Blue Jays 5, Tigers 1: Hoo Boy, We Needed That One, Didn't We

 

remember when those condos on the third-base side 
started showing up in video games? it was, and remains, neat to see

Even before our ancient, AL East-of-yesteryear rivals the Detroit Tigers made errors on three consecutive plays in the sixth, we were already doing just fine ("Hey, no, listen, listen, I was winning before this guy got here," Matt Damon pleaded truthfully [though it was an incomplete truth] before things went poorly for both he himself and his silly little buddy Ed Norton at the state troopers' poker game). But we'll take all the help we can get! Thanks guys! Those three errors paired wonderfully with the Blue Jays' nine hits and, even better still, with Max Scherzer's five innings of one-run baseball (that is a premium kind of it, obviously). Mason Fluharty, who has appeared in a fairly ludicrous seventy-nine games this season, Rule-5-legend Spencer Miles, and Louis Varland (back on the horse!) took it the rest of the way to salvage all that could be (salvaged) of an on-the-whole somewhat dispiriting series against these Tigers. That first game was a real stinger, wasn't it, and will no doubt prove memorable should we end up precisely a game short when all is said in done in another week-and-a-bit. I'm not sure if I have mentioned this previously, but although my preferred outcome the rest of the way would of course be that we squeak on into the final playoff spot and, by virtue of the the fairly reasonable matchup that would offer us against the underwhelming AL-West-leading Astros, and the strength of the front-end of our rotation (Cease, Soriano [let us not speak just now of how nearly all the rest of our guys are in various stages of rest and/or rehabilitation], away we go into a three-game opening round series that would realistically be a coin toss, the second-best outcome, as far as me and my feelings go, would just be to fully crash out, drop like four or five in a row, and finish like six or seven games back—far enough out, that is, that things end up too far gone to pin the season on any one particular blown game, or on a single underperforming player, or anything like that at all. In the increasingly likely scenario that we miss, I would like the margin of that miss to be such that the culpability must, by necessity, be broadly shared. It's better for everybody that way, and perhaps unaccountably, for me in particular?   

I let the above (baseball) feelings just kind of chill about for a bit while I awaited the results from the (Home Hardware) out-of-town scoreboard on the Blue Jays' Thursday off-day, and they indeed broke relatively well from our perspective: a White Sox win (go, Murakami; do it for the pope) knocked the Guards out of first place in the AL Central and cast them back down into the realms of wild cardery (which is where we want them, as we hold the tiebreaker over them [but not, alas, over the White Sox]), and a late Red Sox comeback over the Rangers leaves us tied with them (the Rangers, I mean, not the Red Sox [haha oh no not nearly the Red Sox; oh my no]), two games behind Cleveland for WC3. And so the road ahead is really quite clear: this weekend, in Texas, where the centre-field camera in their new ballpark is just way too high and everything looks bad because of it, it would behoove the heck out of us to take no fewer than two of three, which shouldn't be altogether too much to ask, given that we've got our big three scheduled to take the mound (Cease, Soriano, and "bullpen day"). I honestly haven't even checked who Cleveland will be playing this weekend, though that is of course totally relevant, too; let's just see (we'll learn together!) . . . okay, the Guardians play the league-worst-but-for-the-Angels Athletics, which is not super promising for us, unless perhaps, as losers of their last three, the A's are due? What if the gambler's fallacy is not only real, but in fact a friend to us, one that will engender the realization of our innermost wishes desires? You can't rule it out! Not entirely!

KS

Tigers 10, Blue Jays 1: The Path Narrows

 

altogether too much of this sort of thing

Well that's no good at all! Our bullpen days have been, as you know, really quite something this season, but now that we are down to just the three healthy starting pitchers (of the eight or more [depending on how you figure things] with whom we started the season), it is proving taxing-as-all-heck to be doing this every few days, as opposed to once out of every five. That the bats did not especially bat last night is immaterial, if we were going to pitch like that; and, if we weren't going to hit at all, how we pitched doesn't matter a lick either, so maybe everyone is blameless? A plausible line of argumentation, I think, but another is that we quite simply stunk, and did so considerably. Cleveland won, so we're now two full games behind with just ten to go, and Texas won, so we're even a half-game behind them, too! Oh man! If we go on some kind of wild tear over these final ten games, we can still totally get to where we we would like to be (or at least where I think we might like to be [I find it complicated {emotionally}]), but with the starting rotation in just a ravaged shambles of a bunch of guys, with Yesavage and Bieber still a little ways off (and with Jameson Taillon, who we'd suspected was finished, now officially done for the season), it's going to take some genuine weirdness of this to break our way. We've got Max Scherzer going this afternoon (getaway day! always a pleasure!), and his most recent start was quite poor after a couple of really good ones (and one legitimately great one). He'll always give you everything he has, Scherzer will, but, at age forty-two, there is always a non-zero chance that his arm will literally fall off of his body and onto the mound, which, among other complications, makes it difficult to grip the slider. So I guess we'll just see. 

KS

Tigers 6, Blue Jays 5: What About My Heart, Though

 

tell me about it, José Soriano; tell me about it

After putting two runs on the board in the first (an Alejandro Kirk RBI single, then a wild pitch to bring George Springer scurrying home), the Blue Jays loaded the bases in both the second and the third, but failed to add to their early lead. But no matter! Because, would you look at that, José Soriano has a perfect game going through five! And a no-hitter going through six! Anyone who has watched a significant amount of baseball will recognize the dark phenomenon which unfolded before us in that seventh, though, in which a no-hitter becomes a multiple-run several-hitter in alarmingly quick fashion. It's no fun when that happens! By the time we got through that doomed top-half of the seventh, we were on the wrong end of a four-two score and yet it was no great matter on account of a characteristically towering three-run home run from the hot-as-the-super-hottest-fire Kazuma Okamoto (his thirty-third of the year, which is really something) to put us up late! And our bullpen rules! So we're good! And yet we were not: Joe Mantiply, who has given us no trouble at all this season, got touched up in the eighth such that the call for a five-out save fell upon Louis Varland, our stoutest of stalwarts (and most stalwart of stout guys), who just could not, on the whole, get it done Monday night: most troublingly, in the ninth, he was charged with a straight-up-whiffing-on-the-ball error on a nice throw from Vladdy on a tough play at first; Louis turned his head to look towards the base just an instant ahead of when he should have, and *whoop* there goes the ball, trickling away as the soon-to-be-winning run scampers in. Weighty though all this felt (the crowd was awesome), it was only Varland's second blown save (le sabotage!) of the season, and he has been so great (exceeding even the loftiest expectations) all you could do was accept it all as a true "pobody's nerfect" moment. The White Sox, thankfully, handled the Guardians in the first meeting of their three-game series that is sort-of-possibly for the AL Central title, and so we remain just a game back (and a half-game ahead of the lurking Rangers) with now eleven games to go. Just eleven! I see that Braydon Fisher is the scheduled starter tonight, which no doubt means he is "opening" more than starting, and one would assume a good deal of Spencer Miles (as much as we can get!) behind him? Had a bullpen day not been in the cards for the Tuesday game, one wonders if Spencer Miles might have appeared Monday? But there's no use worrying at it: Sewald to Mantiply to Varland was obviously not a bad plan at all after Soriano; it just didn't work out. That's baseball, Suzyn, as the late John Sterling would famously say (to Suzyn, primarily, but its wisdom exceeds those bounds, too).

KS

Blue Jays 8, Orioles 1: Vladdy Got One

 

"yes sir, there she goes; let's admire that one" as an old friend used to say

When Vladimir Guerrero Jr. hit a fifth-inning home run off of a lightly hanging Logan Gilbert curveball to put the Blue Jays up five-nothing in Game Six of the 2025 American League Championship Series against the Seattle Mariners last October (watch it here, should glory rank amongst your interests at all), who could have believed that it would be Vladdy's last home run in the SkyDome until the following September? Probably pretty much no one! For sure not me! And yet this turned out to be very much our situation. When it finally came, this long-awaited dinger, it did so as the middle-dinger in the Blue Jays' first back-to-back-to-back home runs struck since 2012: then, it was Colby Rasmus, José Bautista, and Edwin Encarnacion (I bet you would not have guessed more than two of those names, and I furtherly bet I know which two [same here!]); Sunday, it was George Springer, Kazuma Okamoto, and also Vladdy, tuckled right in between the two as previously mentioned. The crowd did not treat it lightly, nor did they treat it even the slightest bit Bronx-cheeringly, or anything, but instead greeted the moment with earnest celebration and encouragement, so much so that, with a little nod from John Schneider, Vladdy gave them a curtain call at the end and everything. I will admit to feeling a lot of feelings in that moment, and to have, in the realm of the spirit, fallen to my knees in the Mr. Sub located on Bloor Street West opposite the old Varsity Stadium (in the material world, I was simply at home, conventionally seated). The broadcast handled it like the strangely big moment that it was, too, offering no fewer than five commentary-free presentations from different cameras (having just watched some Vladdy postseason homers, and now this one, something that I prefer about regular-season home runs is watching first a few, then a few more, then just about everyone in the crowd stand up as they realize the ball has a chance; this is of course less the case in postseason contexts, where most if not all of the crowd is already standing in anticipation of the big moment [they sneak up on you a little more throughout the course of the long season), and playing CeCe Peniston's "Finally" not once but twice (two non-consecutive occasions!). "I believe in God, you know," Vladdy told Hazel Mae afterwards. "And it's not when we want, it's when God says, 'today's a homer.'" And how did it feel, Vladdy? "To me it's like, it feels so fucking good. Sorry guys. Sorry for the language. Sorry, sorry. But it feels good, you know, it feels good to hit it. I hope many more to come." A swear! A palpable swear! On a Jr. Jays Sunday no less! The crowd understandably loved it. The television broadcast was on enough of a delay that they caught it and muted their way around it, but it came through on the radio loud and clear, proving yet again that radio truly is the medium most decorous with the game (baseball on television? a great time, no question, but a little obvious; baseball on the radio? a gentleperson's pursuit).

Amidst all the understandable relief and excitement of the Vladdy dinger, let us not overlook that it came as part of a four-hit day for him, too, in which Statcast data suggests Vladdy's earlier double high off the wall in right-centre would have itself been a homer but for small swirl of wind that knocked the ball down eleven feet. Is Vladdy back? One always wonders, doesn't one? You may recall that after a long, late-season homerless stretch last year, Vladdy's remark to his teammates in the dugout (and indeed the call from Dan Shulman and Buck Martinez in the booth) following his ALDS Game Two grand slam against the Yankees (his second home run of that still-young series, and my preferred home run in all of Blue Jays baseball, no big deal) was the he was "back." The expectations surrounding Vladdy since he signed as a sixteen-year-old have only ever been such that when he's doing anything less than being more or less the best hitter you've seen (consider, for example, the whole of last October), the question "what's wrong with Vladdy?" persists. Obviously this season has been significantly different, as there really has been something wrong with Vladdy (though by fWAR, he has already surpassed his 2023 season on the strength of much-improved fielding and baserunning), but Bo Bichette made a great point when he was back in town with the Mets earlier in the season: though Bo did not dispute that Vladdy was undeniably having a down year, he reminded us that "what's wrong with Vladdy?" questions had been a feature of every season the two had played together, despite all the All-Star appearances and MVP votes and the lot of it. Pressure is a privilege, and all that, I suppose. Hazel Mae's last question after the game was, "You've told me that the support of your fans and your teammates has meant a great deal. Why?" To which Vladdy replied, "Because they know I'm human. I try. Believe me." 

All of this would perhaps have been for naught, we should note, had it not been for the performance of Dylan Cease, whose start had been pushed back a day for extra rest given velocity concerns arising, no doubt, from his huge workload in his Cy-Young-contending season (he seems likely to finish behind only Cam Schlittler). It was another one of those weird ones where you can see Cease struggling, and throwing just so many pitches that it's not reasonable to ask him to go more than five innings, but at the end of those five, he's allowed just one run and struck out nine. It's been remarkable. The first started poorly for him, with a walk, a single, and another walk to load the bases with nobody out. But a crucial full-count ABS challenge by Brandon Valenzuela turned what would have been ball four and a run into strike three by the slimmest of margins, and two swinging strikeouts later, everything was cool, and Ricky Tiedeman, who was already up in the pen in case the first totally fell apart (a true playoff feel in this one right from the get-go), could, in relative terms, relax a while.

The Twins, alas, did us no favours against the Guardians in their Sunday afternoon affair, leaving us a game behind for the final Wild Card spot . . . or are we, we might well ask, having come across this medium-depth dive into the remaining schedule not just for the Blue Jays but the Guardians and, curiously, the slumping White Sox in equal measure. Its encouraging conclusion: because of the Cleveland/Chicago series that begins tonight, and the fairly incontrovertible fact that no fewer than one team is going to lose each of those games, the Blue Jays are in no meaningful sense trailing in their pursuit of WC3, in that, should the Blue Jays "win out," as they say, the worst-case result would be a tie with the Guardians, over whom we hold the tiebreaker. No one is expecting, certainly, that we're going to win all twelve remaining games (wouldn't it be weird though?), but the point (and it is well taken!) is that with this dozen games to go, it's all right in front of us: we are not in a position where we need any help or lucky breaks on the (Home Hardware) out-of-town scoreboard for this to happen (though, personally, sign me up for all the help and luck you've got). I am pretty stoked about it. 

KS

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

Orioles 7, Blue Jays 4: And Yet It Was Never Nearly That Close

 

that's thirty-year-old rookie Rudy Martin Jr. to the right,
called up in the wake of the Jésus Sanchez DFA
(he seemed really nice but, alas, stopped catching
[and also sort of hitting])

We all remember Chris Bassitt, right? A three-year stalwart of the Blue Jays rotation who selflessly pitched crucial innings out of the bullpen as part of last year's miracle run to the World Series? One of five Blue Jays pitchers to allow a single run in the ill-fated eleven-inning Game Seven of that very same series? One among the relative few pitchers to wear a glove with a modified-trapeze web, far and away the most æsthetic of all baseball glove webs? (I admit that this last point will be invisible to all but the true baseball-glove sicko [it is okay if you haven't noticed that we are living in a baseball glove golden age right now but we completely are.]) Well, there he was, Chris Bassitt, pitching for the Orioles Friday night! And he pitched well (two runs over five), not that he especially needed to, given his old pal Max Scherzer's disastrous second inning, in which the O's scored five runs on, among other things, six straight hits (that's actually so many hits to happen all in a row). Homers from both Kazuma Okamoto and, later, Brett Bateman (his first! he's been so great! he is already the best part of the Kevin Gausman trade! isn't that weird!) gave the final score the appearance of a much more competitive game than this one ever really felt like after that brutal five-run second. The Friday night crowd was a little better about it all than you might expect, with many more chanting "Vladdy" in encouragement than the few lightly booing his groundouts, but it it was a dispiriting affair; there's no getting around it. This one-sided loss, coupled with the news that Saturday's game is scheduled as a "Big Spaghetti" Spencer Arrighetti-heavy bullpen day now that Dylan Cease is being given an extra day of rest (his velocity is noticeably down as we near the end of the long season [hey: mine too, man]), doesn't make for a super cheerful start to the weekend. It of course remains true, however, that you never know. 

KS

Athletics 2, Blue Jays 0: A Relatively Rare Bullpen-Day Loss

honestly a little surprised at how Braydon Fisher grips
his knuckle curve but that's good; I am here to learn

I'm sure "bulk guy" Michael Lorenzen would have rather not allowed those two runs (one each in the third and fourth), and I imagine he would have hoped to have added more bulk to the game than his two-and-two-thirds innings provided, but you'd definitely have to say that this was another bullpen day that worked: six guys (Fisher, Lorenzen, Sewald, Mantiply, Rogers, and Varland) allowed a combined two runs on just four hits and two walks, and as I look at the box score now (which always offers something pleasingly different than our direct experience of the game itself, doesn't it?), I learn that it was Lorenzen who allowed all four of those hits, and one of those walks, meaning I guess that the walk issued by Tyler Rogers in the seventh was the only other A's batter to have reached in the whole game? Really? Man, everybody did even better than I'd thought! Except for the the bats, though, the beleaguered bats: six hits, three walks, but a couple of double plays, and a couple of deep fly balls that died on the track, and that's how you end up shut-out on a day where almost anything at all would have been enough to take the series and turn a totally fine five-and-four road trip into a profoundly triumphant six-and-three one, but alas. I was hoping we might benefit from a little nominative determinism when A's pitcher Scott Blewett entered the game, but no. 

At least it all happened on a day when the teams directly ahead of us (Cleveland) and behind (Texas) both lost (we extend our thanks to the Orioles and Mariners respectively), and so we remain a game back of the Guardians as we head into a weekend series against the Orioles, whom we actually play a bunch over these final fifteen games (six times!). If this weekend goes poorly for the Orioles, that might be more or less it for them; if it goes poorly for us, there's a chance we're still in it, but I would like our chances a whole lot more were we able to grab two out of three. It looks like we'll have Cease and Soriano ready to go, and Friday night, if I am not mistaken, is shaping up to be Max Scherzer vs. Chris Bassitt, which sounds pretty neat to me. September baseball! Scoreboard watching! A generalized sense of unease! Let's go!  

KS

Blue Jays 4, Athletics 2: (Still In) The Thick Of It

 

Big Oak, watching it go

How can there only be sixteen games to go? The baseball seasons, like the seasons themselves, seem to leave us faster every year. If they are going to keep on receding at this present pace (or worse!), how pleasing then, that sometimes Josh Smith and Kazuma Okamoto will hit back to back home runs; that the Blue Jays will tack on two more in a sixth-inning rally; that José Soriano, who came to us in our best trade for a starting pitcher since the José Berrios deal, will go seven strong innings on a night when the bullpen really needed the rest (ahead of Wednesday afternoon's bullpen game); and that Rule-5 legend Spencer Miles can take it the rest of the way. Just a genuine pleasures, this one. And so here we sit: back at .500, still a game back, with the Guards winning earlier in the evening, but pretty hopeful. Wouldn't a win this afternoon to wrap-up the road trip be just the ticket?      

KS 

Athletics 6, Blue Jays 5: On A Cease Day, No Less

 

there was kind of a lot of this (five stolen bases is plenty)

Two constants throughout this, our weird fiftieth summer of Blue Jays baseball, have been the top-of-the-league excellence of both Dylan Cease and Louis Varland in their closely related respective fields (of striking guys out in slightly different portions of baseball games). Though it is an unfair and unrealistic expectation, it's gotten to the point that you don't really figure Varland will allow any runs at all, ever, though last night, he did (just the one, on an unplayable walk-off infield single not all that long after what replays showed should perhaps have been an inning-ending third strike on an imperfectly checked swing, but what can you do). And as for Dylan Cease, you'd never expect five runs in five innings, though that's how things went last night (one run was unearned, as a botched rundown between home and third saw poor Kazuma Okamoto pick up two errors on the same play, the second logged as "throw," which happens to everybody, but the first as "missed catch," which stings [and in fairness to him, the rundown should probably have ended before Kirk's throw that Okamoto officially missed]). The game-tying, top-of-the-ninth home run from Andrés Giménez, much like the Blue Jays' three-run rally in the seventh (that ended, alas, with Giménez picked off at second), was rad, but ultimately proved just ever-so-slightly insufficient. A drag! Especially when a win would have put us right back into that final playoff spot. There's still time for that, though, and we've got José Soriano going tonight, which is promising. It is a shame (though an entirely understandable one) to have used both Rogers and Varland in what turned out to be a loss, as one wonders about their availability if not today, then in tomorrow's bullpen day (I had incorrectly thought Scherzer would start Wednesday, but no, he's going Friday, after the off-day Thursday). Maybe we should put up a bunch of runs early and just coast?   

KS

Royals 6, Blue Jays 1: Big Spaghetti In Ruins

 

the pronated wrist suggests a changeup, does it not? unless our guy
has started throwing a screwball without telling (I would tell everybody if I could throw a screwball) 

A couple of big swings—one off the bat of the venerable Sal Perez for three runs, the other coming from that of the Pasquatch himself, Italian WBC legend Vinnie Pasquantino, for two more—had Spencer Arrighetti and his pals (your Toronto Blue Jays) down early, and down they stayed, a condition aggravated somewhat by the Guardians' third walk-off win in four games (all coming against Detroit [figure it out, Tigers; jeeze louise]). And so the Blue Jays fall a game off the pace. However! We are off to Sacramento to play the long-suffering A's, with Cease, Soriano, and Scherzer lined up for the series, whereas the Guardians will be dealing with the still-slightly-in-it Baltimore Orioles to start the week. The good news and the bad about that Guards/O's series is the same news, and it is that in each of those three games, one team we would like to lose will for sure lose, but but one team that we would prefer to see lose will necessarily win (did you know they still do tie games in the ol' 日本野球機構 Nippon Yakyū Kikō? kind of neat, right?). So long as we're winning, though, we're in good shape! And actually, at this, our very moment of composition, I see now that the Guards fell to the Orioles 6-4 in Baltimore earlier in the day, and we've got Dylan Cease going for us tonight, so you've got to like those chances, right? 

KS

Blue Jays 4, Royals 3: I Guess This Is Happening?

 

Vladdy and Big Oak at the corners

All it took against Kansas City on a sweltering Saturday night (thirty-six degrees at first pitch!) was Max Scherzer to be good, the bullpen to be great, Kazuma Okamoto to put up four hits, Nathan Lukes to add three more, and just like that, the Toronto Blue Jays have won seven of their last eight to tuckle right in to that final playoff spot (we hold the tiebreaker over the Guards) with a record of seventy-one-and-seventy, which, I am sure you have already noted, puts the Blue Jays above .500 for the first time since they were four-and-three back in early, early April (it also brings the team's all-time record from 1977 to present to an even-steven 3927-3927, though I recognize not everyone will be as interested in that aspect of things [personally I feel like taking the long view]). Chief amongst this game's many delights, to me, was Vladdy's first inning, indeed both halves of it: in the top, after having singled tidily to right, Vladdy scored from first on an Alejandro Kirk infield single (we have spoken about those so many times) and a Josh Rojas throwing error that afforded just enough time (not an instant more!) for Vladdy to chug all the way around and evade Carter Jensen's swiping tag at the plate with the niftiest little hook slide; and in the bottom half, Vladdy scooped up a ground ball at first and fired a laser to third to hang up the stutter-stepping Joe Caglianone dangling of third, tagged out by Okamoto to help Scherzer get out of a tough inning (is Vladdy the best-throwing first baseman you have ever seen? I ask because he is the best-throwing first baseman I have ever seen [I think they should still play Vladdy at third a few innings a season just for fun and also for the glory that may be won]). Even in just about the worst season you could imagine for Vladdy, he remains a truly delightful guy.

Do we dare dream of a series sweep with "Big Spaghetti" Spencer Arrighetti on the mound Sunday afternoon? He will not be working behind an opener, I have read, but is rather just going out there and starting. It's a bold plan, unconventional in its conventiality, and I am keen to see how it plays out. 

KS

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

Blue Jays 6, Guardians 3: Everything's Coming Up Us Guys

 

I really like our middle infield (let's turn two, boys)

It took José Soriano a tonne of pitches to get nearly-but-not-quite-all-the-way through five innings this afternoon: it was four-and-two-thirds, when all was said and done, over which he was charged with three. Not the end of the world, but for a man of his talents, it was understandable that Soriano looked a little frustrated with either himself or maybe just with the way things had gone generally, but I hope he took at least a little comfort in the four runs the Blue Jays had cobbled together in the top half of that same inning: walks from both Ernie Clement and Brandon Valenzuela (each of whom won an ABS challenge en route to their "free pass"); an attempted sacrifice bunt that turned into an infield hit for Brett Bateman, our fleet young gamer of a centre fielder (who has performed much better than Kevin Gausman since the trade, believe it or not [not that we wish anything but good things for Gausman, but it's notable]); a two-run double from Nathan Lukes; a deep sac fly from Vladdy to score another; and a Jésus Sanchez single just off the mitt of hard-charging centre fielder Steven Kwan, who is admired by all (also his father's name is Ray; I feel like we need to remind ourselves of this tremendous fact at every opportunity) to bring in the fourth. Josh Smith's late homer was very welcome, as were the familiar sights of Tyler Rogers soft-tossing his way through the eighth, and Louis Varland touching one-oh-two on the radar gun in the ninth to win what honestly really felt like a playoff series (for us; I don't know how the smattering of Cleveland fans in attendance felt about it [it was a day game on a school day, so I get it, but let's get out there and support the team!]).

This one was so much fun! And it brings us to just a half-game behind the Guards for the final playoff spot, which is also really quite fun. We're just a game under .500! It has kind of been a while! We're still on the outside looking in, and the odds are not expressly in our favour, but actually checking in on those odds at FanGraphs real quick, they've gone from 4.3% (August 6th, five games out) to 32.1% (literally right now, a half-game out, as you will recall from a proximate utterance). Nothing is certain, obviously (that's part of the fun!), but I think you will agree that things that have a one-in-three chance kind of happen all the time, right? Think of your favourite single-season performance in which a guy of whom you are fond got a hit in about a third of his plate appearances—it felt like he was getting a hit just about every time up there, didn't it! You couldn't keep him off the bases! Actually, I have just now checked Ichiro's rookie season, in which he put up an absurd 242 hits in his 738 plate appearances (that's also really a lot), which is to say he was hitting safely in 32.7% of his times at "the dish" (his batting average that season was .350, as walks and sacrifices are taken away from the denominator in batting average, as you may well recall). What I am suggesting, then, is that having faith in these 2026 Toronto Blue Jays making the playoffs requires no greater leap of it (faith, that is) than it takes to believe that 2001 Ichiro would get a base hit. I think we can all have at least that much faith without even having to work all that hard at it, probably. 

KS

Blue Jays 11, Guardians 0: Let's Go, Vladdy

 

clap clap clapclapclap

Well, it finally happened, and whether or not it happens again in any of the twenty-two games that constitute the remainder of this strange season, for one night, at least, Vladdy was fully Vladdy: three-for-five with a ringing double off the wall, a towering no-doubter of a home run to left, and an opposite-field liner that was just smoked (this one seemed to please him most of all), amounting to five runs batted in along with the run he himself scored (runs trotted in?). That it happened in Cleveland, rather than Toronto, is unideal, I suppose, except for how there were an awful lot of Vladdy-chanting Blue Jays fans in attendance at still-lovely Jacobs Field (I know that it has been Progressive Field for a good while, and we all like Fran, but I really liked calling it "The Jake," and have decided to persist in this), and also on account of how holy moly do we ever need to win some of these games in Cleveland, right? And so we did! And Vladdy was amazing. And I loved it. "We're all human beings," Vladdy said through his interpreter this week (his approach now seems to be to address the crowd in English, but when speaking to a gaggle of reporters, it is interpreter time [I get it]). "There's ups and downs, obviously. This year hasn't been my year, or the year I wanted. But I talk, always good communication with the coaching staff and players. Basically just tell them 'hey, it's not going my way right now, but stay with me. Stay with me. I'm going to continue to keep working hard, and, at the end, I'll be there for you guys.'" Thanks, Vladdy. 

KS   

Guardians 6, Blue Jays 1: Three Two-Run Home Runs Is So Many Of Them

 

José Ramirez still seems headed to the Hall of Fame
(in case you had been wondering)

A bullpen day, then, to open this crucial series in Cleveland against these fairly likeable Guardians, and though we have come to welcome bullpen days generally, this one saw fully three of guys ("Big Spaghetti" Spencer Arrighetti, returning lefty Joe Mantiply, and new friend Michael Lorenzen) each touched for a two-run homer, all whilst, on the other side of things, the Guards' Gavin Williams, for his part, allowed just two hits and a walk whilst striking out thirteen over seven admirably (in a begrudging sense) efficient innings. Rats! It feels like we are more than a little "up against it" as Dylan Cease heads to the hill Wednesday, but who would you rather have out there than 2026 Dylan Cease? A big game from Cease, and something of a similar complexion Thursday afternoon from Soriano, and we're still feeling pretty good! I think!  

KS

Blue Jays 7, Mariners 0: Scherzmaxxing Sans-Limite

 

okay everybody in for normal high-fives let's go

How could this be the one-hundred-and-fifteenth time Max Scherzer has struck out ten or more batters in a single game? This is a profoundly unreasonable amount of times to have done that, isn't it? I guess that's no small part of how you make your way past the great Gaylord Perry for ninth-place all time for strikeouts literally ever at 3535 (and counting!), which Scherzer also managed Sunday afternoon as he helped us secure just our third series-sweep of the whole season, if you can believe it (the A's right at the start [squeakers, though], and the Red Sox back when they looked like the worst team anyone had ever seen, with open displays of on-field acrimony [it got dark there {but has since gotten, alas, better}]. That the boys continued to bop against this usually-excellent Mariners staff remained delightful: more homers for Kirk and Okamoto, and at least a hit for nearly everybody in the lineup (don't worry, Charles, McAdoo; you're still cool). And so it looks like we'll head into this week's huge series in Cleveland a-game-a-half behind those selfsame Guardians for the final playoff spot. Two-out-of-three would feel pretty good, wouldn't it? But anything less than that would be tough? Vladdy, whom I am delighted to have heard the SkyDome crowd emphatically get behind in a late at-bat of little consequence on Sunday, has returned to hitting the ball super hard, but is still largely hitting it directly at people. But this is progress! If Vladdy gets right for a month, imagine how much fun that would be. 

KS

Blue Jays 4, Mariners 3: The Baserunning Daring-Do of Brett Bateman and Alejandro Kirk

having slid-in / having slidden

José Soriano allowed just three runs over seven innings, a noble effort (and literal "quality" start) to be sure, but all three runs came through the first four innings, necessitating an inherently charismatic four-run Blue Jays comeback which, this time, took the shape of two in each of both the fifth and sixth, aided in no small measure (materially, æsthetically, spiritually) by the baserunning heroics of first Brett Bateman (scoring from second on a bases-loaded ball-four wild pitch? who has ever seen such a thing? not me! literally ever! this is some Alfredo Griffin-level stuff!) and then, crucially, Alejandro Kirk, who followed his go-ahead RBI-single in the sixth with a wonderful steal of second base, only the second of his career (he's two-for-two!). The forty-odd thousand assembled at the SkyDome, it goes without saying, went nuts about it, with a full-on standing ovation and the whole works. There was much to cheer on the day, plenty of it coming even before the game started, as it was time for Buck Martinez's much anticipated induction into the newly constituted Blue Jays Hall of Excellence (physically located in the 100s right-field concourse, as I understand it), not to be confused with the previous Blue Jays Level of Excellence (as manifested around the 200s), with all members of the old Level now recognized in the new Hall—plus with Buck, now, too! The ceremony was all handled wonderfully, honestly, with just the right amount of speechifying from just the right people, nothing at all rushed but nothing extraneous, either, and nobody left in a position to even lightly embarrass themselves or anything (always my concern with this sort of thing, honestly). Everybody loves Buck, and it was great that they did this for him while he and his family are all still in good health and able to travel for it and really enjoy the day, which they certainly seemed to do. Much was made throughout the ceremony, of course, of Buck as a gritty player, a likeable manager, a beloved broadcaster, and an important member of the community in terms of charitable works (it was a nice touch that there was a Challenger Baseball distinction named in his honour, and a sports broadcasting scholarship made available in his name at Toronto Metropolitan), but something we didn't hear much talk about was his significant commitment to the MLBPA; they sure went into that in his career-spanning interview on the MLBPA's "Stitch x Stitch" podcast, though, which I wholeheartedly recommend to the Buck Martinez completionist. What a great guy!  

Still on the subject of great guys: the new Hall of Excellence is organized around these lovely little curio-cabinet displays (I'm sure there is a museum-specific term that eludes me here in my ignorance of such matters) for each of the inducted players, and from all the photographs I've seen, they all seem really very neat. But what stood out to me, and I guess to beat reported Keegan Matheson, too, as he posted the close-up picture that am about to share with you in a moment, is the inclusion of one of Carlos Delgado's notebooks in which he would meticulously track every pitch he saw: 

the thoughtful notes of a thoughtful guy

Delgado was on-hand for the pregame ceremony, as were all living members of the Hall of Excellence (may peace be upon Tony Fernandez, Roy Halladay, and Tom Cheek), and he has the look of someone who is just full-on thriving in retirement, which I sincerely hope to be the case. As we draw nearer September 25th's Carlos Delgado Short-Sleeved Retro Windbreaker giveaway, I hope we all make time in our day for even more reflection on the virtues of Carlos Delgado than we usually allow ourselves. 

KS

Blue Jays 8, Mariners 1: One's Thoughts Turn

 

the boys, having lightly bopped

Who would have believed last fall, as Jeff Hoffman struck out the side not long after George Springer's seventh-inning three-run home run to put the Blue Jays past the Mariners in the seventh game of a first-rate ALCS and clinch Toronto's first pennant in thirty-two years, that these two fine squads, largely unchanged, would spend most if not all (we'll see!) of the next summer on the outside of the playoff seedings looking in, and trying to make do with the two worst offences in either league? First off, it would be a super weird thing to be thinking about at all, obviously, rather than just being like, "this rules." But nevertheless, it's definitely strange that it has happened. It sure has, though! If Vladdy's struggles (a 94 wRC+ after a season at 137) have troubled you (I think hey have troubled us all), consider Cal Raleigh's: a wRC+ cut nearly in half (84 this year after last year's remarkable 161), a batting average (which we don't care about that much anymore) of .165, an OPB (which we definitely do) of just .283, his sixty homers (that's too many) nowhere to be seen. Tough times all around! Except for for us, last night, in which we romped awesomely: three home runs (Okamoto, Springer, Lukes again), a couple doubles (Vladdy, Springer), and six more Cy Youngable innings from Dylan Cease. That Cleveland lost, too, made for even better night, and puts the Blue Jays two-and-a-half back with a three-game series against the Guardians next week looming large as all heck, provided we can get through these next two against what is sure to be better Mariners pitching than we saw last night (they are generally excellent at it).

KS 

Royals 13, Blue Jays 2: Hoooooo Boy

 

thank you for you service, Myles Straw

Time will tell, I suppose, if this is the low-point of the season, but it is certainly a (excuse me, an) low-point of the season, I think we'd all agree. It wasn't so much the four runs "Big Spaghetti" Spencer Arrighetti allowed in his four innings of work that did it (four runs in four falls into a broad "ungreat but understandable" category), but rather the six runs poor Simeon Woods-Richardson served up on five hits and a couple walks in his single, DFA-forerunning inning (there was a balk in there, too, actually). For the first time in this strange Blue Jays summer, the boo birds, as they say, were well and truly out, and they did not limit their song to SWR, but visited it, too, in a much lighter yet still-discernible fashion, upon a Vladdy groundout to first a little later on. It may not surprise you to learn that I find this to be foolishness. I have never been a home-team booer, and feel little sympathy with those who choose this faithless path. I distinctly remember, in my years of direct SkyDome attendance, a Carlos Delgado groundout to first that Carlos, already ailing from the bad hip that would end his career short of the five-hundred home run mark that would have strengthened his Hall of Fame case significantly (though I was impressed and indeed moved by how close Carlos came on last year's Contemporary Era Committee, closer even than Don Mattingly), did not dash it out in a pointless performance of effort. Complaining about players not foolishly sprinting out every doomed groundball in a long season full of hamstring pulls and messed-up ankles (I find myself in the position of Stoeten, begging these guys to watch one whole season) still holds a place of privilege amongst the most typical of the know-nothing-know-it-all baseball takes, displaying ignorance not just of how baseball is played today, but the way it has been played for at least the near-half-century I can vouch for directly, in addition to the decades before that from which film survives. It's like these guys remember one age-appropriate thing their coach told them in mosquito, and it is the only thought they are able to hold on the matter. Baseball players—not lazy baseball players, not checked-out baseball players, not baseball players who are dogging it—do not, unless the specific circumstance demands it, sprint to first on a routine groundball or a lazy pop-up in the way they would, say, sprint home after tagging up on a shallow fly ball, or the way they would haul trying to score from first on a double. The spectacle of hustle this particular sort of fan craves is coded as "team first" in a scrappy-white-guy sort of way (despite it being, when conspicuous, nothing more than a form of exalting the self [that's not very team-first at all, boys]) and is ultimately, if you will pardon the expression, pure mark shit (go ahead and be Jonathan Papelbon all mad at Bryce Harper if you want, though, I guess ["I was taught in tee-ball to run out everything to first-base," a commenter on that video writes in support of my earlier point about mosquito]). Even the scrappiest, hustlingmost hustler you can call to mind simply has not run super hard through the bag on every groundball or popup in every game in any of their long seasons. It's a totally fake idea, easily disproven by simply watching baseball games (try it! it's fun!). But when things are going poorly, a certain sort of fan seizes on it, because they want that player's failure to be not just an athletic failure, but a moral one as well, the result of lacking a particular virtue that the fan, though of course no athlete, can claim that they themselves do not and would not ever lack (uh oh somebody's exalting the self again!). Never mind the enormous quantity of extra swings Vladdy is reported to be taking every day, the early rounds of batting practice, the cuts in the cages after the game, all the tedious work off the tee: the problem with Vladimir Guerrero Jr.'s swing this season is that he's not trying and doesn't care, I guess? "Vladmir Guerrero Jr., who famously neither tries nor cares; let's boo him." These are faithless fans who lack spirit and I denounce them so hard right now. 

I know it wasn't even all that many people, but stop booing Vladdy, everybody; he's trying, and you're being mean.

KS

Blue Jays 3, Royals 0: Well Good!

 

more like Lathan Nukes

How pleasant for Nathan Lukes that, just one night after inadvertently ending a game through baserunning misadventure on the back-end of a two-run single (an ending I have never, ever seen before in a baseball game), his fourth-inning, three-run home run off of journeyman Randy Dobnak (whose name possess a certain Bobson Dugnutt charm [for the deepest of all possible dives on that subject, click here) proved the entirety of the difference between the Blue Jays and the Royals Wednesday night. Imagine his relief! About the whole thing! We did not hit all that much beyond that, though we didn't entirely need to, as it was yet another more-than-fine bullpen day (with Shane Bieber off to the IL for a while, joining so many of his colleagues there, bullpen days will continue indefinitely, it would seem). Actually, Arden Zwelling had some really great Bullpen Day Thoughts (which is more of less what the electronic pages of this blog have functioned as for most of this season) to share with this game's television (and "computer phones") audience: Zwelling noted that this was the Blue Jays' eighteenth bullpen day of the year, which is of course nuts, and that if you treated "Bullpen Day" as its own starting pitcher (which we know that it is not!), it would have outperformed all Blue Jays starter aside from AL Cy Young-contender Dylan Cease (whose work was recently featured at the AGO for good fun[d raising]). How about that? He noted, too, that the Blue Jays' coaching staff scripts no fewer than three possible paths along which any given bullpen day might unfold, and then print all of that out on sheets (perhaps little cards?) that they refer to throughout the game, which I liked the sound of a lot. Anyway, given where we are in the standings, every win is of course a big win at this point in the season, but the full weight of our need in tonight's game was impressed upon us even before first pitch, as the afternoon results out of Los Angeles revealed that the Guardians had come from behind for the second time in a row against the Angels to post their seventh consecutive win, which is altogether too many for my liking, especially given that the Blue Jays had lost three of four while a good portion of that objectively nifty streak was developing. We play the Guardians next week—in Cleveland, no less—in a series that, should we play well, will keep us very much in the mix going forward, and if we crash out, could functionally end September baseball (as we like to think of it) in the very first week of that oft-rad baseball month. But, first, we need to stay close throughout the rest of this week for next week to even matter, in that way. No pressure though, guys! Let's keep it loose out there! Keep up the chatter, fellows! That's the way! 

KS