"I'm gonna keep going!" Max Scherzer yelled to everyone's immediate and obvious delight as he walked off the field and into the Blue Jays' dugout after striking out two more to end the top of the sixth in what may well have been the final start of his Hall-of-Fame career. "Keep going! Keep going, motherfucker!" was George Springer's unmistakable off-camera reply as the broadcast faded into the break. Springer, batting at the top of the order as had so long been his custom (though not of late), had already had his moment—a single in his second at-bat of the day, one that saw him scoot into second on the left-fielder's bobble, after which he was pulled for a pinch-runner to a truly wonderful ovation, one befitting his standing—in this, the final game of his six-year stint in Toronto, and quite possibly the last game of his own very fine career. His arrival in Toronto ahead of the 2021 season, like Hyun-Jin Ryu's the year before, were clear signs that the team had decided to spend whatever it took to build around Vladdy and Bo (who, it's easy to forget, were only twenty-two and twenty-three, respectively, at the time of Springer's signing) and see just how far it could take them. The answer, as we saw last year (a season in which Springer, incidentally, at thirty-five years old, was the third-best hitter in either league, behind only Aaron Judge and Shohei Ohtani), was as far as baseball goes (in some ways farther), and it took George Springer's seventh-inning, ALCS Game Seven three-run homer on one good knee (one good knee at most) to get them there ("Exactly the part of the lineup you'd want up in a situation like this," Dan Shulman calmly intoned an instant before it happened [hear all calls here, including, right at the end, the Mariners' heartrending radio broadcast, in a way the truest among them]). For Springer, who has done enough to fairly be said have done it all (2017 World Series Champion and MVP, four-time All-Star, made all the money anyone could ever spend), but not so much that there's any kind of final push towards the Hall of Fame to be had (I'm afraid our guy has neither two-hundred more home runs nor fifteen-hundred further hits in him at this point), and whose third child just arrived this summer, I would be very surprised if we ever see him in a major league uniform again. For Scherzer, whose kids are older (though of course still young), and who is, in a baseball sense, fundamentally unhinged, nothing would surprise me.
And so ends what can only be said to be a disappointing season, of course. That the Blue Jays went from last place in the AL East in 2024 to extra innings of Game Seven of the World Series against the historically great Los Angeles Dodgers the very next season was really all the evidence we needed of just how slim the margins in all of this are; we didn't need a last-place finish this year to underscore the point. But that's what we got, just to make good and sure. In baseball, when things are going well, they're only ever barely going well (this part, we feel), and when they're going terribly, we're rarely quite as far off as we might think (this part, we don't). It's all so tenuous. We learn this early, from minced-oath television airings of Bull Durham, and the speech Ron Shelton writes for Crash Davies about how the difference between a .250 hitter and a .300 hitter over the course of twenty-five weeks of baseball is (inexplicably, impossibly) somehow just twenty-five hits. "You get just one extra flare a week, just one, a gork, a ground ball—a ground ball with eyes!—you get a dying quail, just one more dying quail a week and you’re in Yankee Stadium. You still don’t know what I’m talking about, do you?" We do, though (unlike Ebby Calvin "Nuke" LaLoosh, but it's okay; he'll get there; he's still young). That it's true on the level of the individual, then, is well-established for us, but it's no less true for the team, as impossible as that feels by the end of the long season. Last year, the Blue Jays won ninety-four, and kept going; this year, just seventy-nine, and there's nowhere else to go. But what's fifteen games over twenty-five weeks (what's Hecuba to him, or he to Hecuba)? If we'd won even one more game every other week, we'd be in clover, well and truly. But with a full rotation's-worth of hurt and hurting starters, and very nearly nobody hitting all year, this is where we've ended up, and quite rightly, I suppose. Still, it was wonderfully heartening and legitimately moving to hear the ninth-inning chants of the standing 42,131 who filled the SkyDome for the last Sunday afternoon of this strange fiftieth season. In some ways, it was a tough summer. But with a little luck, we'll see another. Let's go, Blue Jays.
KS
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