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A rainy Labour Day here, unusually well-suited to settling in on the couch with green tea and fifty-pack of Timbits (there's no point getting ten, and if you're in for twenty, you might as well just go all the way, is how we approach this) while the Blue Jays took to Yankee Stadium in what looked to be maybe the sunniest day ever. We admired the polarized enormity of the sunglass-styles favoured by the young men these days nearly, though not quite, as much as we admired the deft command and, like, pitch-mix foolery of Hyun-Jin Ryu, as he worked six shutout innings of three-hit, no-walk, six-K baseball to further cement his position as my favourite Blue Jay to watch pitch ever (rest easy Roy Halladay, though, for real). Ryu left after only eighty pitches, and said later that he did so because his arm, though not at all "hurt," was getting a little tight from all the sliders he was throwing. "Sliders?" you might well ask. "From Hyun-Jin Ryu?" you might query further. Yes, it turns out, sliders: he thought he would try some because they are so cool when Robbie Ray throws them, and I am not making that up even a little bit. Richards, Mayza, and Cimber combined to allow just two baserunners between them in relief, and man, if the bullpen can keep it even moderately together -- and they have been doing even better than that of late! -- to the point where they even-almost-nearly keep pace with a starting rotation that has turned out to be one of the best the Blue Jays have ever had (they are pretty much top-five in team history right now; there was even A Graphic to show how), then we could really, really have something coming down the stretch. As to Blue Jays home runs, there was a nice little mix of them, actually: we had Semien and Vladdy going back to back in the first (hey that's forty for Vladdy), Téo's twenty-fifth to lead off the ninth, and then Marcus Semien's grand slam later that same inning to give him thirty-seven, and a bunch of those have been lately. Yankee Stadium, though lovely, really is something of a joke in its dimensions, and these home runs were true Yankee Stadium homers, sort of these silly little *boop* home runs. But yesterday I was all for them.
After the game, I put on the radio call of a wild one in Tampa, a game the Rays broadcast team described thus: "As regular-season games go, this is excruciating." The Rays held on, which is to say the Red Sox did not, which is to say that my efforts to avoid excessive scoreboard watching have already fallen somewhat but flat, but which is also (and crucially) to say that the Blue Jays are now the first team out of the second wild card spot (Seattle lost too!), three games behind Boston, three-and-a-half behind New York. Five-straight wins is the most in the American League right now! Here we come! Except this is Gerrit Cole's night to pitch in New York, so maybe not tonight. But after that, though, who could doubt it.
KS
