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| the unmistakable look of a man called for a balk |
Yes, I'm afraid, Dylan Cease too: in his first start back since his very fine All-Star starting performance (three strikeouts and a walk in his lone inning, you will perhaps recall [since it was literally less than a week ago]), Dylan Cease allowed two home runs (one to Cedric Mullins, I should note, previously my preferred Oriole, then briefly my preferred Met, and now my preferred Ray), threw the ball into centre field on a botched pickoff play at second, and, as a finally indignity, was called for a balk. He was joined in in this fairly inglorious messing up by the fairly steady Kazuma Okamoto and the usually excellent Andrés Giménez, both of whom were charged with errors, and Ernie Clement, who was not, but who let one go right through him in a way that upset him at least as much as it did the rest of us (I was briefly saddened, sure, but it is not the kind of thing that's going to come back to bite me in arbitration, so it was easy for me, personally, to let it go). It's not like it was shabby fielding all around—Vladdy, for example, made a great step-on-the-bag-at-first, fire-to-Giménez-for-the-tag-at-second double-play, which you can tell is one of the ones he likes best to do—but there was enough of it that it undeniably cost us a few runs. Not that it especially mattered, granted, in that while the Blue Jays managed eight hits and a pair of walks, they were only able to turn all that into just the one run, so it was never really especially close. It would surely have been a pleasure to watch Tampa Bay's Nick Martinez, a quirky, fidgety All-Star of a starting pitcher, ply his trade had he been doing so against anybody but these sad, sad Blue Jays, whom I would prefer to see happy.
KS
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