Blue Jays 11, Indians 7: Travis Snider and Rajai Davis FTW

Yeeeeeeaaaaaaaaaahhhhhhh

I don't know, man, with all due respect to both Zaun and Ashby, maybe Travis Snider really has straightened out his swing? Three hits last night, including a double and a home run, knocking in five. Add Rajai Davis' 4-RBI, 3-4 night, and not even Shawn Camp's hideous eighth inning could deprive Jo-Jo Reyes of his fourth win. It's particularly good to see Rajai do something, because he has been one of the worst regular players in baseball this year. And I don't say that idly: he's 414th out of 425 batters in WAR. His OBP is .268, if you can believe it. I will understand if you cannot.


KS 

This season....

I haven't written much on this blog, and I apologize for that. Besides some real life shit that would be tl;dr to go into (and no one would rightly give two fucks about), I've been kind of afraid to say anything about this season, as if mentioning it would cause me to wake up and find out it was all a dream and the Pirates were 15 games below .500 and 25 out of first place.

But it isn't.

Tonight's win clinched a winning first half of the season for the first time since 1992. Imagine that, if you can. A lot of teams have championship droughts, but consider this: an entire generation of baseball fans in this city have never seen winning baseball. There's more fans in Detroit with memories of Lions playoff games than fans in Pittsburgh with memories of Pirates playoff games. It's been said that Pittsburgh doesn't even care about baseball anymore, and there's been times where that's been hard to argue. That's no longer the case now. Not only is the team doing it's part, the fans have been too. It gets pointed out quickly that sellouts vs the Phillies and Red Sox included a large portion of visiting fans, but when you have standing room only in a game against a Cubs team that pretty much called it a season on Memorial Day you know you have something real.

It's been long forgotten that Pittsburgh was first and foremost a baseball town for nearly a century. The Steelers were an afterthought from their founding in 1933 to about 1969. They were lucky to break .500 and were barely covered by the local sports media. The Pirates were the kings of the city by a large margin. Even when football took hold, it was still neck and neck. Some of the most beloved sports heroes were Clemente, Stargell, and Maz. Even into the 80s, we had Andy Van Slyke, Doug Drabek, Bobby Bonilla, and yes, even that skinny young Bonds guy (wonder what became of him) giving the fans something to cheer for.

As we all know, times got hard. It hasn't been fun being a Pirates fan for a long while. There was the Freak Show team in 1997 that somehow contended until the last week of the season (still finished below .500) but that's been it until now. Now there's reason to believe again, and no matter what happens the second half of the year, this season is a success because of that alone. A city remembered it was a baseball town again.

48-42

All the fine ladies set to welcome Joe DiMagglio back from the dead.

Indians 5, Toronto 4: What Can You Even Say

Blargh.

Were I to focus on the positives from last night, I would have to say that by golly, we sure are getting a lot more out of Carlos Villanueva than anybody could have ever expected, and how about another home run from Jose Bautista! Rzepcynski and Frasor sure pitched well out of the pen! But of course the real story here is the Indians' five-run bottom of the ninth. Yes, it was Luis Perez who gave up the Asdrubel Cabrera RBI single and Travis Hafner's mighty wallop of a walk-off grand slam, but I choose to lay most of the blame at the feet of "The Closer" Frank Francisco, who opened up the inning like this: Single. Double. Walk. That is how you turn a four-run lead in the ninth into a shameful, grievous thing. That is exactly how you do it.


KS 

Mets at Giants Weekend Series

I rooted as they beat my sworn foes, the Braves and Phillies, and pulled for them as they won the World Series, beating the Rangers, about whom I am fairly ambivalent.  However...now...we must fight!

I have a very busy weekend that includes meeting my new nephew and attending a wedding, so my posting will be delayed, but with Reyes hitting the DL yesterday, and the Mets mired in a stretch where they will probably face seven All-Stars in a row, it's quite possible that when I return to writing on Sunday, I will be recapping the "WELP" packing-it-in-for-the-season game.  

I'll just leave this here, in lieu of a .gif of John Franco striking out Barry Bonds, which I just don't think the internet is ready for.  Everyone have a great weekend, except you Bill, who can burn in hell.  :-D   <3

Dodgers 6, Mets 0 - Game Called on Account of Awful Umpiring

That's some good umpirin'

Yeah, I realize that the above run represented just one of the six that the Mets lost by, but the beauty of a five-year swoon is that fans have become as skilled at working in excuses as tailors work in fine linens and silks.  Such a ridiculous call turned the Mets completely off to the idea of playing baseball for the rest of the evening, especially against one so dominant as Clayton Kershaw, so, in protest, they left behind a team of crudely painted scarecrows while they got an early start on their trip up the coast to San Francisco.  

WHY ARE YOU CHEATING JUAN URIBE YOU HAVE TWO WORLD SERIES CHAMPIONSHIPS TAKE IT EASY

47-42

Ryan Rayburn and Don Kelly are the two dudes in the back. I'm so proud of those wacky little fellas

Giants Win Game of the Year 6-5 in 14 Innings

Nailed it.

This started off as a terrible game. Really, just abysmal. Stranded leadoff runners by the bucketful. Giants swinging and missing at balls bowled slowly underhand across home plate. Everyone not named "Andres Torres" or "Pablo Sandoval" looking like they were swinging a rolled-up wet carpet. Madison Bumgarner giving up five runs. I noted on Twitter that this was a real stinky butthole of a game and a pretty lousy-looking team (in so many words).

These days, it seems like if you want to have your team look like just the best team around, you should play the Giants. The Padres, for seven or nine innings there, looked like they were the Bronx Bombers crossed with the Big Red Machine and huffing Swingin' A's fumes. Driving balls to the gaps, stealing a million bases, striking out the side on one pitch. Nate Schierholtz launched a mammoth home run off of the right field foul pole in the middle innings to bring the Giants within one run, but then the Padres scored again. Two runs? Insurmountable.

But in the eighth inning, Pablo Sandoval crushed a bomb to Triples Alley that he thought was gone. He only ended up with a game-tying double, but it was enough at the time. The Giants bullpen nodded and said, "We got this." Sandoval made just the best possible play to end the top of the ninth inning with a man on third, and the bullpen was off to the races, retiring the last 17 batters they faced. Giants pitchers ended the night with 19 strikeouts and one walk. Think about that for a second. I'll wait.

The Padres and Giants spent the last five innings trying to out-not-score one another, but only the Giants were getting men on base. The bottom of the fourteenth opened with the Padres inserting a pitcher named Pat Neshek, whose delivery can best be described as "oh my god what am i looking at." He hurked and jerked and threw a ball to Nate Schierholtz, then got a swinging strike, then a foul. Just as I was thinking, "Man, wouldn't it be awesome if..." Neshek spasmed and frothed and threw a ball out over the middle of the plate, and Nate Schierholtz hit just the highest fly ball I've ever seen. The Padres right fielder drifted back slowly and settled under it against the wall and... PANGGGG... it bounced off the tin roof top of the wall and into the cove. Juggernate's first two-homer game, and the Giants had their tenth walk-off win of the season.

A lousy game that was a must-win for the Giants became one of the best games I've seen this season. The Giants had this game in the bag multiple times and couldn't put it away. The offense needs at least one bat. The return of Mike Fontenot will be a cause for celebration. Yeesh. But this was a big, big win. What a game.

Red Sox 6, Blue Jays 4: Knuckleballers Own

Tim Wakefield, shown here owning.

Either the Red Sox had some killer scouting report on Ricky Romero, or Romero was just junk out there, because the Sox were uncharacteristically free-swingers last night. They were not at all their usual patient selves, but they knocked the ball all over the place, so I am not dissing so much as noting. A night after Brett Cecil went the distance in a loss, Romero was out of the game in the fifth, so it was kind of a long night for the bullpen, who actually totally shut the door the rest of the way (nice job, bullpen). I didn't stay up through the forty-minute rain delay so I can't even act like I was heartbroken when the Blue Jays brought the tying run to the plate in the ninth or anything. I was resting comfortably. 


There's kind of an interesting thing going on with Travis Snider right now, I should mention. Since being recalled from Las Vegas, he's hit four doubles in three games. One would think that everything is cool, then, right? But both Gregg Zaun (who I loathe) and Alan Ashby (who I admire) have said that his swing is still not quite right in the way that it was not quite right before: he's still taking these basically one-handed hacks at breaking balls, and right now they're falling in, but over the long haul he's going to have the same problems that got him sent down, they say. It'll be interesting to see how this plays out. Some guys have pretty solid careers with kind of mechanically awful swings, but not many.


Finally, I would like to draw your attention to the WAR leader boards at Baseball Reference, where you can plainly see that Jose Bautista sits not only atop these standings but also the haters. Also, as much as everyone is making of Justin Verlander, I am not sure we are making enough of Justin Verlander. And maybe, maybe Andrew McCutcheon should have made the NL All-Star team.


A.L. WAR Bat / Pitch

	Tm	WAR
J.Bautista	TOR	6.1
J.Verlander	DET	4.8
A.Gonzalez	BOS	4.5
J.Weaver	LAA	4.4
J.Beckett	BOS	4.1

N.L. WAR Bat / Pitch

	Tm	WAR
M.Kemp	LAD	5.4
A.McCutchen	PIT	5.0
R.Halladay	PHI	4.5
R.Braun	MIL	4.2
C.Hamels	PHI	4.2

KS

TCB - Mets 5, Dodgers 3

Fig. 1 - A Perfect Curveball

Back in 2006, the last time the Mets made the playoffs, they would celebrate each home victory by playing Bachman Turner Overdrive's 'Taking Care of Business.'  I loved it for its simplicity, as if the team was acknowledging "Yes, we are in the business of winning baseball games!"  You can only control the game you're playing that night, and if last night's 5-3 win was nothing remarkable - no homers, a pretty pedestrian pitching performance by Jon Niese, and nobody really filling up the stat sheet - at least it kept the modest four-game winning streak alive, improved the Mets' record during this critical stretch of the season to 8-4, and kept them undefeated for a West Coast trip, when they traditionally perform dreadfully.  

Things are going so well right now that I can easily brush off ridiculously hacky troll jobs and even ALMOST stomach Reyes' pretty-much inevitable DL trip, which will take him out of the All-Star Game and Philadelphia series.  Also, I didn't realize that the Phillies were capable of losing, which they did last night.  Now all the Braves have to do is get into the act, and baby, we've got a stew goin'.  


ETA:  WHATTUP

Further Thoughts on The Cutting of Juan Rivera

Don't cry for him; he's already cut.

The lowest form of sportswriting is that which conflates athletic performance and personal character. It is distressingly common (in the "ay, madam, it is . . . common" Hamlet double meaning way), always stupid, and often racist. Hustling, undersized scrappy white player really shows you how this game ought to be played. And he's a hell of a guy, too! You can tell by the way he hustles scrappily! Athletic but troubled black player, on the other hand, is not the kind of player or man you want your kids looking up to. And don't get me started on naturally gifted but lackadaisical Latino! If only he could get his head on straight, hustle scrappily, and get whiter, you'd really have something you could jerk off to, wouldn't you, boomer sportswriter? 


But let's put the not-that-subtle racism of mainstream sports journalism to one side for a minute and just focus on the extent to which the equation of performance and character is the dumbest thing imaginable. First of all, it just is, right? This is utterly obvious, and yet missed by a staggering percentage of people who write about or broadcast sports. In no other line of work is on-the-job excellence so naively read as illustrative of a person's worth as a human being. Do we expect there to be a correlation between someone's ability to perform heart surgery or drive a bus or bag your groceries and their likelihood to be, I don't know, an emotionally available parent, or a neighbour who will occasionally mow a little over into your yard to save you like five minutes the next time you do it? Of course not. Of course not. But if you play baseball a certain way, you're not just a good baseball player; you're a quality person, and maybe even a leader.


The dumbest instance of this in my life as baseball fan relates, naturally, to the Blue Jays, and specifically to a strange period in which Carlos Delgado was publicly criticized for not being the kind of leader and character guy that Raul Mondesi clearly was. I am not making this up; this was in the papers. Richard Griffin is usually the source of the worst nonsense concerning Toronto baseball, and there is of course no exception to this rule to be found here. But he wasn't alone. How could the writers tell Mondesi was a character guy? He went hard out there. He dove headlong into any and every base. He gunned the ball in from right field, even when there was no play to be made anywhere. He'd take a huge turn around first on any single to the outfield, just to show you how eager he was to try to stretch it into a double. In short, he played the game right way, as the writers saw it; this revealed his character, and his ability to lead. Why didn't Carlos Delgado do any of these things? Why couldn't he be a leader, someone for the young players to look up to and admire, like Raul Mondesi? I am not kidding you; these are things that were written about, and taken up in the sports talk of the day.  It all reads as just incredibly ridiculous now, because Carlos Delgado is Carlos Delgado, and Raul Mondesi was revealed in the fullness of time to be clubhouse cancer whose hard-living lifestyle nearly sunk not only himself but the career of young Felipe Lopez, too, who has said that without the trade out of Toronto he never would have gotten his head straight. Also, Mondesi was caught stealing electricty.


Anyway, all of this is by way of saying that when I say Juan Rivera is an asshole and I'm glad he got cut, I am not trying to suggest that I have been able to deduce anything about his character off the field, his value as a human being by the way he plays baseball. I don't think that just because Juan Rivera looked like a lazy and incompetent asshole of a baseball player that he is any way a bad person. Juan Rivera, for all I know, is a loving husband, a proud father, a dutiful son, a caring brother, and the kind of cousin you actually keep in touch with. But on the field he was an asshole. Maybe he's an awesome guy. But he played baseball like an asshole. And I am glad that asshole got cut.


KS

46-42

Red Sox 3, Blue Jays 2: Look, He Was Safe.

Come on.

I have no special love for E5, though I do have a kind of sympathy for his plight, generally (a man who simply cannot throw who is sometimes asked to throw). I have an active dislike of John Farrell's insistence that the Blue Jays run run run at every opportunity and try to take every extra base possible, and thus get picked off, caught stealing, and run into outs at a maddening pace. But let's be real here: when Encarnacion tried to score from second on John McDonald's single with two outs in the bottom of the ninth -- in a game they shouldn't even really have been in, except for Jose Bautista's two-run shot that same inning -- he made it. He was in there. There's just no question. It was a very nice throw by Darnell McDonald. But Veritek missed the tag by about a foot as Encarnacion's right foot touched home. I appreciate how difficult it is to umpire, and I know it all happened pretty quickly, but Brian Knight missed the call. Watch it here and see for yourself. It is horseshit.


In the end it is whatevs, because there's every reason to think the bullpen would have blown it eventually. But Encarnacion was safe. There's no question.


The other reason I am not going to let that blown call take the spring out of my step is that the Blue Jays have finally heeded my persistent calls to cut Juan Rivera! I have, like, an extra good summery feeling because of that. 


KS

2011 Mets Beat 2009 Mets 6-0

More of this, please

Watching Tuesday night's game was eerie.  The way that the Dodgers could only go station-to-station and failed to cash in runners on second and third with one away in the third reminded me of the 2009 Mets after injuries claimed Beltran, Reyes, Delgado, and basically the whole team.  Even more hilarious was the fourth, where the Dodgers had a single, a double, a HBP and a walk and failed to score.  

The beneficiary of this offensive ineptitude was Michael Pelfrey, the man Vin Scully dubbed "a gentle giant" because of his catch and release method fishing practices, (really a thing he talked about.)  There are few Mets fans that would disagree that mental midget would be more appropriate, given Pelfrey's tendency to fall apart when the slightest thing goes awry.  I was expecting a six-spot in the Dodgers second inning when Kemp reached on Ruben Tejada's error and stole second, but Pelfrey worked through it, just like in the fifth when, with a 2-0 lead he loaded the bases with two outs and allowed an absolute laser to Juan Uribe which, fortunately, was ticketed directly for Angel Pagan. I still say that against any semblance of an offense, Pelfrey would have allowed three or four runs tonight.  

It doesn't happen often, but the Mets got all their runs from homers last night, including a two-run shot by Beltran in the fifth, and a sixth-inning solo and eight-inning three-run job from Jason Bay, who might be showing flashes of the player the Mets thought they were getting when they signed him in the winter of 2009.  Since his June 28th game against the Tigers, when he ended the team's grand slam drought, he has pieced together an eight-game hitting streak with 12 RBI.  If this is the sign that he's heating up, his timing couldn't be better, since the Mets are in the middle of the most critical stretch of the season, which will go a long way in determining whether the team will be dismantled or left alone for a Wild Card run.  He has shown the ability to carry a team for weeks in the past, and if he's able to do so now, with Wright and Santana eying possible post-All Star Game returns, the next month could be VERY interesting. 

45-42

Giants Hand Out Complimentary Runs, Waste Rallies, Lose 5-3

"Gregerson? Who is Gregerson? My name is Guy Incognito."

The Giants are allergic to getting hits with runners in scoring position. Legitimately. They have a note from their doctor, and everything. "RISP-eratory failure."

Other things the Giants are allergic to:

- Hits without runners in scoring position

- Executing a hit and run

- Not grounding into double plays

- Home runs

- The Padres

- Bees

- Managers with normal, human-size heads

- Not getting injured

- Baseball bats

- Baseball gloves

- Beads

- Grass

- Gluten

(By the way, the Giants have lost the last two games with the tying runs in scoring position and less than two outs in the bottom of the ninth inning. Blast these allergies!)

45-41

Giants Hate America, Lose to Padres 5-3

Okay, so now we need TWO hitters.

It should have been closer. Wasted opportunities. It could have been the Giants' tenth walk-off win of the season. Wasted opportunities wrapped inside a thin layer of squandered chances and served atop a bed of regrets.

This was only the third game of the season against the San Diego Banes of my GD Existence. Thanks to the unbalanced schedule, fully 20% of the remaining games are against the Padres. That is not hyperbole. Look it up. One in every five games from here on out is the worst two offenses in the National League trying to out-not-hit one another. The second half of the season is not going to be fun.

No trades forthcoming. The only combo-breaker in the Giants lineup of guaranteed outs is Pablo Sandoval, who is having a historic baseball-mauling streak that is being squandered on the rest of these mandolin-hitting suckbats. 13-game hitting streak, but 9-game extra-base hit streak, which equals the San Francisco team record. He's really brutalizing the ball to all fields and being the bounceback thinner Panda we all hoped he'd be at the beginning of the year. Now he just needs to hope some of that magic pixie dust wears off on Huff, Torres, Ross, and everyone else in the lineup. Tejada and Schierholtz are probably the two hitters in the lineup who aren't swinging at pickoff throws to first. And that is TERRIFYING.

Mets 3, Satans 2 (10) and Mets 5, Dodgers 2

At first I was all

Then I was all

It's something all of us Mets fans have been fearing in the deepest recesses of our feeble minds, the ultimate worst-case scenario that seemed to be the only thing that could stop a Met from winning the MVP award for the first time in history,  but preemptive dread didn't take the sting out of hearing that Jose Reyes had left Saturday's game with a hamstring injury, allowing local fuckfaces Tim McCarver and Joe Buck to bring up the old tired injury-prone business.  I barely heard them, though.  In my head, the A-bombs were already going off:  

Well, this season is over, soon they'll be six games under .500, 12 back in the Wild Card, and then it'll be 'So long Beltran' and 'So long K-Rod' and it'll be another August where I need to force myself to actually watch the Mets, like eating my vegetables or something, and the days of 52 runs in four games will be over, and we'll be back to 52 games with four runs and I've seen the last game that Reyes will ever play with the Mets because the Mets doctors are a bunch of clownbabies and somehow he'll tear the hamstring completely when he's trying to test it and while he's wallowing on the ground, his thyroid will explode again, but all of that will be but a memory when he signs with Philadelphia in the off-season, and then I'll have COMPLICATED FEELINGS when he starts the ASG at Citi Field in 2013 wearing the candy cane uniforms and Oh God that's going to happen, isn't it please God no.

Seriously, this is what was going through my head at a FOURTH OF JULY BARBECUE for God's sake, with sunny weather, an awesome pool with a diving board and food and drink beyond compare.  It should have been a perfect day, but it was the dead of winter in my mind and Jesus Christ I can't believe I got suckered into this crap all again.  Even worse was reading my Facebook feed and the gloating of the miserable Yankee fans I choose to associate with.  I'm surprised they knew that the Yankees play baseball BEFORE October.  

Then, on Sunday, a miracle.    

On a day when the team could be excused for looking a little shell shocked, and R.A. Dickey leaving the game early, they fought back with two outs, down to their last strike twice, against the greatest closer in history, led by hitting legends Jason Bay, Lucas Duda and Ronny Paulino.  Equally gratifying was Rodriguez's two scoreless innings and Bay coming through with the game-winner to salvage the series, and my hopes.  Even having lost the series, I was still feeling like running through the streets of Seaside Park, "Reyes' injury is minor, and he's the All-Star starter!  Mets beat Rivera!  Gary Carter is feeling better!  Happy 4th of July, you old Building and Loan!"

Oh and then they went and won the first game of their usually season-crushing West Coast trip after being held hitless for five innings, so that's good.  In this critical 23-game stretch where they have faced/will face all six of the first place teams in the Majors, the Mets are 6-4 so far, which isn't perfect, but certainly beats the alternative, particularly with the team wisely treating Reyes with kid gloves this week.  

Oh and the schedule maker who put together three in Texas, followed by three in Detroit, followed by a trip home to play the Yankees, and then right back out to LA and San Francisco can go fuck themselves.  

Blue Jays 7, Phillies 4 and Blue Jays 9, Red Sox 7: Jays Break Out the Bats on Mr. Sub Sports Bag Day, Keep Them Out For Lesser Holiday A Day Later

Have never liked the black uniforms; have always liked dingers. You can see the bind I'm in.

Cliff Lee's utterly ridiculous streak of thirty-four consecutive innings without allowing a run -- the man allowed a grand total of one run in June, by the way -- came to an end in pretty dramatic fashion yesterday, as the Blue Jays thundered to a 7-4 win powered by three home runs in the eighth, from Eric Thames, who fills me with hope, Jose Bautista, who fills me with pride, and Edwin Encarnacion, who fills me with stomach cramps but it's not his fault. Had Jo-Jo been able to keep it together for like a second longer, he totally would have picked up a win over Cliff Lee, which would probably have been the coolest thing ever, but nevertheless, a big day! And even bigger because it all came on Mr. Sub Sports Bag Day. 


Mr. Sub Sports Bag Day has been an annual occurrence for pretty much as long as anums have occurred. For those of you not familiar with this whole situation, Mr. Sub are the purveyors of seriously the worst possible sandwiches, and I am not being stuck up about that. I enjoy Subway. Quizno's can be good. But Mr. Sub can never, ever be good. In my experience, Mr. Sub is a dank pit of strangely wet meat, genuinely questionable vegetables, and injudiciously applied condiments. I hate it and it is awful. But their sports bags, given away at Blue Jays games annually, serve a pretty interesting social function in the city: if you see someone on the streetcar or wherever, and they're rocking a Mr. Sub Sports Bag of any vintage at all, it is like "woah ok we've got a 500 here," which is to say, a citizen of the 500-level upper deck seats. I'm not hating, because that's where I usually sat, too; but generally speaking the 500s are a place for oddballs, drifters, and broke fanatics. The term "500s" applied to people outside the context of the stadium itself is a useful classification for, say, the kind of not-entirely-together but certainly not-entirely-untogether kind of slightly odd person you not uncommonly encounter at the public library, say. You know what I mean? Anyway, these people, this broader meaning of "500s," very, very often are in possession of Mr. Sub Sports Bags when you see them doing their thing, and yesterday is the day all those people got new ones. Somewhere, I have like five.  


Then today things got pretty rad in Boston, too! Brandon Morrow was pretty OK for a bit; Jason Frasor wasn't, really; and "The Closer" Frank Francisco had me uttering foul oaths but ultimately struck out three in the ninth after allowing a leadoff single and a stolen base. Aaron Hill went three-for-five with a home run, and please please please let this be the start of a torrid second-half pace for Aaron Hill, because this has been brutal. Also, Travis Snider is back up, and he too went three-for-five with two doubles. Let this be real. OK?


KS

45-40

Where I spent the day instead of watching baseball, although there was this old dude who had it on the radio, but I was too busy doing beach things to really pay attention. Oh well.

Giants Take Pity, Lose to Tigers 6-3

what kind of high five is that? come on man

Amidst all the brouhaha of the All-Star selections today, the Giants jumped out to an early lead behind Ryan Vogelsong. Midway through the game, they noticed the Indians were about to lose to the Reds, so they flubbed a couple of plays, coughed up a few walks, hit into some lucky catches, and allowed the Tigers to close the gap in their playoff race. You know, because they've been so hospitable.

Anyway, lots more WASTED OPPORTUNITIES in this one, like stranding more leadoff doubles, not getting third outs on easy plays, etc etc.

Hard to feel bad about a 4-3 road trip, but let's see what the rest of the way to the All-Star break has in store.

Phillies 5, Blue Jays 3: This Was Pretty Awesome

Maybe the coolest thing to happen so far this year.

I do not have, nor do I know any Blue Jays fan who has, anything even remotely resembling mixed emotions about Roy Halladay. He was the best, and we loved him; he is still the best, and we wish him every success. He stayed a Blue Jay an awful, awful long time while J. P. Ricciardi -- who we also do not have mixed feelings about, as we simply do not care for that guy -- failed utterly to build a contender around the best pitcher in baseball, a sure-fire first-ballot Hall of Fame ace. When it finally got to the point where Halladay was not going to re-sign with the club, because he quite reasonably wanted a chance to pitch in the postseason before it was all said and done and time is an arrow, man, he handled the situation admirably, and gave everybody enough room to operate so that in the end Blue Jays were able to salvage something better than two compensatory draft picks (probably). We all loved Roy Halladay, and the way he left town was perfectly in keeping with the kind of quiet dignity yeah I said it quiet dignity with which he carried himself throughout his many years as the best reason to actually get on the streetcar and go down to the stadium. In summation, if you actively dislike Roy Halladay, you are probably a bad person.  


So it wasn't like booo this dude forsook us at all as Halladay returned to Toronto this weekend. This was not some A. J. Burnett nonsense, nor was it like when George Bell came back as a Cub at the '91 All-Star game, his hat as barely atop his head as ever, booed to within an inch of his life. This was totally different. When Halladay brought out the scorecard to the home plate umpire Friday night, he was greeted with a standing ovation. When he took the mound for the first time on Saturday afternoon, he was met with another. This is all right and just and good.


It was also all of those things when the crowd of 44,078 went completely bananas in the fourth when Jose Bautista ripped a home run off the windows in centre field. The best hitter in the game squared off against the  best pitcher, and while in a sense they're both totally our guys, the guy who is clearly a little more our guy right now got the best of it, and it felt good, man. It just felt good. And again, not in the way it feels good when somebody gets a hold of A. J. Burnett, not like that at all. A totally different thing.


Of course, Halladay went the distance, and was pretty awesome despite clearly not having his absolute best stuff. He still works as quickly as anybody, hits his spots like a machine, and man oh man do I wish he threw that changeup when he was a Blue Jay, but no, only in spring training. There was some kind of stat they gave on the radio yesterday about how Halladay has gone at least six innings in the most consecutive road starts since Walter Johnson or something? Of course he has. What can you say. Doc is the best, and may he have just enough success with the Phillies that he retire completely satisfied, but not so much success that he go into the Hall of Fame without a Blue Jays cap on. That's how I feel about Roy Halladay right now.


Also, Jon Rauch lost his mind and got ejected yesterday after getting squeezed pretty bad in an at bat against Ryan Howard. Dude is almost seven feet, and is apparently capable of much, much anger. Click here and you'll find it. Were I tiny and generally very good umpire Alfonso Marquez, I would have been shook.


KS

44-40

Just Another Typical 15-3 Giants Victory

A pretty swing for a pretty man.

Neil, I am truly sorry for the grotesqueries visited upon your team at their lovely stadium this evening. Your noble Tigers deserved better than this, and now the Giants have squandered their runs for July, and possibly August as well.

In any event, we get to play again tomorrow!

Phillies 7, Blue Jays 6: This Will Lack Structure

Compared to the rest of these bums J. P. Arencibia is a defensive stalwart

There are all kinds of ways for a team to be bad, and most of them are roughly equally frustrating, except for a staggering inability to catch and throw the ball, which is the most galling thing that can afflict a team that you, in your foolishness, have chosen to attend to. Yesterday it became too much to bear. Aaron Hill has completely lost it, and it's baffling. John McDonald, who only exists to put his glove on balls and then swiftly transfer that ball to his throwing hand and then deliver it to a base at which a force play is in effect -- literally that is the only reason he is there -- is having a terrible time doing that. Rajai Davis refuses to charge hard at anything, which removes the possibility of not just potential fly outs but also plays at bases on balls that drop. Oh, and balls are dropping: it's gotten to the point that Ashby and Howarth were speculating on the radio that maybe Corey Patteron's mild speaking voice is the reason there's so much confusion in the outfield on catchable balls dropping in between outfielders. And Juan Rivera, motherfucking Juan Rivera completely misplayed an entirely catchable, routine fly ball in the ninth inning yesterday, which is exactly the kind of thing that can't happen when Frank "The Closer" Francisco is out there walking the leadoff man in the ninth with a one-run lead. 

A disaster, yesterday, a disaster. Romero was good enough to win, had he any defense behind him, and even without it, he almost did: Jose Bautista launched a two-run shot to put the Blue Jays ahead in the seventh and that should totally have been enough to send 45,512 people home happy on Canada Day.

But no, that wasn't nearly enough, because nobody here can catch the damn ball. If my life wasn't perfect in literally every other respect I couldn't do this anymore. But it is, so I will. But I will register my displeasure on the internet.

KS

44-39

Giants Put on Torture Clinic, Win 4-3

Exactly.

Probably the most stressful game of the season. The Giants got runners to second base or beyond and stranded them in innings 1, 2, 4, 5, 6, and 8. This was "WASTED OPPORTUNITIES" writ large. To top it off, Javier Lopez gave up a fluke hit to a lefty for basically the third time this season, and Brian Wilson blew back-to-back saves for only the second time in his career, and the first time since 2008.

This was a pulses-pounding meltdown fest, and I can only imagine how Neil feels. I am certain he will make his baseball feelings known to all in short order. Mercy me, this was a...I don't even know what to call it. Giants get blown out tomorrow, make no mistake.

Neil, earlier I was feeling cocky after the Pablo Sandoval go-ahead double and was going to post this .gif, with the snakes being analogous to the Tigers. Since I believe I will not have another chance, here it is:

NEIL

On this day...we are enemies.

Pirates 6, Blue Jays 2: What Have We Become?

Booooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooo.

So for the first time since 2003, the Pittsburgh Pirates have won an Interleague series on the road. How about that. 


KS