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| there he goes |
I'll wait until Kevin Gausman is actually traded, if that is indeed what's still going to happen, before getting much into the particulars of where he figures amongst the all-time Toronto Blue Jays greats (it is more prominently than you might expect! amongst them!), but I did want to mention this much for today: that the Blue Jays, as some of us will recall instantly/intimately, have played postseason games at the conclusion of eleven of their first forty-nine seasons (not at bad rate, honestly) for a total of eighty-four games; of those eighty-four games, Kevin Gausman has been the starting pitcher in seven of them, and appeared in an eighth, as well, coming out the bullpen to battle through a scoreless seventh inning against the Seattle Mariners in Game Seven of the 2025 American League Championship series, setting the stage for George Springer's three-run home run in the bottom half of that same inning. Even setting aside the thirty-plus regular-season starts he's made every year he's been with the team so far—and the Cy Young votes, and the All-Star Game, all of that—and just thinking about the postseason (a strange thing to do, I grant you), Kevin Gausman has pitched in very nearly ten percent of the Toronto Blue Jays' postseason games—ever, I mean! That's kind of surprising, isn't it? Did it feel that way to you while it was happening? I'm honestly not sure that it did to me. I do know that whenever it was Gausman's turn at any point throughout last year's whole miraculous run, I felt good about it every time, or as good as you ever can: who knows what might happen, one would be forced to concede (before the fates or whatever), but he's for sure the best we've got, so here we go . . .
The whole of Saturday's game was about Kevin Gausman, from start to finish, or really from before the start, even, as the early crowd stood and cheered him all along his way from the dugout to the bullpen to warm up ahead of the game. The broadcast, both pregame and throughout the afternoon, foregrounded the likelihood of this being Gausman's last start with the team, and was filled with nothing but praise for him as a player and a congenial presence around the team (his ever-audible "attaboy, Kirky" on an ably blocked splitter in the dirt was not just highlighted, but lingered over), with much made of Gausman and his family as people who fell in love with the city (it really is pretty nice!). As to the game itself, Gausman held up his end of things admirably, scattering nine hits (a lot of it soft contact, though not all) and just one walk over five-and-two-thirds of one-run baseball, before quite a crew, really (Fisher, Fluharty, Hoffman, Rogers), handled the final three-and-a-third. Blue Jays runs came in the third (Springer singling home Schneider), fourth (Luis Urías bringing Ernie home on a sacrifice fly), and, most excitingly, the seventh (Springer doubling in Giménez, and Kirk driving one to right to score both Springer and Vladdy [who had a pair of hits on the day, for his part]), and there you go: three straight wins, all of a sudden, and four of their last five. At this very moment of composition, I am checking in and seeing that yes, the Guardians did end up losing to the Diamondbacks in the end; the Twins lost to the Mariners earlier; the Rangers lost to the Astros; and the Orioles lost to the Phillies; which is all to say that Blue Jays are closer to the action than they've been in a while, now just three-and-a-half games behind Minnesota and Cleveland for the final Wild Card spot. If Max Scherzer can put something together tomorrow—a tall order at this stage of things, no question—and we get a few more breaks on the (Home Hardware [forever, to me, at least]) out-of-town scoreboard like we did today, we could be two-and-a-half games back as Monday evening's trade deadline approaches. What a mess that would be! That's chaos! And for that reason alone I say we do it.
KS
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