season now stands at just one earned run through thirty innings for a tidy ERA of just 0.30, which is bananas.
With the win, the Blue Jays are now just a single game below .500 at twenty-eight and twenty-nine, and, because the American League continues to be profoundly mediocre (not a complaint!), that's good enough for sole possession of the third and final Wild Card position for now. That our juggernaut status is thus confirmed is, I believe, self-evident, but I really would like us to pause for a moment, if we could, to note just how great the pitching has been to keep us even somewhat afloat during this stretch of offensive underperformance. That a good chunk of this offensive underperformance can be attributed to injury (Kirk, Barger, Lukes for a couple stretches, Springer for a while, etc.) is of course true, but the pitching staff has been pretty banged up too: José Berrios and Bowden Francis are both gone for over a year with elbow surgeries; Cody Ponce is out for the year following a knee explosion; Max Scherzer is on the IL for who knows how long on account of trying to pitch in his forties; Shane Bieber's rehab is coming along but he's still not that close; Tommy Nance and Joe Mantiply are down; Yimi Garcia (of whom I remain an ultra) is having just a bear of a time trying to get back; Dylan Cease is gone for at least a couple starts; and let's not forget Eric Lauer who, though, uninjured, pitched his way to a DFA. It has been in that sense a mess! And yet the bullpen has been just about as good as anybody's, and the starters have not been far off that pace. And it really is the pitching part of the whole run prevention half of the game that has been coming through, because our several seasons of having top-of-the-league defensive play appear to be extremely over, just absolutely insanely over all of a sudden. But perhaps that is a topic for another day.
Go Jays, though!
KS
No comments:
Post a Comment