They Live
7 years ago
Watch a Jays game at the bar with the right sunglasses on and this is what it looks like.
Quiet. What’s that sound??? Do you hear it? The soft alternations between hiss and soppy vacuum? The wheeze-whine slowly flapping in the larynx as it opens into a gargling moron-bray? Ahhh, yes. It’s those sounds so distinct to the mouth-breathing turds who are slowly crawling out of the woodwork, growing in confidence as they feel 2015 move farther into the rearview, ready to stake a claim to their rightful place as the preening doofuses hilariously asking us to believe they knew better than everyone all along, ready at any moment to go scuttling for the cover in case the Blue Jays’ performance starts to uptick.
Summer has arrived early! The garbage clowns are here!
The Boston Red Sox are playing very well, and the Toronto Blue Jays — who again looked listless in a series-opening loss to the New York Yankees last night — are not. And so posturing Twitter-egg fucknuts are here to tell you that they saw this coming all along, and that you’re a shill and a dupe if you didn’t — especially if you still don’t see it their way: that everything is fucked, that Rogers and Mark Shapiro are out to get you, and that their feckless media surrogates only exist to reinforce you and your fellow fan’s love of mediocrity.
These people are, of course, terrible morons. Not just ordinary dimwits, but destructive ass-clowns who’d love nothing better than to have a few more people who won’t quietly excuse themselves from the table when they get thigh deep into a really good Blue Jays pisstake. People who want to drag you down to live in a world as sick and negative as the one that’s in their heads and their hearts.
But here’s the thing about our current infestation of dip-shittery: they’ve got nothing.
That’s not to say that the Blue Jays haven’t been wholly disappointing so far — because, hoo boy, they have — but it’s how they’ve disappointed that insulates them from so much of the playbook of criticisms this type of trashbag “fan” likes to hurl.
By now you likely have heard that the 2016 Jays have yet to win a game in which their opponents have scored four runs or more. They are 0-21 in such contests, which represent 45% of the games in which they’ve played.
In 2015 such games accounted for 56% of the Jays’ contests. They allowed their opponent to score four runs or more 97 times over 172 games (including the playoffs). They won 35 of those — or 36% of them.
If the 2016 Jays had been winning at the same clip in those games, seven of their losses become wins. Their 22-25 record becomes 29-18 and they’re sitting a half game ahead of the Red Sox right now.
That’s some fairly dirty math right there, but it underlines what we all — even the disingenuous lemon-sucking pissbabies — already know: the Jays have been disappointing precisely because the one part of the team that nobody in their right mind would have even thought about changing has continually misfired.
They simply are not scoring enough runs.
Oh, I’m sure you can go through the game log and find a whole bunch of games that the bullpen, usually while working with virtually zero margin for error, has pissed away. And I’m certainly not going to argue that the bullpen hasn’t been a mess so far. But the Jays are 11th in the American League at 3.96 runs per game right now. Last season they led the majors at 5.45 per, with the second place Yankees being way back at 4.69.
Again, I’m not saying the bullpen hasn’t been painful to watch most of the time, but give them an extra run-and-a-half to work with every single game and the narrative that places the blame for the season’s woes on the relief corps — and the front office’s “lack of spending” to address it (though, of course, they added a bunch of salary there in Storen, Chavez, Floyd, and a $1.3M raise for Brett Cecil, so it’s a problematic argument regardless) — changes considerably.
Shit, give them another half a run and things look quite a bit better, I think.
The places where the common shitweasel would like — or rather, need — to convince you the Toronto Blue Jays have gone so badly wrong, then, simply don’t hit on the problem.
Is cheapjack Rogers subsidizing a bad hockey deal with money that should have been spent to better the Blue Jays? Well… probably. But where was that money going to be spent? Certainly not on offence, because other than two of the club’s true bright spots so far — Michael Saunders in left field and Justin Smoak at first base — who were you going to replace?
Is John Gibbons the problem? Or Brook Jacoby? Are they not handing out enough atta boys? Did their skin suddenly stop producing the enzyme that, when emitted in a big league dugout, creates the kind of magical spirit-presence that makes the people around them good at hitting baseballs?
Do we just blame the bullpen anyway because we’re lazy and need to pretend something foul has crawled up inside us or else we can’t enjoy the game of baseball — which, I guess, can’t be fun without racing to the incoherent bottom at the first sign of anything resembling trouble?
I sure as hell hope not.
I mean, I can’t stress enough that the bullpen has obviously not been good, and the team does still need to find some better answers back there, but the far bigger problem this team has is completely incompatible with the kind of harried mouth-pissing about what’s to blame, where it all went wrong, and who didn’t see it coming, that might be in order if the bullpen really was the culprit here. The bigger problem is that the offence everybody expected to be World Class has yet to be World Class.
And though the solution won’t be satisfying — especially to those who dumbly feel the season caving in on them already and think the only way out is to either start pointing fingers or posturing like they’re truth-seers whose puerile negativity passing as wit isn’t laughable — it is at least a fairly simple one: wait for the hitters to start hitting.
The scary truth, of course, is that it might not actually happen — or might not happen in time to keep the club from falling too far behind the division leaders to mount a serious challenge four months from now.
The even scarier truth is, we really don’t have any other choice.
So just get a little zen about it, eh assholes? It shouldn’t be that difficult, even. Just look at the lineup. There is truly no reason to believe it could be this bad for this much longer. And when it comes back again — assuming it does — have yourself a laugh as you listen for the muffled sounds of ragged claws racing back out under the rocks, stuffing themselves back into their Jays paraphernalia like all this never happened.
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