 |
| It's okay, Shane Bieber (pat pat); you did a pretty good job today mostly (pat pat) |
The last time Shane Bieber was on the mound for the Blue Jays, you may well recall, was in extra innings in Game Seven of the really very good 2025 World Series. When Beiber entered that game, I honestly felt like we were good indefinitely, that we would have as many chances as we needed to push a single run across in the home half of really any inning, however many it might take. I was at least as surprised as anyone, and probably more surprised than most, when Will Smith homered in a way that proved to be enormously consequential (within the admittedly limited realm of baseball game outcomes). It's entirely possible that I have a disproportionate sense of Shane Bieber's excellence, as our parasocial relationship was forged in the fires of Baseball Mogul, and that can do strange things to one's capacity for objective assessment (my status as perhaps the internet's foremost Yimi Garcia Ultra is no doubt another consequence of this phenomenon). But consider, too, the role (pardon me, the rôle) Bieber had played in the Blue Jays' postseason up to that crucial point: although Bieber simply did not have it in his start in Yankee Stadium (Bieber left that game in the third inning down 6-3 in a game the Blue Jays would ultimately lose 9-6, in no small part because Aaron Judge "went off" [the foul poll, specifically, in this instance]), do you recall that the Blue Jays dropped their first two at home in the ALCS? And that it was Bieber's start in Seattle that got things going in Game Three? Or that, after the utterly absurd eighteen-inning World Series game in Los Angeles that, in the end, did not quite go our way, it was Shane Bieber who started the next night, and did so ably?
I was very pleased to hear Dan Shulman remind the audience of all of this (admittedly he did not say much about that Yankees game) as Bieber made his long-awaited and exceedingly welcome return to the lineup after a winter and spring of arm, shall we say, uncertainty. And Bieber looked pretty good! For a while! A first-inning run, sure, but then a relatively breezy second and third before, well, admittedly, he did allow back-to-back-to-back home runs (all solo shots, though!) to Yainer Diaz, Cam Smith, and finally Taylor Trammell, who, fair enough, hit it into the 500s; that's where he hit it; we can be open and honest about that. The Blue Jays battled back, though! Two-run home runs from newcomer Luis Urías (recently obtained from Arizona for Cash Considerations [who sounds like a third baseman to me]) and Daulton Varsho had things looking pretty good, and Kazumo Okamoto's two-run single to left in the bottom of the eighth (scoring Springer and Vladdy) seemed like it was going to be enough to get it done with Tyler Rogers coming in to pitch the ninth (Louis Varland, who is pitching constantly, was unavailable). But instead of his usual soft contact more or less directly to guys, Rogers allowed some reasonably hard contact less directly to guys than you might hope, and, combined with a costly catcher's interference on Brandon Valenzuela's part, we were all tied up, and headed to extras, where neither Springer (groundout to the drawn-in infield) nor Vladdy (flyball to the edge of the warning track in centre) were able to bring in the runner from third (who had been nicely bunted over by Giménez), and Braydon Fisher, after a fine tenth (I neglected to mention that Hoffman did well again, but he did; let's get that in here to, however inelegantly), had our old friend Joey Loperfido down to the Astros' last strike of the inning before a fairly towering three-run shot was hit very much to right. Okamoto, whose OPS in June is at-or-near 1.000 (super good!), knocked in Vladdy in the home half of the eleventh, but that's where it stopped. A great game, honestly, but we're back below .500 (that's bad . . .), but still in the WC3 playoff position (. . . that's good!). So, a mixed bag, as we look towardst a series win Wednesday night? I wonder if Trey Yesavage might strike like a whole bunch of guys out, maybe.
KS
No comments:
Post a Comment