Good News: Francisco Liriano has been cleared to fly back to Toronto with the Blue Jays (also Boston lost)

Photo Credit: Kevin Jairaj-USA TODAY Sports

Is it a bit grotesque of me to tack on a bunch of cheering for the tough spot the Boston Red Sox find themselves in after going down 0-2 to Cleveland in the other ALDS to what is ostensibly a post about Francisco Liriano’s health following a scary incident on the field this afternoon in Texas?

Probably! But all I can tell you about the Liriano stuff is what you already see in the headline, and which a whole bunch of reporters tweeted after (presumably) being fed an official announcement from the club. And that announcement is that Francisco Liriano has been cleared to leave the Dallas hospital he was brought to for tests after being hit in the back of the head/neck by a 102 mph line drive off the bat of Carlos Gomez, and can fly back to Toronto with his teammates.

Awesome!

Less awesome is the news on Devon Travis, who Ben Nicholson-Smith writes about at Sportsnet. In it we learn that the second baseman, who is currently day-to-day, received a cortisone shot (or at least I assume that’s what they mean by “a shot”), but his injured knee didn’t respond to it. “I don’t know what’s going on,” Travis said, “I just know that it hurts.”

Right now Ryan Goins isn’t on the Jays’ playoff roster, meaning that they’re a little thin in the middle infield — depth that almost looked like it was going to have to be tested after Darwin Barney took a pitch to the ribs on Friday. Thing is: by MLB postseason roster rules, if the Jays were to bring on Goins as an injury replacement for Travis, Devon would be ineligible for the remainder of the Texas series and the ALCS, should the Jays make it that far.

But again, enough about with this bummer shit! And… oh yeah, the fucking Red Sox got the shit kicked out of them in Cleveland! And while the Clevelands are certainly a formidable foe, this is great news because they are way preferable to Boston as a potential opponent for the Jays in the ALCS, I think.

Cleveland beat the Jays in the season series between the two teams this year by four wins to three, but one of those wins was the 19-inning Canada Day marathon that the Jays, by all rights, should have won several times. Another is the bizarre loss suffered on a Tyler Naquin “inside the park home run” after Michael Saunders failed to make a ninth-inning catch in right field and Melvin Upton both failed to back him up and then fell before he could get a good throw in. And another came on a two-run Jose Ramirez home run in the bottom of the eighth off Brett Cecil.

Full marks for Cleveland for getting the results, but the Jays could have very, very easily have been 5-2 or even 6-1 against them this year. Not that such things matter, I’m just sayin’.

But why am I even talking about Cleveland, because oh man, BOSTON? While it’s too soon to gloat about anything just yet, their season going out with a whimper sure would be sweet. Even if it means our old friend, the wonderful David Price, has to endure more shit about his supposed inability to win in the playoffs (which… after another disaster today, may be moving away from the realm of “supposed”).

A lot of people liked that tweet! A lot of people, though — way too many people, in fact — took the opportunity to sneer back about how the Jays “didn’t make an offer” to Price. What a frustratingly enduring pile of horseshit!

Oh, I don’t doubt that the Jays “didn’t make an offer,” but this pernicious little fucking line relies on the fact people don’t actually have any concept of how these negotiations work. And it does so for no other reason but to make the Blue Jays look bad and feed the all-consuming hatred that so many fans felt for Mark Shapiro and Ross Atkins and Rogers in the early days of the club’s new regime.

Fuck this line, frankly. And while I don’t want to sound like I’m shitting too much on people who were genuinely confused by it — because that’s precisely what it was designed to do — it’s just… do you believe that the way negotiations work is that Shapiro and a few cronies get into a room with Price and his agent and they slide numbers back and forth across the table? It only takes a second of thought to get out of this trap, y’know? There are different levels of talks that take place. We hear about them all the time during hot stove season. Teams and players feel out the market, and do a whole lot of work informally. And if a team like the Blue Jays understands that the highest they’ll be willing to offer doesn’t rise to the level of what other teams have already offered, or what Price and his agent deem to be the most minimally serious, what the fuck is the point of making an offer? Hey guys, I know this is insulting and we’ve completely wasted our time, but if we don’t at least “make you an offer” there are a whole lot of shitheels ready to try to make that an issue with people who evidently don’t have the slightest clue how this works. 

Update because for some reason I’m still thinking about this: I’ve realized that a simpler way to approach this, rather than haranguing people (fun as that may be), it to simply ask, “OK, so they didn’t make an offer. What does that mean? Does that mean they didn’t know what it took to sign him? That they didn’t bother finding out what the market would be and turned directly to J.A. Happ instead? Does it mean they didn’t even care or think to try?” 

If you want to be mad at the Blue Jays over David Price, be mad that they weren’t willing to pay what Boston did. Because every other “offer” is completely irrelevant. And if you think, Well golly gee, I wouldn’t have paid as much as the Red Sox did, but they should have at least made an offer! — and especially if you’re still doing it now — give your head a shake!

Which is, of course, to say… 2-0! Boston losing! Liriano OK! WHOOOOOOOOOOOO!!!!