Rain Threat: Livin’ On The Edge, Blue Jays (87-72) @ Red Sox (92-67)

7 years ago

There’s something wrong with the world today. The Jays still fighting to seal up a spot in the damn Wild Card play-in game? Rain playing havoc with first pitch times up and down the eastern seaboard? The stupid Red Sox not giving their best players a rest?

Fuck all that!

HOWEVER. As I noted in the Daily Duce post earlier, just one friggin’ Jays win in this series makes the task ahead of the Mariners and Tigers so much harder. Time is running out for those clubs, and Jose Bautista is not wrong that, of the teams remaining, the Jays are probably the team under the least amount of pressure. It’s just… do those other teams feel like they’ve kinda been playing like absolute dogshit for more than a month?

But here’s the thing that I was basically saying on today’s Birds All Day podcast: it’s easy to look at the offensive sputtering of the last couple nights against Baltimore as being of a piece with the trouble the had scoring runs earlier in the month. And maybe it is! But I really do think that much of what went awry in early September was rooted in the injuries to Josh Donaldson’s hip and Jose Bautista’s knee. With those guys looking more like themselves — though Donaldson looked like his hip was still barking, or had maybe been re-aggravated a little, this week — I am at least a little receptive to the notion that these were a couple of “those games” and not so much glaring symptoms of a much deeper, long-running, obvious problem.

Wishful thinking? Maybe. But they’re 6-4 in their last 10, if you want to play that kind of arbitrary endpoints game. And shit, if not for a couple of late-inning gut-punches on Wednesday they’d be 7-3. As bad as it may feel right now, they’re not at the “automatic loss” stage by any stretch. Not even against Boston — against whom they are 8-8 this season.

Two wins, or at least just one win, is hardly too much to ask.

Apparently so too is decent weather, because we’re now being told that the game won’t be getting underway until 7:35 PM ET.

Is it also wishful thinking that this game might not turn into a seven-hour 20-pitcher twice-interrupted-by-rain slog that’s just finishing up sometimes around when Swansea and Liverpool are getting set to kick off tomorrow morning? Perhaps… perhaps. But that doesn’t mean we’re not going to be hard wired into every damn minute here. So let’s fucking get it on.

Just one win! And then three more tomorrow, Sunday, and Tuesday!

Scuttlebutt

TV: Sportsnet
Next Game(s): Saturday @ Red Sox, 7:10 PM ET; Sunday @ Red Sox, 3:05 PM ET
AL Wild Card Standings: BAL (-), TOR (-), DET (1.5), SEA (2)
And now, the lineups…