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| Big Oak got another one |
It gives me no pleasure to report that veteran slugger Joc Pederson opened the game with a leadoff homerun to end an eleven-pitch at-bat, and, worse still, that's more or less how the whole evening went for Kevin Gausman. That's two tough ones in a row for Gausman, though of different sorts, in that, against the Cubs, he couldn't find the zone, and his defense betrayed him utterly; whereas against the Rangers, he found the zone, but the Rangers found the seats repeatedly (oh no). Despite three homers and six runs allowed in just the first three innings, Gausman stuck it out admirably, and managed to spare the bullpen for the six innings he ultimately struggled through. Simeon Woods-Richardson took it the rest of the way, walking some guys, sure, but allowing none to score, in this his third outing since being claimed off of waivers from the Twins (that he was DFA'd pretty much right after this is understandable but lamentable, and probably pretty tough for him personally, though I'm sure he'll land another major-league spot somewhere). The Blue Jays slowly managed to work their way back into this one (Davis Schneider hit a sacrifice fly with the bases loaded; Myles Straw knocked in a pair with a single) to such an extent that when Kazuma Okamoto hit his two-run homer in the bottom of the ninth, they were within one! But then of course the game ended really very soon thereafter. So it goes.
It was perhaps a fitting end to this, the eighty-first game, and thus the true halfway point, of this strange-so-far Blue Jays season. That we find ourselves in a four-team, sub-.500 tie for the final Wild Card spot sounds about right, doesn't it? Given how many of our guys got, and in some case remain, hurt? And how not all the bats are really quite humming along to the extent that one might have hoped? Still plenty of baseball left (literally half of it!), and so lots of time for things either to improve even slightly, in which case we would be in clover, or to fall apart significantly, in which case at least all of the anxiousness would be out of it. Either way, really! Keeping with this midseason theme, I would like to note that Ernie Clement, as the American League's leading All-Star vote-getter, has already been announced as the starting second baseman of that coming game; he has been spared the run-off balloting that in recent years has given the selection process more of a French-presidential-election vibe than it had held previously. Ernie's 3.2 million votes were exceeded only by Shohei Ohtani's 3.3 million (he will be the NL's starting DH, and I suppose might even pitch), which led Ernie to quip that it was tough coming in second place to the Dodgers again, haha! Several Blue Jays who have put forth first-halves of varying quality find themselves as run-off finalists for this round of balloting, and although this has elicited a good deal of commentary about Canadian fans unduly stuffing the ballot boxes, as a full-on partisan of the worst kind, I don't feel the least bit funny about it at all, and instead hope that literally all of our guys get in—and I mean literally every one of them, even Alejandro Kirk with like ten games played. "I was surprised that I'm in first," Guerrero told beat reported Mitch Bannon about it a little while ago. "There's a lot of first basemen doing a better job than me. But I don't control the fans, I don't control the vote." In my view, though, he should.
KS
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