Blue Jays 7, Orioles 3: Also It Was Sunny

Vladdy, having been sent

An RBI-double and a couple runs scored for Vladdy, plus home runs from both Alejandro Kirk and Brett Bateman (his second in as many days! also the only Blue Jay to have ever had more hits in their first thirty games with the team is Bo Bichette!) gave our <<bullpenistes>> (Miles, Mantiply, Arrighetti, Fluharty, Sewald, Rogers, Varland [also the actual French for bullpen is l'enclos des releveurs; I am just joshing about) more than they needed on this pretty much ideal Saturday afternoon of baseball. What's more, the Twins (aided by a scoreless inning from Jeff Hoffman) held on against the Guardians, so here we are again, just the one game back of Cleveland for WC3 (should you ever find yourself wondering about WC2, I would say probably don't, as the Red Sox are six games ahead, which at this point of the season is functionally infinity-minus-one games [and the less said about WC1, the better]). It really is looking like it's going to all come down to the final weekend of the season, isn't it? The last time that was really the case for us, in an in-or-out sense (last year's AL East title came down to the very last day, thrillingly, in the Alejandro Kirkk game, but those are different stakes), was of course 2021 (as Baseball Felt here), the season that ended, as you may recall, with Marcus Semien's all-too-true statement that "we became the best team in baseball, but it was a tick too late." Even given the insane extent to which last year was obviously the year, I still sometimes find myself feeling that maybe 2021 was the year? However our weird present season ends up, exactly, it seems unlikely that it will lay as heavy as that one. But who knows!  

KS