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| would that we all possessed Alejandro Kirk's equanimity |
Two ninth-inning losses (I suppose they're pretty much all "ninth-inning losses," unless they run late or get rained out early, but you see what I am after) in a little under twenty-four hours is no way to lose a series (on the contrary, it is a great way to lose a series, haha!), and yet I choose to remember the good times—a Davis Schneider homer, a strong and well-received inning of relief from the largely beset Jeff Hoffman—rather than the really very bad: the two-homer, five-run, Yankees ninth off of first Braydon Fisher, and then Tommy Nance. I'm not mad about it! They're both solid guys! Everybody gets hit sometimes! The Yankees are the best team in the league! And we, alas, are not. We are, on the contrary, four games under .500. Will three against the weirdly lowly Red Sox in Fenway this week be of any service in our quest to be perfectly, indisputably average? Sounds like a lowered expectation, on account of how it obviously is, but I would welcome it pretty hard all the same. I don't know if we have it in us, but I would like for us to have it in us. At present, the Athletics and Rangers are tied for the final Wild Card spot, a game-and-a-half ahead of us, and neither has a winning record. Are we better than them? It's not impossible. Are we better than this? We have been previously, certainly. Might we be again? Too soon to say.
A somewhat rough couple of days of Blue Jays baseball seem as good an occasion as any to mention that I have come to understand that I really don't actually mind it all that much when the Blue Jays are playing poorly (it is, after all, just baseball, and only one iteration of it at that [and I am a pretty old guy; I have genuinely "seen some shit" as regards Blue Jays baseball]); what I really do mind is the careless type of thing other people say about the Blue Jays when they are playing poorly, the kinds of complaints they have and make. I find them irksome and ungenerous! This is, obviously and self-evidently, entirely my problem, a prison of my own making (though probably at least as bad as literal prison). Although I eliminated all sports talk radio from my life many years ago for this reason (among others, certainly), and have since done the same with nearly all sports podcasting (sports talk radio's slightly-though-at-times-insufficiently elevated cousin), I do have a weakness for checking in on "the boards," and it is a habit I must cure myself of outside of really just one exception (more on that lone exception in just a moment). I found the Blue Jays-specific boards fairly silly and strangely doomerish even throughout much of their miracle run of 2025 (a season which is really a very easy test as to whether or not you might enjoy Blue Jays baseball), and I have only myself to blame for persisting with them into this new season. I think my position is that the team-specific internet is a failed genre (of internet). I will say, though, that r/baseball, for its part, remains the best general baseball board since the pre-"Think Factory" (awful, awful name) days of Baseball Primer, in no small part because it serves as a stated, explicit refuge from the almost flat-earth levels of nonsense one encounters on team-specific boards ("take it to the team sub" is a devastating rejoinder one sometimes encounters there [it elicits a frisson]). Where else, I ask, might one encounter baseball news this cheering:
I am on the internet for stuff like that; that is the kind of thing I want to know about, and to share with you. On account of how it is neat.
Anyway, on to Boston! Looks like the Red Sox are sending Tolle, Bennett, and Sonny Gray to the mound against TBD, TBD, and TBD, who, in all honestly, have actually thrown some solid innings for us so far. Let's expect good things.
KS
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