Nationals 6, Blue Jays 3; Nationals 4, Blue Jays 2: At Least Brandon Morrow is Pretty Hurt

oh man my oblique

Heck of a series so far! Not only have the Blue Jays dropped the first two to these young and exciting Nationals who used to be the old and depressing Expos, but Brandon Morrow has messed up his oblique and is out for weeks, probably! It is kind of funny that he threw nine pitches, allowing a dude to reach base and eventually score, and so he is saddled with the loss. Not a good stat, pitcher wins and losses. Really not a very good stat at all. 


KS

Blue Jays 4, Orioles 1: Gladness Brooms

dingerz for days

I was totally in and out with last night's game, and yet I was present for all for Blue Jays solo home runs: E5 (again!), Rajai (again!), Lawrie, and Rasmus. I mention this because I found it awesome. Less awesome is that Brandon Morrow, who pitched well, had to leave the game after getting smoked by a batted ball in the seventh, but it is a dangereuse game we play is it not mon chéri?


Hey also, have you noticed that the AL East is utterly nuts? Like, here it is:

It's not just me, right? That is legitimately nuts, isn't it? 


KS

Rangers 14, Blue Jays 3: Brandon Morrow Made This One Easy

well I mean what are you going to do

Friday night I was like, you know what, I really want to watch a bunch of old karate movies tonight, but the Blue Jays game just started, let's see how that's going. I did, and soon noticed that Brandon Morrow had given up six runs and didn't even get out of the first inning, so the course of my night became clear! E5's fifteenth home run of the season should be noted, but that is all I choose to note from this game notable only for Morrow, who has been awesome this year, sucking this time out, and for Cruz's eight runs batted in, which you sure don't see everyday. 


KS 

Blue Jays 5, Angels 0: I Probably Have to Stop Minding Brandon Morrow

neat

I went to bed last night wondering if J. P. Arencibia's three-run home run was going to stand up, and it turns out it totally did, because Brandon Morrow threw a three-hitter against the unexpectedly woeful Angels. Will that be enough for me to finally stop minding Brandon Morrow, a little? Only time will tell. 


KS

Blue Jays 4, Royals 1: Joseph Batstista is The Best

high five high five high five high five high five high five high five

Yes, Kelly Johnson hit a solo shot, and Brandon Morrow pitched well enough into the seventh, even managing to strand runners, which is not something he seemed to do even once ever last season, but what I would like to focus on here is how Bruce Chen walked Johnson in the sixth and was probably like "well dang" because Bautista was due up next and then sure enough, next pitch, dinger. Loved it. Also acquitting himself beautifully tonight: Blue Jays colour guy Alan Ashby, who commented on Brandon Morrow throwing away a bunted ball, and he said something like, so that's a bunt single and an error to put a man on second, and had he made it all the way to third on that play all the moms would have really been cheering hard at the little league diamond, and it was like oh man burn. Finally, proving that I do not understand anything about our beloved sport, the word from Bautista himself is that he has been trying too hard to hit the ball to right, and he's decided he needs to just pull the shit out of everything, and sure enough, home run to left. This is the first piece of evidence we have that Jose Bautista knows more about hitting than I do, but even though it is but a single datum I think we should treat it seriously. 

KS

Rays 12, Blue Jays 2: Well That One Got A Little Crazy At The End

this one he did not in fact catch

Obviously it didn't actually matter, but that six-run top of the ninth was a hell of a thing, was it not? But the long and the short of this one is that David Price always kills the Blue Jays, and I still have no faith in Brandon Morrow, and so here we are. Jose Bautista made a cool catch in the first, and if Adam Lind wasn't lollygagging in the infield he might have thrown a dude out on a sharply struck ball to right in the same inning, but of course Adam Lind was lollygagging around the infield because he is just so awesome a guy that he doesn't even have to play smart or hard and we will all forgive him because of his astounding production. Oh hey also: a lady who was at the park today with her awesome dog was telling this guy, "You know that home run Bautista hit last night? One of the guys I just went to Cuba with caught that ball! I read about it on Facebook." So there you go, that's a thing that happened. 


Anyway, my contention is that we'll get 'em tomorrow. 


KS

Orioles 7, Blue Jays 5: The Greatest Indignity

*swoomp*

I am not going to front like I caught more than just a little bit of this one. And it sounds like it was a pretty entertaining game, with seven home runs and some lead changes and whatnot, fine. But we can't be losing to the Orioles, man, come on; what is this all about. Brandon Morrow should have sliced this lineup open like a tonton, but instead allowed four runs in seven innings of work. While that is not nightmarishly bad or anything, and Alan Ashby assures me Morrow pitched well, it is not as awesome as one would hope or indeed expect. And then the bullpen just messed up, basically.


Taking the next two in a row is going to prove vital re: my approval.


KS  

Blue Jays 7, Indians 4 (F/12): Four-Run Twelfths Are the Best Kind of Twelfths

Brett Lawrie, hothead. 

You look at Brandon Morrow's line -- two runs, neither of them earned, on one hit and only three walks in seven innings pitched -- and there's every reason to think that taken a little off and throwing the two-seamer, as he has vowed to do, is already paying off, and I guess that it is, maybe, but man, it still seemed like he was throwing a lot of pitches out there. Sometimes. A little. Or something. I think maybe I've just got a thing where I can't trust that Brandon Morrow won't ruin my enjoyment, or something, and I've got to get over it, because he was by any reasonable standard cruising when a J. P. Arencibia throwing error set the stage for two unearned runs to come in on a Jason Kipnis homer in the fifth. Blue Jays bats were scared hitless until the seventh, when Brett Lawrie knocked in a pair after a couple of walks and a wild pitch that almost say Adam Lind thrown out at second. It was seriously close!


I was sure that Kelly Johnson's solo shot in the top of the ninth was going to do it (note that Aaron Hill, for whom he was traded, hit two today), but our new closer with whom I have yet to develop any problems served one up for Asdrubal Cabrera, and so it was extras again, which I would feel darkly about had it not ended as it did in the twelfth, that is, with an inning that went: a double for E5, another single for Lawrie that would have scored anyone but E5, a two-run double by Rajai Davis, who had come on for Eric Thames in the ninth, and RBI singles from Colby Rasmus and Johnson. A four-run twelfth! I will overlook the run Francisco Cordero allowed in the final frame, and focus instead on how Casey Janssen was awesome in the two innings of work that preceded. 


Two ways to look at all of this so far, I think. On the one hand, it is rad that that Blue Jays have pulled off two come-from-behind wins in extra innings to open the year! On the other, should it be this hard to beat Cleveland? Either way, bring the brooms Sunday! I'm not sure where!


KS

Blue Jays 3, White Sox 2: Well, that's it.

You would think 162 games would be enough, but I am not convinced.

Last night was maybe the single best night of regular season baseball I can remember, with four games with serious playoff implications going on at the same time, all easily followed through the glory of baseball on the internet. (Bill covers all of this superbly in the post just below mine, but I got about halfway through this earlier today, saved it, and am returning to it now, hours later, and I think it would be wrong of me to deny you my, you know, word bounty, so here it all is. Inevitably, we cover some of the same ground, but get used to it: everyone is writing about last night, and I would be stunned if there were not at least one 28 September 2011 book on the shelves this time next year. So here we go.) 


The Cardinals got out ahead of the Astros early with a five-run first, and Chris Carpenter allowed only two hits all night, so the pressure was on the Braves to stay alive against the Phillies, which they very much did not, losing in thirteen in a straight-up hell of a game. "Braves Cap Collapse," the headline says, and yeah, they sure did. I don't want to diminish the severity of that collapse, or the agony of the Braves fans who endured it, but the Red Sox implosion has been far more vivid to me, a streak of incompetence so wide and so deep that it began to look like self-abnegation. Last night, when Papelbon threw the last of his fifteen pitches in twelve minutes -- the one that ended up lined into and then out of Carl Crawford's glove in left, allowing the winning Baltimore run to come across in the bottom of the ninth -- it was the perfect ending to a seven-win, twenty-loss month, a fitting bookend to Boston's equally improbable two-and-ten start to the season. 


Meanwhile, the Rays, with a total payroll that exceeds the combined salaries of Papelbon and Crawford but not by as much as you might think, clawed themselves back from a seven-run deficit through seven-and-a-half innings, with Evan Longoria's three-run shot in the home half of the eighth bringing them to within a run. When pinch hitter Dan Johnson, who came into the game batting .108, and who I had literally never heard of, homered to tie it in the ninth, it was ludicrous, even more so than Longoria's walk-off shot in the twelfth, I think. According to FanGraphs, the only player in either leagues with worse production in at least ninety plate appearances this season is Roy Halladay. Just amazing stuff. Too bad they couldn't even put thirty thousand in the seats for it, but that's baseball in St. Pete, I guess.


Despite all of that amazingness last night, in all honesty my attention was much more firmly focused on a perfectly meaningless afternoon game between the Blue Jays and the White Sox. A game of utterly no playoff consequence, it was played entirely for the benefit of a bunch of people with nothing better to do on a pretty nice fall afternoon, people like:


(i) An old man with a scorecard.

(ii) A man with a helmet full of nachos.

(iii) A couple of Frank Thomas fans.

(iv) A lady with a beer.

(v) A kid with a rally cap behind the bullpen and his brother.

(vi) A young couple messing around with their phones but in a way that looks fun and shared and not alienating.

(vii) Seventh-inning stretchers.

(vii) And this guy.

So the usual, basically. 


What they saw was, from their perspective, I'm sure, kind of a debacle. With the White Sox up 2-1 in the top of the ninth after perfectly OK outings from both starters (Humber for the Sox, Morrow for the Blue Jays), Chris Sale just pretty much blew it: double, single, sac bunt, intentional walk, run-scoring walk, run-scoring walk, and then, inevitably, the hook. That Frank Francisco managed to seal the deal in the bottom of the ninth was both a relief and a pleasure. (After an absolutely abysmal first couple months, Francisco has actually kind of almost salvaged his season, and so good for him, I guess, but the hurt remains, a little.) I was entirely satisfied with the slightly strange way this one ended, but I've got to think White Sox fans felt it the worst bullshit ever. 


The win on this last day of the season brought the Blue Jays back to .500 for the thirty-third time this season. I don't know if Mike Wilner was entirely accurate when he called the 2011 Toronto Blue Jays the five-hundredest team to ever five hundred, probably not, but it has definitely felt that way: no great streaks one way or the other, no real can-you-even-believe-this runs of elation or let's-trade-everybody stretches of incompetence and despair. Things have been even-steven. I will have more, much more, senselessly more, to say about the 2011 Toronto Blue Jays in the coming weeks and months, but for now I'm just like, "Well, that's it. Last game of the season. I am, as always, genuinely sad to see it end." That is what I am like for now. But I had fun! 


To return, finally, to the dramatic stuff from last night, I've got a few things I'd like to share with you, the first a .gif that shows pretty clearly that Dan Johnson's game-tying solo blast totally bag tagged some guy. Here you go:

Next, here's a graph from FanGraphs (where else?) of AL wild card probabilities throughout the evening (click here for more):

Here are Harold Reynolds and Dan Plesac of MLB Network losing their minds, a little:

And finally, here's a pretty terrific video timeline that MLB put together, definitely worth ten minutes of your time on this, a night without any baseball:






Enjoy!


KS

Blue Jays 3, Yankees 0: Brandon Morrow and Adam Lind Are Kind of Awful . . . But Not Today

J.P.: hey Swish, that's three, bro
Swish: lol I know right

This was an excellent baseball game.


Brandon Morrow, who has been wretched for ages now, struck out eight and allowed only four hits in eight innings against a Yankees B-squad today (no Jeter, Cano, Granderson, or Teixeira), and three of those four hits were the merest of infield singles. The fourth hit was a Nunez ground ball through the right side that Jose Bautista scooped up all casual, and, without looking like anything was up in the least, fired a strike to E5 at first to force Nunez, who had made a big, lazy turn around the bag. Nunez proceeded to curse his lot, surely, and then attempted to advance a base, which he did not, as E5 put for an uncharacteristically accurate throw to McCoy, who applied the tag. It owned. It owned.  


Add to Morrow's fine start Adam Lind's two home runs -- or dingers -- and you've got yourself an extremely content guy over here enjoying an afternoon of Blue Jays baseball. Also Eric Thames fouled a ball off his own head. Seriously, look:

 That rarely happens! 


KS

Red Sox 18, Blue Jays 6: The Seven-Run Eighth Made This Look Worse Than It Was (A Little)

It got worse.

Not everything was awful, last night, not everything: J. P. Arencibia hit his twenty-third home run; Bautista hit his forty-second; and David Cooper is making me think things about Adam Lind that I would not share with Adam Lind. Beyond that, though, not a great one: Brandon Morrow continues to be a confounding butt; Luis Perez might as well have walked the ball to the plate and set it on a tee; and John Farrell's "what's the worst that can happen?" decision to run some kids out there in the eighth truly showed the worst that can happen. Let us salute Tim Wakefield, however, on this, the occasion of his two-hundredth win. Tim Wakefield is awesome. Knuckleballers are awesome. If you do not trade for at least one of them when you are playing baseball video games, you and I are very different people.    

KS

Blue Jays 11, Red Sox 10: This Game was Bananas

B-A-N-A-N-A-S

With the Red Sox up 8-4 through five innings, and Tim Wakefield in line for the two-hundredth win of his insanely long career, it looked to me like the story of the game was going to be the contrast between Brandon Morrow, a young guy with all the stuff in the world who has yet to truly figure it all out, and Wakefield, a guy with no arm and basically one pitch but who is, you know, the awesomest. But then everything got crazy, leaving the clear-cut narratives that seemed to have been developing in this contest obscure and, in the end, undiscernible. But that's probably OK.  


Actually, it was kind of weird from the first, really. Morrow scuffled from the outset, and it's not like Wakefield was exactly rolling, either: Thames came in on an E5 sac fly in the first; J. P. Arencibia set the Blue Jays mark for home runs by a catcher with his twenty-first in the second; and Bautista doubled in Thames in the third. But the first real sign of the madness that was to follow came when Brett Lawrie and Jose Bautista pulled off the double steal of second and home, with Bautista beating Marco Scuturo's pretty dang errant throw to the plate. The usual Red Sox bludgeoning followed, with home runs by Ortiz and Ellsbury, setting the stage for the Blue Jays' eighth, possibly my favourite inning all year. I mean, just look at it:

Bottom 8 (Daniel Bard pitching)

• 
  

  1.Brett Lawrie hit by pitch.




• 
  

  2.Adam Loewen singles on a ground ball to right fielder Josh Reddick. Brett Lawrie to 3rd.




• 
  

  3.J. P. Arencibia walks. Adam Loewen to 2nd.




• 
  

  4.Dewayne Wise strikes out swinging.




• 
  

  5.Yunel Escobar called out on strikes.




• 
  

  6.Eric Thames walks. Brett Lawrie scores. Adam Loewen to 3rd. J. P. Arencibia to 2nd.




• 
  

  Offensive Substitution: Pinch runner Chris Woodward replaces J. Arencibia.




• 
  

  Coaching visit to mound.




• 
  

  7.Jose Bautista walks. Adam Loewen scores. Chris Woodward to 3rd. Eric Thames to 2nd.




• 
  

  Pitcher Change: Matt Albers replaces Daniel Bard.




• 
  

  Coaching visit to mound.




• 
  

  8.Edwin Encarnacion doubles (34) on a line drive to center fielder Jacoby Ellsbury. Chris Woodward scores. Eric Thames scores. Jose Bautista scores.




• 
  

  9.Kelly Johnson strikes out swinging.

  
  

To the above I would add only that E5's double to the wall came on a 3-2 pitch, making it all the better (runners on the move!). Even Frank Francisco's insistence on allowing two runs in the ninth did not dampen my spirits, especially since the game ended on Jose Molina's throw to second, catching Mike Aviles stealing, an awesome way to end a baseball game, I trust you will agree.


I hope Tim Wakefield gets his 200th before the end of the year, because at forty-five years old, there's every reason to believe he won't be back. Like literally everyone else, I have a soft spot for knuckleballers. Maybe it would get old if he actually pitched for your team, and you had to listen to all the same old knuckleballer stories every five days instead of a couple of times a season, but in small doses it seems like the best of things. Alan Ashby, who caught Joe Niekro (presumably in the Niekro Leagues), had plenty to say on the radio last night. Jerry Howarth, totally enamoured with the knuckleball, eventually asked Ashby why so few players throw it. "I think it's because, for the time being, anyway, sanity prevails on the planet earth," was Ashby's reply. 


Kind of, but not really, because last night was crazy, man, it was crazy.


KS