The Blue Jays will take on the Kansas City Royals twice here on Saturday. Fourteen whole innings of baseball! Let’s do this!
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The Blue Jays are 6-7 on the year so far. That feels about right for a team continually taking two steps forward and two steps back here in this second year of pandemic baseball. Maybe even a bit generous. With George Springer still yet to debut, an 8,500-capacity ballpark to call home, and a rash of injuries that has dredged up all sorts of unexpected names from the bottom of the roster (Josh Palacios! Joel Payamps! Tommy Milone!), it feels like the Jays are stuck in a kind of perpetual spring training. And much like a Grapefruit League contest, a game like Thursday's could simultaneously be a disaster, somewhat uplifting, and kind of meaningless. The defence lets the pitchers down. We're forced to watch Tanner Roark. Cavan Biggio gets hurt. But Vladimir Guerrero Jr. continues his incredible star turn. Rowdy Tellez and Lourdes Gurriel Jr. finally manage to start getting some hits. The team fights back and puts itself in position to take the lead in the top of the ninth. Then an umpire's awful strike call changes everything. The Jays lose. But they didn't really deserve to win anyway, and it's terrible, but also sort of OK? The team and its fans will just keep muddling on in the belief that things will eventually get better. Opening Day will come.
It's sorta not unlike what's going here in the pandemic-stricken province of Ontario, where our ass-stupid failson of a Premier and the coterie of bootlickers, partisan hacks, and nepotism case dullards he surrounds himself with are turning us all into zombies because the measures we all recognized months ago would have helped curb the spread of the virus and maybe brought us to a point where things could slowly, safely be opening back up again are seemingly in conflict with what Wal-Mart, the construction industry, and whoever else donated to his foul campaign prefers. They are allowing things to get worse, to continue piling misery on workers and small business owners and the already marginalized communities that are hardest hit, by doing as little as possible not to prolong all this — again and again and again choosing "the economy" over public health and predictably getting the worst outcome for both — and, in fact, seem all too happy to keep us living in March 2020 forever because they're too chickenshit to make the hard choices needed to help this start getting better now (paid sick leave, real lockdowns, targeted vaccinations, accepting the help that's been offered by the federal government, and not shutting down playgrounds, outdoor activities that have been completely safe, or imposing martial law would be a good start).
Hey, I wonder if having to keep on living out the plot of Groundhog Day with no end in sight and my feelings about the Jays' season so far are at all connected???
I do know that I have a hell of a lot more faith in the Blue Jays leadership to get the team out of the muck than I do the clown at Queen's Park. But I digress!
For the Jays, the weird wheel-spinning quality of the season so far continues apace. Tanner Roark pitched Thursday, but after a rough start was actually OK. Cavan Biggio hasn’t been placed on the injured list, but Santiago Espinal is at third in the first game of today’s doubleheader. Jordan Romano’s injury isn’t as bad as “ulnar neuritis” made it sound, but Julian Merryweather may be out for a while. Dan Shulman is calling the games on this road trip, but his colour man is Pat Tabler. The list of injured players they have is staggering, but they’re hardly the only team in that position.
That last point may sound preposterous, but it’s true! The betting site Covers.com lists 11 Blue Jays who are injured or questionable for today's action (Biggio, Romano, Stripling, Merryweather, Hernández, Springer, Hatch, *deep breath*, Chatwood, Yates, Murphy, Pearson). The Rangers also have 11 players on their list. So do the Rays. So do the Padres. The Astros have 13. The Giants have eight. The Brewers have nine. A bunch of teams have seven.
Even other, less injured teams — the Yankees, to give but one delicious example — are a bit out of sorts at the moment as well.
So, I don’t know. Maybe Tommy Milone will be entirely fine when he takes the ball in game two of today’s twin bill. It would certainly fit right in with all that we’ve seen so far in this 2021 season. And Kauffman Stadium is about as ideal a place as you could come up with for a soft-tossing lefty to sneak in a good start.
Also, it’s, uh, not like he’s facing a Cy Young calibre opponent. That is, unless we’ve been transported back to 2008.
Yes, indeed, it’s Grapefruit League baseball, folks, where anything can happen and none of it matters (yet). So screw it, let’s get weird. Go Jays! Eat Arby’s!
Injury updates
Prior to the doubleheader here on Saturday, Jays manager Charlie Montoyo provided a few updates on some of his many ailing players.
• As mentioned above, Santiago Espinal will take over for Cavan Biggio at third base in the first game of the doubleheader. The only reason he is able to do so is because he’s been added to the roster as the Jays’ 27th man for today’s action. Whether he sticks around for longer than that will depend on Biggio’s health.
• Biggio, of course, took a ball off of his bare hand while fielding at third base in Thursday’s loss and had to be removed from the game. He was sent for x-rays, which came back negative. According to Montoyo, Biggio will test out his hand today and will be an option tomorrow if all goes well.
• Also an option at third, possibly even for game two here on Saturday: Vladimir Guerrero Jr. Hell yes, let’s really get weird!
• George Springer, who is working his way back from the quad issue he suffered when he had almost worked his way back from the oblique issue that has kept him out since mid-March, is now able to do some light running and hitting off of a tee. He’ll progress to live batting practice after the weekend. Ideally he'll be able to return at some point during the Jays' next "home" stand. And he'll definitely want to be back for their first road trip of May, which will see them go to Oakland, then his former home of Houston, before returning east for a visit to Atlanta.
• Teoscar Hernández seems to be making progress.
Links!
• Great stuff from Braydon Holmyard of the Toronto Star, who gives us an inside look at Vladimir Guerrero Jr.’s training regimen this past winter in the Dominican Republic. I, uh, think it’s safe to say that the work Vlad has been putting in has been paying off so far. A must-read.
• Elsewhere at the Star, Gregor Chisholm looks at the Jays’ recent injury woes, and how they’ve managed to somehow hold their own through it all.
• Lindsey Adler of the Athletic looks at last night’s Yankees-Rays game, in which a bunch of disgraceful Yankees fans started throwing baseballs onto the field. You both hate and love to see it. “It was a display of some baseball fans making an active choice to sever any future sentimentality toward a ball they could display on their office desk, because as the game played out, they didn’t want to remember the experience of watching the Yankees rack up three fielding errors, a total of three hits and allow seven walks to their most annoying division rival,” Adler writes. “They wanted their ire to be seen, and not just heard.”
• I’ll just put this here:
• I don’t know exactly what this one means, BUT WHO ARE WE TO ARGUE?
• Jokes: Blue Jays Twitter’s got ‘em:
• A headline at Jays Journal (where else?) says that Nate Pearson needs to be a reliever in 2021. The piece doesn’t exactly say that, but the content mill needs grist damn it!
• Speaking of Tommy Milone (weren’t we?), Shi Davidi of Sportsnet takes an in-depth look at today’s game two starter, whose repertoire — with its fastball that averages 84 mph — is a serious anachronism in the modern game, and how he tries to make it all work.
• Seriously, though, that call against Vlad in the ninth inning on Thursday was awful.
• Lastly, it’s hard not to love Josh Palacios, a native of Brooklyn who had a chance to play in the big leagues on Jackie Robinson Day this week.
Oof. Cmon Montoyo - stop making love to the corpse of whomever invented the bunt.
"Dan Shulman is calling the games on this road trip, but his colour man is Pat Tabler"
I love Dan, but even he can't salvage Pat. Just inanity after inanity.