NATS (20-12) BETTER THAN TIGERS LAST NIGHT

 after 4-game sweep, 

 Clint Robinson's (who?) walk-off 

 homer was needed 

 and yet, the Nats find themselves 

 second in the division 

NATS (18-8) WORSE THAN ROYALS A WEEK AGO

 Jonny Papelbon 
 faced seven batters for save, 
 gave up three runs, lost 

 walk off road losses might hurt, 
 but shitty humans hurt worse 

NATS RISE TO GLORY game thirty-one

So, finally back to .500, now the Nationals on Saturday were allowed the strange notion of going into a game, thinking, "Hey, we could actually go above .500." This has only happened two other games this season thus far, and one of those was opening day. Doug Fister (lol) gave a solid start, and midway through this nice Saturday in DC, Nats were up 6-1, looking like they could maybe idle their way into the above-.500 column for the first time in 2015.
But then fuck, nothing is ever easy with these guys. The fuckin' wheels came off Fister and the defense, partially in the 7th, more so in the 8th, and by the time the Nats got off the field to bat in the bottom of the 8th, 6-1 had become 6-6, and this had all the hallmarks of yet another classic Nationals collapse, of which they have earned a reputation both in the individual games as well as the larger sense. Shit looked fucked. All this talent (allegedly) brought together, under the guise of winning at least a World Series, perhaps more. But what of the year they shut Strasborg down? But what of the crumble of severe nature against the Cardinals two years ago? Is this team shook, at a deep psychic level, and unable to achieve? No runs in 8th, or top of 9th, game still hung in that 6-6 balance, so easy to assume, "Fuck, here we go into extra innings, where things will get ugly in some bizarre snakebitten way."
Except there is a man on, with one out, and up to the plate steps The Ultimate Harper - a young man, perhaps a God in a Farmboy's Body, who embodies that potential more than anything else in a Nationals uniform. He could be this generation's Barry Bonds (minus the controversy hopefully) or he could just be another power hitter amongst a thousand. A fanbase drunk off alcohol and sunshine but also sobered by the harsh reality of Washington sports fandom, specific to this team but also the overall glut of quality successes for an American city this size, hung in the balance, wondering would they happily go home and get drunker and fuck and make babies to name Bryce, or would it be another failure in a long line of failures and they'd go home and do Mother's Day shit tomorrow and then go back to work on Monday and life would just go on, no glory no dopamine sports release just on and on with boring mundane life, but not forever, because we all fuckin' die in the end.
Then BAMM - Bryce jacks one that was gone the moment wood struck ball, and not only was the game's tie untied, but all that heavy emotional weight hovering over the stadium with all those individuals, feeling these psychic pressures and perhaps being forced to face their own post-industrial somewhat meaningless mortality - it dissipated in the moment. Single HR ball to end game, inject dopamine into thousands of brains, lift collective spirits, and (momentarily) avoid the sometimes depressing nature of suffering life the way humans have it. That is the Ultimate Harper's power.
Not only this, but for the first time this season of much hyped promise, the Nats were above .500. They were a winning team. The stumbles and struggles and strangely sore elbows and whatever elses - none of it stopped them from still being a winning team. This walk-off HR was another "moment", and in these "moments", momentum is gained. Not physical momentum you can measure with scientific devices in laboratory settings, but that unexplainable yet undeniable metaphysical momentum. This is a team that is gaining momentum, hopefully enough to sustain their movement deep into October.
Nats were 16-15.

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

Curly W 15-9

bottom of the 9th starts out w/ Nats one down

& the kid leads off with a double

(& then a couple of SOs by other Nats)

& then Ian Desmond bangs a walk-off HR

and order is restored, we have won once again

And though I know the Harper media mania is sickening

and annoying and enough to make one angry at the dude though it is not his fault

let me say this...

even though he is a boy playing a man's game it is also a case of him

being a man playing a boy's game

the dude is the fuckin' goods

Blue Jays 4, Angels 3: Now That is How You Close The Season at Home

There she goes.

Trailing 3-1 in the seventh despite another solid start by young Henderson Alvarez, the Blue Jays at last got down to biznass: Eric Thames, who Alan Ashby could not possibly love more, led off the inning with his twelfth home run of the season, knocking Ervin Santana out of the game. Jose Bautista walked (3-4, 2 BB, 2 standing ovations complete with chants of "M-V-P"), and Adam Lind ripped one off of Mark Trumbo at first. What could have been a double play was instead a ball that skittered into centre field, which allowed Bautista to reach third, and Lind to totally evade the tag at second, not that umpire Brian Runge noticed. As you can see here --

-- Adam Lind was not nuts about this, nor should have been. In any event, Bautista came in to tie the game at three on a wild pitch, but the Jays left an E5 double out there to die to end the inning.


Let us reconvene in the bottom of the twelfth, long after the Blue Jays had strangely lost the DH through pinch hitting machinations in the bottom of the ninth and defensive reorderings in the top of the tenth. Leading off that home half of the final inning of baseball to be played in Toronto this year was that selfsame E5, who curled a 3-2 hanging breaking ball just inside the foul pole to give the Blue Jays their eleventh walk-off win of the season. And there was much rejoicing, because it owned. The Blue Jays were perfect in extra innings at home this year, which is a pretty awesome thing to be. Thanks, guys.


I was struck last night by the end-of-season baseball feelings displayed by young Navin Vaswani of NotGraphs, whose emoting I have linked to previously in these pages. The last home game of the year is invariably a melancholic affair, even, or perhaps especially, when it ends like this one did. In the tellingly sepia-tone-titled "One Last Night At The Ballpark," Navin had this to say:   

I’m at the Rogers Centre. Section 217, first base side. The lid’s open. There couldn’t be finer weather for the grand finale, the last baseball game in Toronto this year.

Vernon Wells is getting “the business” in left field. An elderly woman to my right booed him when he came to bat in the fifth. She’s merciless. A couple of enthusiastic Blue Jays fans, or, as I like to call them, “clowns,” just started the wave.

There’s an Englishman sitting behind me, at his second game this week. About baseball he said: “I just wish we had this in England.”

Baseball’s the best. It’s going to be a long winter.

 He did not stop there:

ADDENDUM: Edwin Encarnacion — “Double E,” not “E5″ — walked it off for Toronto. It was glorious. The Blue Jays made sure that since they weren’t going to the postseason, neither were the Los Angeles Angels. Here’s to playing spoiler.

In the 9th and 12th innings, when Jose Bautista stepped up to bat, most everyone in the building rose to their feet and showered the American League’s Most Valuable Player with applause, and chants of “MVP! MVP! MVP!” This warmed my baseball heart. We might not have given him the many curtain calls he probably deserved, but Bautista was appreciated. His has been another incredible season, one this city won’t soon forget.

I had it all Wednesday night: Great company; delicious sweet potato fries; a beautiful night; a couple of Bud Light Limes; and an extra innings, come-from-behind walk-off Blue Jays win. If that’s the last baseball game I ever have the privilege of watching in person, I’m good. No complaints.

It would be easy to make light of this as the kind of naked sentimentality best reserved for the ear of one's significant other, or perhaps best confined to the heavily annotated pages of one's scorekeeping book, even. But I salute Navin. These are baseball feelings of the highest order. Is there a more profound baseball feeling than the end-of-season baseball feeling? I submit that there is not. Bless you, Navin.


KS

Blue Jays 5, Orioles: 4: Another Blow Stuck Against the Loathsome Kevin Gregg

OH NOES KEVIN GREGG I THINK HE IS IN THERE

In the early going, there was much to cheer: Jose Bautista's 41st home run of the season; Brett Lawrie's 9th; Dewayne Wise's throw to the plate to end the third inning; and Lawrie's ridiculous bare-handed play on a chopper to third to end the fourth. Add to this another solid outing by young Henderson Alvarez, and it was easy to not get all that bent out of shape when Jesse Litsch couldn't quite keep it together in the eighth, allowing Vladimir Guerrero (bless him) to double in the go-ahead run. It had been a pretty good one! It would have been OK had the Blue Jays come up just a little short. It seriously would have been. I was at peace.


However! After Clay Rapada -- sleeper pick for best name in the majors, in my view -- got David Cooper swinging to open the ninth, Buck Showalter went to Kevin Gregg to close things out, because he is, as you know, A Closer, and that's vitally important. To his goonish, loathsome credit, Gregg managed to put Lawrie away swinging and totally get two strikes on Kelly Johnson before falling apart completely and ruining everything. Johnson worked a walk, which brought Jose Molina to the plate, and I had every expectation that J. P. Arencibia would be brought out to  pinch hit at that point, playing for the longball, you know? But as Alan Ashby rightly noted, that's a tough call for manager John Farrell: Arencibia has the power, but the lovably plump Molina hits for the much better average. Sure enough, Molina singled (oh, there was a pinch runner alright: it was Chris Woodward), and Adam Lowen -- a former Orioles pitcher on whom the Blue Jays took a flyer as an outfielder, sent to A-ball, and here we are three years later -- came to the plate for Dewayne Wise, and was awarded first after being ever so faintly brushed by a pitch. 


So it was with two out and the bases loaded that John Farrell at last brought J. P. Arencibia off the bench, at which point the irredeemable Gregg uncorked a wild pitch that brought home the tying run, and allowed a crisp single to left to bring in the game winner. Take that, Kevin Gregg: the universe is never going to forgive you for being the way you were with Cito, and I am but part of the universe.


To conclude on an unrelated topic, I would like to pass along that Jerry Howarth mentioned yesterday that he had served as master of ceremonies at Adam Lind's wedding last year (registry details here if you have yet to send a gift; pic of the happy couple here), which, I don't know, I found both nice and perhaps surprisingly amusing. "There she goes!" etc. 


Oh actually to conclude, here is rad shot of Jose Bautista rounding the bases. 

JOSE JOSE

KS

Blue Jays 1, Red Sox 0 (F/11): You Love Brett Lawrie. You Love Him.

Hey awesome it's Chris Woodward over there on the left!

It's only right that Geddy Lee was in his customary seat behind home plate on a day when Brett Lawrie sent everyone home happy with a walk-off home run in the eleventh, because he is awesome and so was this. And it is only fitting that Geddy Lee was not at all in his customary seat behind home plate, but in fact nowhere to be seen when that mighty wallop was indeed walloped, because this game took forever: the Red Sox insistence on dragging out every last god damned pitch has gotten to the point that Geddy can't take it anymore. That's how dire this situation has become: the way the Red Sox play baseball is too long and drawn-out for a guy who plays in Rush. 


It was a relief, of a kind, when Josh Beckett left the game early with an apparent leg strain or something. Sure there was going to be that massive delay that happens when a pitcher comes in from the bullpen completely cold to replace an injured starter and is given as long as he needs to warm up, but at least then things would start humming along after that, right? Well, they did, sort of, until Papelbon. Until Papelbon. For a minute there, and by a minute I actually mean about half an inning, it seemed like Blue Jays radio ace Alan Ashby was about to join Geddy, wherever he was. Ashby was so sick of Papelbon's shenanigans, you have no idea. Utterly disgusted, and completely unwilling to hide it in any way. Misses outside and I can't effing believe we're going to have to wait another eighty seconds before he throws again. (That is not a direct quotation or in fact a quotation of any kind.) The inning was only rescued for me by my wife's observation, "Papelbon jeans; boots with the fur." 


Anyway, Jerry Howarth noted about an inning before it happened that, with everything else that has gone Brett Lawrie's way in his brief time with the club, it's almost surprising that he had yet to get a walk-off hit of some kind. And then there we were, bottom of the eleventh, watching the ball sail out to centre, just below where there once was a restaurant called Windows but now there are only windows, an ideal finish to a nail-biter that saw five innings of shutout relief after the young arm of Henderson Alvarez went a scoreless six. If only Geddy had stuck it out . . . 


KS 

Rangers 5, Blue Jays 4: This Bullpen is For Shit

You will note that exactly none of the above players is a Toronto Blue Jay 

I totally get that you can't really play day games in Fort Worth in July, but I nevertheless choose to really, really mind that there's no Jays game on the radio in the afternoon when they play Texas. So I come into these games already minding things. Then Rzepcynski and Rauch combine to blow the one-run lead that came out of a three-run sixth on an Arencibia home run (his third in his last two games), an Escobar double, a Thames triple (and we all love triples!), and a Bautista single, and that seriously ups the amount of minding that I do. It is not helping that Corey Patterson can't catch a reasonable proportion of balls that are, you know, totally catchable.


This is brutal.


KS

Blue Jays 6, Mariners 5 (F/14): Well I'll be.

Walkin' off.

It is perhaps worth noting that the two players I explicitly slandered last night out of sheer frustration with this endless game -- Rajai Davis, who pinch ran for Escobar in the ninth, and John McDonald, who then came in to play short for extras -- are the two who figured in the winning run. A couple innings into extras, I was very much of the opinion that there was no way the Blue Jays were ever going to score, unless Bautista or Lind did it entirely on their own, because of the deadbeats in front of them in the order. How wrong I was! Davis singled, stole a couple, and Johnny Mac (as he is known to all but me) lifted a sac fly to win it. 


Lots of ups and downs and near misses in this one, but I would like to extend a special "lol" in the direction of Mike Carp (possible nickname: "Hiroshima") who got picked off at second after a leadoff double in the eleventh as Chone Figgins tried to bunt him over to third. I would also like to salute the Blue Jays bullpen. After Brett Cecil allowed five runs through his seven innings, Camp, Rauch, Frasor, "Don't Ask" Dotel, Rzepcynski, and Janssen who took it the rest of the actually-kind-of-long way. The Blue Jays have used more relief pitching than any other team in the American League this year, which is obviously horrible.  


KS

Blue Jays 6, Rays 4 (F/11): John McDonald is Your Home Run Hero

Wait, wait, is that . . . Chris Woodward?.

John McDonald, an all-glove super-sub with a career slugging percentage of .330, is the kind of undersized, scrappy, hustling player that broadcasters and writers won't ever shut up about for even a second until eventually you almost start to dislike the guy through absolutely no fault of his own. I am a huge fan of Blue Jays' play-by-play man Jerry Howarth, but he absolutely will not stop about John McDonald, and it's too much: "John McDonald practices at game speed! John McDonald does the little things! John McDonald plays the game the right way! John McDonald is eating a package of salted nuts!" I like John McDonald fine. And I am probably second-to-none in my appreciation of Jerry Howarth. But on this subject, I seriously want him to stop talking.


But now he never, ever will, not after last night's walkoff home run in the eleventh to win a pretty great game. Let it first be said that Jo-Jo delivered: four runs over seven innings is not a "quality start" in accordance with that (perfectly useful) statistic, but it is totally A Quality Start out of Jo-Jo Reyes. Through eight, the score was even at Tampa Bay 4, Jose Bautista 4 (Haters: 0). Bautista homered, tripled, and doubled in his first three plate appearances, scoring each time, and came up in the eighth needing a single for the cycle. Alas, he walked on four pitches, and came in to score on an E5 double to tie it. Bautista got another crack at the cycle in the tenth, but again walked. Alas.  

You will perhaps recall that I hate Juan Rivera, but to his credit he singled in the bottom of the eleventh. This changes nothing between us, but credit where credit is due. It was indeed strange to see Chris Woodward come in to pinch run -- in 2011, in a baseball game -- but this is not to suggest that it was not a welcome sight. Stranger and more welcome still was John McDonald's high fly to deep left that fell into a jubilant Blue Jays bullpen to end the game. Buck Martinez, our reasonably competent television play-by-play guy, pretty much had a stroke on air, which is sad, but also beautifully communicated the excitement of this entirely unexpected turn of events.


It is hard to have any worries or cares after a game like that, but I am nevertheless concerned that Juan Rivera and Travis Snider are hitting .283 if you add them together. Other than that, no complaints; this was awesome.


KS

Blue Jays 6, Yankees 5 (F/10): YEEEEEEEEEAAAAAAAAAAAHHHHHHH

Travis Snider and Ricky Romero share . . . A Moment.

When both Yunel Escobar and Travis Snider struck out with the bases loaded in the sixth inning, I was of the opinion that this game sucked. Snider seemed to agree, too, as he indicated by snapping his bat over his knee à la mode de Bo.  But we were both wrong, as it turned out, because we had failed to allow for a triumphant comeback in the bottom of the ninth against Mariano Rivera, the greatest closer in the history of baseball, no big deal. 


Down by two, Escobar led off the ninth with a ringing double, and after a Snider ground-out moved him to third, he scored on a wild pitch as the Yankees did their best to pitch around Jose Bautista (they were right to want no part of him after his earlier rocket of a home run to left in a decisive blow against the haters, as I see it). Bautista went first to third on an Adam Lind single, setting the stage for a squeeze play to tie it in the bottom of the ninth against Mariano Rivera. It was at least as cool as that sounds, too: John MacDonald managed a perfect bunt down the line towards first on a tricky high pitch, and Bautista darted home on the safety squeeze, beating the tag after Texeira's fine play and flip to home. 


Jon Rauch wasn't all that hot in the top of the tenth, walking two, but no real damage was done, so who am I to complain? Rivera understandably did not come back out to work the tenth -- he was lucky Eric Chavez was able to go 5-3 for a slick double play to end the ninth -- so it was Ivan Nova who gave up the leadoff single to E5, the selfsame E5 who, two outs later, would race home on a Travis Snider shot to the wall to win it.  Full game highlights are here, and you really should click them, on account of the extent to which they own (that extent, for the record, is  so hard).


An almost perfect night! Did Kyle Drabek throw smoke? Alas, he did not. Did A. J. Burnett fail utterly? Tragically, no. But those few shortcomings aside, this was a hell of a game. 


KS