Blue Jays 3, Rays 1: Peak Performance

 

go Kirky

Here's a weird one: first inning, two outs, Ernie Clement on second, George Springer on first, Alejandro Kirk at the plate. Kirk, as we have long maintained here at Baseball Feelings without ever actually having really checked, seems to get way more infield hits than you might expect given that he is one of the slowest players in the league (first-percentile sprint speed of 22.9 feet/second [a bizarre unit of measurement compared to the way we usually talk about running, but basepaths are measured in feet, so it's fine I guess]). Part of this is on account of how he just makes a tonne of contact, and so some of that contact, like anybody else's, is inevitably going to result in unplayable dribblers, sure, but a crucial factor here seems to be that because Kirk runs so slowly (the man runs hard, of course; please do not mistake me), everybody knows you can and indeed should play the infield plenty back; so far back, in fact, that, coupled with how much contact Kirk makes, and how a certain proportion of that contact will inevitably be soft, he's going to get a bunch of infield hits—and indeed a weird amount of them, really—not despite of how slow he is, but, quite to the contrary, because of how slow he is. Paradox, or dialectic? Is this one best handled by the Anglicans among us, or the Hegelians? Or perhaps (dialectically) by some third thing? I don't know, but I sure enjoy it! And yesterday's first inning offered us just a tremendous instance of this. As I was saying: two outs, Ernie on second, Springer at first, Alejandro Kirk at the plate. Kirk hits the merest dribbler down the the third base line towards Junior Caminero (an absolute menace of a dude this series, even for him); Caminero charges in, needing a barehanded pickup to even make a play of it as Kirk dashes (in his wholly admirable fashion) down the line to first, but Caminero, understandably, cannot not secure the ball to even begin any of that (hey: it happens). Ernie, alive to all of this in his usual canny fashion, sees the ball roll past Caminero, if only a little, and darts home to score as Springer deftly takes third just ahead of the eventual throw to that bag. So that's an infield single—no error on the play, as the scorer could not deem it one that Caminero should have made with ordinary effort—that scored a run from second and sent a runner from first to third. On an Alejandro Kirk infield single.

That first-inning play left me delighted enough that I'm quite sure I would have been able to sustain a reasonable amount of delight throughout the remaining eight innings regardless of how delightful or undelightful those innings may have been on their own merit, but the delights just kept coming! Shane Bieber was their foremost architect, pitching exactly like you'd like to see Shane Bieber pitch: seven innings, one run on just three hits without any walks at all, all while only striking out three, which is to say, his six-pitch mix had everybody hitting grounders all day, which led to some nifty plays from Okamoto at third, Ernie at short, and Vladdy at first (Luis Urias, for whatever reason, went largely untested as far as I recall).  Vladdy was good for a pair of hits and a run knocked in, Springer likewise, and once you toss in a couple of clean innings from Tyler Rogers and Louis Varland, all of a sudden you're feeling pretty good about the world! As it relates to the fortunes of the baseball team you enjoy! 

On to Boston, then, where the Red Sox are coming off their longest winning streak (fifteen games!) since Ted Williams was on the squad, which really was some time ago. It's better for us to catch them now that they've got all that out of their system, I think. Hey has anybody else noticed during their daily scan of the standings (don't act like I'm the only one who scans daily) that if the Blue Jays were somehow able to sweep in Boston this weekend, we'd be only three games out with a week to go before the trade deadline? Wouldn't that be a ludicrous position, bordering on an impossible one? To do anything productive with, I mean? Fortunately, the act of watching baseball remains exactly as productive either way, but for the people who have to make decisions about things, I can see it mattering more. How pleasing, then, to be us instead.  

KS