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| maybe George Springer would have been safe if he'd wanted it more |
Let's work backwards, maybe: on a day where we knew the bullpen would be a little thin, it fell to Mason Fluharty to get the final three outs against this weirdly horrendous Red Sox lineup and protect a one-run lead that came from the fairly unlikely source of an Ernie Clement dribbler cashed in by a Brandon Valenzuela double off of awful guy/borderline-Hall-of-Famer Aroldis Chapman in the top of that very same ninth. What great fun! That's the kind of ninth inning I think we can all get behind! The eighth hadn't gone quite as well, as Trey Yesavage allowed back-to-back solo home runs (the first to our old friend Isiah Kiner-Falefa, the next to borderline-Name-Guy Caleb Durbin), but that Yesavage was even out there in the eighth tells you what kind of day he had (and also, again, shows that the back-end of the bullpen had worked the previous two days—it fell to Tommy Nance to get the last two outs in the eighth, after Yesavage left, and we thank him for his service in this regard). Nathan Lukes had homered in the seventh for the Blue Jays third run of the game; their second had come way back in the inning of that same numerical designation when Andrés Giménez (whom I really like) sac-flied Okamoto home from third. But my favourite thing that happened in this one, by far, came all the way back in the first, when Vladdy—who despite his prolonged troubles at the plate, could be seen amiably and affably and quite winningly chatting it up with some young Boston fans in the first rows moments before the game began—hit his first home run in twenty-three games, only his fourth of the season, very much over the green monster. When he got back to the dugout, and the home run jacket made its appearance, you could hear John Schneider (who has known Vladdy since he was, what, seventeen years old?) say lightly, "It still fits!" Once all the highs were fived, the camera caught Vladdy exhaling and offering a low-key but obviously heartfelt "gracias padre" at the far end of the dugout. Is it too soon to speculate that Vladdy is totally fixed now? "We need to live where our feelings lead us," the RZA said somewhere one time (evidence of this is that he is making little prayer hands above this quotation in a small picture I have up on the wall of the room in which I compose this present composition), and my feelings lead me to conclude fairly definitively that this is in fact it, that Vladdy is all set now, and is probably about to go on a tear that will make mad the guilty, appall the free, confound the ignorant, and amaze, indeed, the very faculties of eyes and ears. He's done it before! Maybe it's already begun again! Perhaps he will be buoyed, too, by how the Blue Jays are in a playoff spot now, and also that a simple series win (you don't even necessarily sweep this one, guys; I appreciate that that is hard to do) over the Cubs in Wrigley this weekend would see the Blue Jays head home with a sweet, sweet .500 record (we love those!). Yes, it really is probably potentially already upon us, maybe. And if turns out not, I'm sure we'll figure it out.
KS
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