Blue Jays 7, Red Sox 0; Blue Jays 7, Red Sox 1; Red Sox 6, Blue Jays 3: I Was Getting Set to Declare The Blue Jays a Juggernaut But Then They Lost One

A noble effort by Kevin Pillar, who we all like, but this rattled around for a triple

The Blue Jays continue to be extremely .500, like just as .500 as it gets. This is both literally true, in that they stand at this very moment of composition a pleasingly symmetrical 16-16, but also in the broader sense that this is all they are or ever could be. I do not mean this as a slight but instead a sympathetic expression of human solidarity.  

R. A. Dickey very much took the loss yesterday, and while we are all of us sophisticates who recognize that there are few statistics as misleading as pitcher wins and pitcher losses, it occurred to me that Dickey pretty much has to be leading the league in losses at this point, because, I mean, yikes so far, right? However, while Dickey's account now stands at a lowly 1-4, it turns out there are like three dudes who have lost five, so it's not yet as bad as it could be, or indeed definitely will be in the fullness of time.

But while Dickey is merely in the running for the league lead in pitcher losses, he is far ahead of the field in Honorary Word-Hoards, to which we add today sāmwīs, which our pal J. R. Clark Hall defines as "stupid, dull, foolish" in his Concise Anglo-Saxon Dictionary, and sure, yeah, definitely,  but it is worth keeping in mind that literally it is more like "half-wise" or "semi-wise," like, for example, this lil fella right here:

this is by Mohaddeseh Taheri (on deviant art here)

And while I am not here to tell you how to feel I think it is probably important to love him.

KS

The Blue Jays Week that Was: It Sure Was

A dinger dung

So the Blue Jays took two out of three at home against the Yankees as part of a 4-3 week that I did not attend to but in passingest of ways but that I respect. The Blue Jays remain a game under .500, which is right where one would expect them to be as they close in on thirty games played this season, because they are plainly not good, but nor are they particularly bad; they are, like so many of us in our working day, just getting through it. I hope that they have rewarding personal lives and projects and hobbies to sustain them, although I worry that their line of work to a certain extent precludes at least some of that.

Although I have skipped over the particulars of the week that was, I do not wish to skip over The R. A. Dickey Honorary Old English Word-Hoard (brought to you in part by the J. R. Clark Hall Concise Anglo-Saxon Dictionary, always), but instead point you to the particulars of līc, which survives into contemporary English as "lich" with the same sense of a body, a corpse, but which, in Old English, appears in all kinds of sikk compounds, like līcbeorg ("coffin, sarcophagus"), līcburg ("cemetary"), līchamian ("to clothe with flesh"), līchamian ("body, carnal, physical, material"), līchryre ("bodily decay, death"), līcsang ("dirge"), līcrest ("sepulchre, tomb"), līcstow ("place of burial"), līcðrōwere ("leper"), which is really good, and also līcpytt ("grave"), which is kind of my favourite I think. 

KS

Blue Jays 11, Red Sox 8; Red Sox 4, Blue Jays 1: One Losing Streak Ends, Another Begins, Which is Like The Seasons

Josh Donaldson: A Guy Who is Working Out

Tuesday dingerzzz from Josh Donaldson and Jose Bautista -- take that, four-game losing streak! Ho ho! -- then today R. A. Dickey pitched and so defeat. What else might one even say.

But not so fast! It is time once again for The R. A. Dickey Honorary Old English Word-Hoard of which we have together grown so fond! Today let us consider heoru, which means "sword," like kind of a lot of other Old English words do actually, but this one shows up in a bunch of compounds that I like, usually meaning not sword, exactly, but just, like, really, really bad, like for example heoruwolf, which Clark Hall has as "bloodthirsty wolf," or heoruhocit, "savagely barbed," heorugrimm, which just means, like, extra grim, like playing a baseball game in front of literally zero people because of protests and riots and curfews stemming from state violence that have shut down the city but for some reason there is still a baseball game but not for the people in that city haha!  

Your Toronto Blue Jays are 10-12 or whatever.

KS

Blue Jays 4, Orioles 2; Blue Jays 7, Orioles 6; Rays 12, Blue Jays 3: Where Do The Days Go

The light in Tampa: arguably worse than the light in the closed dome?

Haha woah ok yeah Blue Jays baseball, right? It has been being played, certainly! These hockey playoffs show no sign of relent, though, and a man has but a finite amount of time, I am sure you will agree, to devote to sport, to sport-feeling, and, most relevant to our conversation here I am sure you will agree once more, to sport-feeling blogging. To recap in brief, then: the Blue Jays finished well against the Orioles, and then got walloped to the extremium against the Rays last night. Foremost among those walloped was surely R. A. Dickey, who stunk, which I say without animosity but instead as the barest statement of fact, of stink-fact. Poor guy. 

Let us all be enriched, however, by the R. A. Dickey Honorary Old English Word-Hoard, which visits upon us dægcandel, "day-candle," and so "sun." Isn't that a nice one? A kenning! Which is like a super-compressed metaphor, a kind of riddling circumlocution! The term derives from the Old Norse verb kenna, "to know," and it is totally a way of knowing things, so there you go.

Hey Devon Travis is hitting like .375 with 5 home runs so far. 

KS   

Braves 8, Blue Jays 7; Blue Jays 6, Braves 5 (F/10): These Really Seem Like Excellent Games I am Missing

I really think photography has finally advanced far enough to truly capture how shitty the light is in there with the roof closed

An 8-7 game with five home runs? A 6-5 extra-inning win with a walk-off home run from everybody's new buddy (in that he is not Brett Lawrie and also extra reasons) Josh Donaldson? These games sound super great! I only caught the bottom of the ninth last night after hockey, but did see Dioner Navarro for a minute and got to think about how I like that he is stout as fvkk, so it's not like I got nothing from the game, because that felt like something, but my thoughts were elsewhere throughout the evening, clearly. And then this afternoon it was really lovely out, and there was a hipster craft show nearby and the crafters are these really interesting talented stylish earnest people and it's not just the crafts (although it is the crafts) and not even snax (although it is the snax) but it is just the feeling you get in there while you're eating a cupcake and sipping a hand-pressed fizzy lemonade and maybe getting a dishtowel, you know? The university radio station has a booth there with these volunteers that could not have less information about any subject than the amount they have about the one they are ostensibly there for; it is wonderful. So I did not catch any of this game but I saw the Donaldson walk-off and it looked like a great time for everybody!

Also it is worth noting, I think, that R. A. Dickey did totally alright again today, and even if he hadn't he would still by his mere presence have provided us with an opportunity for another peek into the R. A. Dickey Honorary Old English Word-Hoard, which I am sure you will agree is more than enough, especially when you see how sikk it is to think about the word galdor, which means "sound, song, incantation, spell, enchantment" (all definitions today from J. R. Clark Hall's Concise Anglo-Saxon Dictionary as that is the one that is on the couch at present), and maybe just get a little quiet about the idea that song and spell are held so closely together in galdor, right? You get a bunch of really good compounds out of this one, too, like galdorcræft ("occult art, incantation, magic" and also my band name so hands off), galdorcræftiga ("wizard"), galdorcwide ("incantation"), galdorgalend ("enchanter"), galdorgalere ("wizard"), galdorleoð ("incantation"), galdorsang ("incantation"), galdorword ("magic word"), galdre ("wizard, magician"), and galdricge ("enchantress"). I mean, my god.

KS

Rays 2, Blue Jays 1: It Might Also Have Been Possible to Not Send Jose Right There

nooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooo

Ah, the home opener, I know it well: you get your whole squad together and show up like twelve-deep in the 500s and listen to a bunch of drunk bro assholes start chanting "Go Leafs Go" by the fifth inning while the Blue Jays blow it to, like, the Twins, or something, and then there are fights. Maybe it doesn't happen like that anymore, exactly, who knows, as I have not been to one of these in holy shit nine years, but I expect the broad lines of the occasion remain largely unchanged; the camera seemed to luxuriate in the fresh faces of whole vast crews of dewy maidens adorned in their team-apparel finery and those too of the young suitors who suit them, which is much of what I recall of these home openers d'antan. By the second game of the season, all of these youthful funseekers will be replaced by the miserabilisit horde of fierce old ladies still mad at Homer Bush for a baserunning mistake in like 1999 and deliberately unfun young men with scorekeeping books and resolute viewz on advanced metrics; both with have little radios; neither will find any real joy. A crowd of 12 000 will be announced, but it will be a damnable lie.

BUT NOT ON OPENING DAY where a cheerful crowd north of 48 000 watched R. A. Dickey walk in the two runs that were all the Rays needed because nothing else ever really got going! Hey! You don't often say this about somebody who walked in a couple runs, but Dickey was really pretty OK, and has looked fairly good in both of his starts so far, actually. Down 2-1, Jose Bautista, who I see has a bobblehead day coming up (in a way it is strange that as a people we have not wearied of the bobblehead yet), drew a walk to lead-off the bottom of the ninth and I was like OOOOOOH SHIIIIIIIIIT and I was certainly no less that way when E5 started taking these huge rips up there as though he had fully considered how raw it would be to win the home opener with a walk-off home run and had decided this was a dare-to-be-great moment (not wrongly) that he could not let pass him by without taking mammoth fvkkn rips. 

But alas, he whiffed on a what looked like a pretty decent 3-2 fastball to hit, and Bautista, who had been sent, was out by a mile at second (or at least a quarter-mile, the length at which deeply-felt lives are sometimes lived), and that was pretty much that. 

But that's baseball, friends! It is often very much like that! And yet here we remain.

Oh hey also, since we were going to do an Old English word every R. A. Dickey start, to celebrate his Beowulf enthusiasm, let's do wealcan, which is where "walk" comes from. (I am not doing this to be mean about R. A. Dickey, because whether the runs were walked in or not [they extremely were], that was not a bad start, and Dickey has been better than a guy at work and I had decided he would be this year, and so is entitled to his propers.) 

wealcan

From Proto-Germanic *walkaną, from Proto-Indo-European *wolg- < *wel- (“to bend, twist, run, roll”). Akin to Old High German walchan, Old Norse valka, Old English ġewealcan "to go, go about, walk", Old English wealcian "to roll up, curl, twist", Old English weallian "to roam about, ramble", German wallen

Verb[edit]

wealcan

1. to move around
2. to revolve
3. to roll, roll around, be rolling
4. to toss
5. to fluctuate
6. to revolve in one's mind; scheme; reflect
7. to discuss

(That's from wiktionary.)

I don't know about you but I am already kind of excited about the next R. A. Dickey start because of all that etymology! 

KS