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| you said it, George Springer; you said it, pal |
I had this one on the radio! Like the whole time! My thinking ran thus(ly): with Dan Shulman away from the television broadcast for this series (basketball reasons? or maybe just a break?), his able son Ben Shulman stepped into that TV rôle, leaving radio play-by-play duties to Eric Smith, who usually makes out okay, and Chris Leroux, who, in our post-Buck era, is my favourite Blue Jays colour commentator by kind of a lot, and so the choice was not the usual one between an excellent television experience (Dan Shulman is the best of his generation at this, regardless of what I make of Joe Siddall's tone at times) or a pretty good radio experience (young Ben and the pleasingly inquisitive Leroux, a true seeker), but between a pretty good TV broadcast on the one hand, or a pretty good radio experience and a really nice walk on the other, and so I opted for the latter. Anyway, from the sound of things, the Blue Jays sure didn't do a whole lot in this one! Just the four hits, I gather. Vladdy hit a deep fly ball to the wall with Okamoto on second in the late innings, and that was probably the most exciting part on the radio, at least, and in truth I don't know how close to the wall it actually was (perhaps I have been tricked?). Oh hey though, you know who put up another totally solid start, just two runs on five hits in five-and-a-third? Patrick Corbin, that's who! To the extent to which are bacon is in fact being saved at present (the extent of this is of course open to debate), Patrick Corbin is doing a reasonable amount of that (hickory-smoked) saving. I'm glad of it! And relieved (light pitching pun) that he's around, in that Max Scherzer's arm issues remain both unresolved and mysterious, and José Berrios is having some profoundly dark minor-league rehab performances that suggest that he might, after years and years as La Makina, be finished. I will mourn this loss if this indeed the case. My expectation at this point is honestly that we will not see him pitch meaningfully in the big leagues again, but I admit to having very low expectations for pitchers once arm troubles begin at all (it is a miracle that anybody's arm holds together ever, in my view [prove me wrong, guy's arms; prove me wrong]).
A terrible trip to Tampa, then, as is so often the case, and yet the American League remains, to our great benefit, an utter absurdity: here we are in the first week of May with only two teams in the league—just two!—with records above five-hundred. This is of course only possible because of the great frequency with which interleague play happens these days (I am utterly agnostic on interleague play: it is nice to see all of the teams, but if they returned to the old ways tomorrow and we never saw another NL team in the regular season ever again, I would be entirely fine with it [I suppose I am ambivalent, rather than agnostic, in that I do not actually have any trouble believing that interleague play exists]). But every team in the NL Central—the whole NL Central! those guys are often the worst!—has a winning record right now. Everything is (sur)passing strange. The Blue Jays, who have now started each of the last three seasons with a sixteen-and-twenty record (isn't that odd? [also they have lost one more game since]), somehow sit both a-game-and-a-half out of a postseason position, and a-game-and-a-half out of having the worst record in the league. These are baffling times, and yet baffling in our favour? I will say that I feel pretty light about it all as we head into this weekend against the Angels. We're throwing Dylan Cease and Trey Yesavage in the first two, and then the struggling Lauer in game three, but that one's against José Soriano, so functionally it might as well be me out there (you should actually see how much break I am getting on like every third or fourth knuckle-curve I'm throwing when we play catch at the park these days—it's honestly quite something).
KS
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