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| 1964—2026 |
Duane Ward—an unsung but crucial member of the Blue Jays teams of my youth, and among the finest relief pitchers in all of baseball from 1988 through 1993, in a somewhat low-key way—was in town ahead of Saturday's unveiling of the Joe Carter statue raised to commemorate the back-to-back World Series Championships of 1992 and 1993. But he didn't make the ceremony Saturday afternoon; the Blue Jays announced his sudden passing at the age of sixty-two the next day. Todd Stottlemyre wrote: "We all came together in Toronto for a special celebration and tribute. With my deepest regret I am making this post. We had no idea our Friday night dinner and the photo I posted was going to be the last time we were going to see Duane Ward. From celebration to sadness in a moment. May God rest your soul BlueJay brother and warrior on the mound. You will never be forgotten. Without your contribution there would be no BACK TO BACK. Life is short and we will never know when we will be called. Give someone a hug today and reach out to a loved one and tell them how much you love them. Prayers go out to the Ward family. RIP Brother, until we see you again." A moment of silence was held ahead of the game, and Dan Shulman did a really good job of putting Ward's relatively brief career (it effectively ended with the second World Championship at age twenty-nine) into context for those in the audience who might understandably not have been especially familiar with it. Tom Henke is the iconic closer of that era of Blue Jays baseball, but Duane Ward had the eighth, and often the seventh, before Henke moved on after the 1992 season. In 1993, the ninth was Ward's, and his forty-five saves and seventy-games finished were obviously huge parts of that season's spectacular success. As the AP/ESPN report on his passing notes, Ward went 3-0 with two saves and a 1.13 ERA in the eight World Series games in which he appeared. It's easy to forget that he pitched the top of the ninth ahead of Joe Carter's Game Six walk-off in 1993, a moment so huge that it subsumes not just the rest of that game but the rest of that series, and almost a whole era of Blue Jays baseball, but who else would it have been? You think about it for a second, and remember that it had to have been Duane Ward.
To Sunday's game, then: Trey Yesavage was great through five, and really still very good through six (three runs on five hits and two walks whilst striking out nine over six innings is a "quality start" both by the metric that bears the name and also just by the ordinary sense of those words), but the bats, alas, scraped out just five runs all weekend, with literally none of them coming Sunday. Oops! The bottom of the ninth was promising for a moment or two, though, as Ernie Clement and Nathan Lukes both reached on singles to bring the tying run to the plate, as they say, with nobody out. But Vladdy's sinking liner to right field was snagged by a sliding Braden Montgomery (a nifty play, I must begrudgingly concede), and Kazuma Okamoto grounded into as easy-peasy an inning-ending (game-ending [series-ending]) double play as you're ever likely to see (our guy Big Oak, for whom all are rightly grateful, has many virtues, but footspeed does not rank chief among them). Dropping a series to these White Sox, however charming they may be in their newfound goodness (after several seasons of badness so extreme that it was itself fairly merry, in its way), is for sure not the way we'd hoped to open up after the break, but that does seem to be what has happened here. It's not good, man; it's not good. And it's almost certainly about to get worse, as look who's coming to town for four games this week: you guessed it, it's those AL-East-leading Tampa Bay Rays! Is there any measure of consolation to be found in the fact they have cooled off of late, and are losers of their last five? In my view not really, no. And we're in such a tough spot in the standings (the bottom of them [that is the spot that's toughest]), with so much of the season already behind us, that even a four-game sweep of the Rays, were it to happen by some confluence of factors human and divine, would only get us marginally back in the discussion as far as a playoff spot goes. Would you believe the Red Sox have won thirteen straight now? Thirteen? How are we supposed to compete with that? If it is by winning baseball games, I do not love our chances! Of that!
KS
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