Blue Jays 9, Royals 2: The Tremendous Gift of A Four-Run First

 

our new friend Michael Lorenzen with that rare-most of saves 
(the one you get for pitching three innings in a blowout)

Name-Suffix Guy Daniel Lynch IV's very first pitch of the ballgame came at Brett Bateman as though Lynch had meant to hit him, a fastball just absolutely buried in Bateman's front hip, nowhere to go. Nobody thinks it was on purpose, and there is absolutely no discernible reason why it would have been, and nobody reacted as though anything untoward had happened at all, but that's how badly he missed, is all I mean to suggest. From there, three straight singles from Vladdy, Kirk, and Okamoto combined with an Ernie Clement double gave us a four-run lead in the first, and you've really got to work to blow one of those; you've almost got to go out of your way. Instead, we took it easy, and cruised to a 9-2 win over these nattily-attired Royals (the best City Connect jerseys in the game, now that the Padres have switched theirs up? the Out Sports publication, for their part, note that "[t]he new Royals City Connect jerseys are super bisexual") in what turned out to be a sneak-attack of a bullpen game: Jameson Taillon, newly returned from the Injured List, pitched just two innings, and is headed right back to it (the Injured List, I mean), with a problem he descries as feeling "more nerve-y" than the previous one (uh oh), and is probably out for the rest of the year (would you believe we have had ten starting pitchers hit the IL this year? not ten pitchers, which would be bad enough, but ten starting pitchers, as though the starters particularly, rather than the pitching staff broadly, had been visited by an especially specific witch's curse). But everybody did great! And that we got three innings from our new friend Michael Lorenzen (who, when pitchers still hit in the NL, could totally hit; perhaps we should approach his time with the team from a "we have Shohei Ohtani at home" perspective?) sparing the rest of the bullpen its precious, precious pitches (you only get so many, unfortunately, and then your arm explodes).

And so with that, the Blue Jays are back to the .500 mark for the first time since June 23rd, when the astronomical summer was but days old, and the lived reality of summer (the school-year summer, the one that begins in earnest with Canada Day) still a week away. Were we ever, it is customary to ask, so young? Dare we venture a game above .500 for the first time since April, when we were four-and-three? This is a clear "dare to be great" moment, and my sincere hope is that we seize it.  

KS