Giants 8, Blue Jays 1: Oh No

 

hang in there, Vladdy

Kazuma Okamoto's twentieth home run of the season (already! and it's only early July! holy cow!) broke a fairly sorry stretch of twenty-nine innings between Blue Jays runs (that's so many! [innings, obviously, rather than runs {of which there have been so few}]). I believe they said on the broadcast that the team record for consecutive scoreless innings was thirty-one, set all the way back in 1981, and if that's accurate (in my memory; I'm sure whatever they said on the broadcast was entirely accurate), I would honestly just as soon they held out a few more innings and set the new mark. I do believe, though, that the Blue Jays' three-game hit total of seven following last night's very poor showing against mediocre Giants pitching does set the new low for Blue Jays' hits in a three-game span in any of their fifty seasons, which really does give one pause. Not long after Okamoto's home run—the very next inning, I think (I'm not checking)—Kaz whiffed on a grounder that should have resulted in a double play, two down, nobody on, but instead resulted in first-and-third, nobody out, and the beginnings of what proved to be a big inning (Kevin Gausman was not at his best). Toss in another error on a dropped pop up in foul territory (always a weird error to me; errors that arise from any circumstance other than a base being achieved will always feel a little off to me, scorekeeperingly), and it really was a mixed bag for Okamoto on the night. For just about everybody else, it was just unambiguously bad. Is this the bottom? It felt like it might be. I do not count myself among those who feel this is already a lost season, but at three-and-a-half games back, a particularly bad week at this point could be just about enough to seal it. On the other hand, though, a solid stretch (not even a great one!) with the right teams losing ahead of us puts us right where we would need to be for the last sixty-five games or so. We stand now upon a perilous edge, as it says in the Francis Storr translation of Oedipus The King, a play about someone whose overall deal is objectively nearly as bad as that of the 2026 Toronto Blue Jays. Please keep his plight in your thoughts, too.

KS