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| the biggest Oak we've got |
Red Sox starting pitcher Patrick Sandoval could not find the plate for much of the first inning, throwing I believe ten consecutive balls at one point (not a single pitch amongst them adjudged strikable!) en route to walking the bases loaded, and yet the Blue Jays, perhaps in a spirit of fellowship and compassion, elected not to score any runs consequent to this sorry state of affairs for the struggling lefty. Whatever the reason (their hearts, their shoes), the Blue Jays left three on to open the game, and left really just a whole bunch of guys on throughout the rest of it, too, for a total of ten (that's plenty!). Let us agree, though, probably, that it is a step in the right direction that they are getting guys on at all, regardless of where they end up. And indeed, sometimes they end up just where you'd hope: take, for instance, Kazuma Okamoto's towering three-run home run to centre field in the seventh to set the MLB record for home runs by a Japanese-born rookie (nifty!), and to tie the game at four (Trey Yesavage had an imperfect outing, allowing three runs on two homers in just four innings, and Braydon Fisher got lightly touched up for the fourth Red Sox run). A brand new ballgame, as they say! After Jeff Hoffman pitched a scoreless seventh, though, things went south in the eighth, as C.J. Van Eyk, whom I absolutely could not have told you was on the roster right now (I have read, and am willing to believe, that he pitched two innings against the White Sox last week, though I possess no specific memory of these innings), was dinged for two runs on four hits in just a third of an inning's work, and although Vladdy (who had singled twice earlier) worked a walk against Aroldis Chapman to bring the tying run to the plate in the ninth, Chapman got Big Oak, Springer, and Kirk to end it. A tough one, in the end.
Also tough: the Blue Jays announced yesterday that the promising Addison Barger, whose elbow, you will recall, pretty much exploded after making a truly incredible throw from right field to the plate in his first game back after injuring both ankles running out a grounder even earlier in the season, is definitely finished for the season, and perhaps part of the next, depending on whether he merely requires an "internal brace" in the elbow (which in and of itself does not sound great), or full-on, let's-harvest-a-ligament-from-elsewhere-in-your-body "Tommy John" surgery. The 2026 season is thus a completely lost one for Barger, who had just one hit in twenty-two at bats over nine games—and he's twenty-six years old, coming off a twenty-one-homer season (you may recall, too, his pinch-hit grand slam in Game One of the World Series? it was quite a moment!), so if he is to cook, the time to cook is very much now. It's a blow to the team, obviously, but much more so for Barger personally.
A blow to me, personally, though admittedly on a much different scale (so different a scale as to make this transition distasteful?), was the late-breaking realization that last night's game was going to be an Apple TV game. I really think they should cut it out! I don't like it when they do that at all! The national broadcasters who don't really know your team are bad enough (through no fault of the individual broadcaster themselves), but Apple is still running those preposterous probabilities in the bottom right corner (rightfully assailed by FanGraphs' Ben Clemens here [four years ago! wild! I've been minding it that long!]). It is I suppose a mercy that the font they use for everything is, while stylish, super tiny, and difficult for me to discern (I am neither young nor particularly well-visioned), in that it limits how much I can mind the specifics of these still-preposterous probabilities, but they are a flickering little bother in the corner of the screen that would better serve us by showing a little bit more grass or dirt.
Anyway! Back to our old friend Dan Shulman and his Sportsnet pals Saturday, I'm sure. Let's reconvene after, and talk about how it went.
KS
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