Blue Jays do their part, don’t get any help from Yankees or Red Sox

Article content material

The largest drawback for the Toronto Blue Jays in Recreation 162 of their season was unlikely to be the workforce that took the sector on the Rogers Centre to face them.

Article content material

The Baltimore Orioles are technically a major-league workforce, however in sensible phrases they’re one thing a lot lower than that. That they had misplaced 109 video games earlier than Sunday, and of their final 5 conferences in opposition to the Blue Jays, all losses, they’d scored 24 runs and given up 60.

And so, the 12-4 blowout that adopted was not a shock. George Springer led off the sport with a house run for Toronto, added a grand slam a few innings later, and the sport was primarily completed aside from the ultimate accounting. When the Orioles weren’t surrendering no-doubt bombs, they had been making a mockery of outfield defence. Tyler Nevin sailed a routine throw over the pinnacle of catcher Pedro Severino within the third inning, and Austin Hays stumbled cartoonishly whereas chasing a Bo Bichette liner within the fourth. Hays hit the dust and bounced off the suitable area fence, and it was a superb encapsulation of the Baltimore season.

Article content material

By the point Hyun-Jin Ryu had acquired out of the fifth inning with a nine-run lead, it was onerous to know how the Boston Purple Sox had one way or the other simply dropped two video games to the Orioles. Did somebody grease their bats? Did they let the clubhouse workers take a couple of hacks? Absolutely Boston couldn’t have misplaced these video games had they really been attempting.

Because it occurred, whereas the Jays had been figuratively sitting on the Orioles’ chest and making them punch themselves with their very own fists on Sunday, Boston was giving one other flagrant show of baseball weirdness. The Sox, tied with the New York Yankees coming into Recreation 162 for the 2 American League wild-card playoff spots, had been closing out their collection in Washington in opposition to the woeful Nationals behind ace starter Chris Sale. The Nats countered with Joan Adon, a 23-year-old who was making his MLB debut. Adon was not precisely a scorching prospect: He spent a lot of the season in single-A, and had a 6.43 ERA in 14 innings of AA ball in 2021. A energetic dialogue within the Toronto press field pre-game had centred on whether or not the Nationals would get in bother from MLB officers for trotting out an untested child to pitch a recreation with such necessary playoff implications.

Article content material

After which in fact he went out and shut down the Purple Sox. The Nationals chased Sale early and Adon gave up simply two runs by way of five-plus innings. By the point the Jays had been two hours into their drubbing of the Orioles, Washington was up 5-1 on the Sox. The situation that the Jays wanted coming into Sunday to make it to a Recreation 163 — win their recreation, and have one in all Boston or New York lose theirs — was very a lot in play.

All of which led to an uncommon scene on the Rogers Centre. The Jays had been strolling by way of an off-the-cuff romp, belting homers and giving a crowd of slightly below 30,000 every kind of causes to take pleasure in themselves on the ballpark, however in the meantime the necessary stuff was occurring many 1000’s of kilometres away. The stadium operations crew actually should have put Sox-Nats on the scoreboard in centre-field, since what was happening there was the factor that will decide whether or not the Jays had a recreation to play on Monday. (They may even have split-screened the Yankees-Rays recreation in New York, since a loss for the house workforce there would additionally prolong the Jays’ season.) As an alternative, the Jays went by way of the late-inning motions of a simple win, and people who understood that they nonetheless wanted assist saved their eyes on their telephones, and close by tv displays, to see what was occurring out of city. In the course of the seventh-inning stretch in Toronto, as the group was fortunately doing the “OK, Blue Jays” factor, Boston’s Alex Verdugo was ripping a double to right-centre, scoring two runs in Washington to tie that recreation at 5-5. All of a sudden, for all the great work the Jays had accomplished on the afternoon, they had been gazing video games knotted in Washington and New York, one in all which they wanted to interrupt their means.

Article content material

It was one of many strangest days in Toronto baseball historical past. The massive-money pitcher did what you’d count on a big-money pitcher to do. The massive-money outfielder did the identical, after which some. Vlad Guerrero, Jr., blasted an opposite-field house run, as a result of that’s what he’s been doing all yr. And with all that happening, the Jays’ destiny was left to Washington and Tampa. Not perfect.

With the Jays about to bat within the backside of the eighth, Aaron Choose plated a run within the backside of the ninth at Yankee Stadium with an infield single. The 1-0 win over Tampa gave the Yankees one of many AL wild-card spots and closed one of many two doorways that was open to the Jays. The Rogers Centre appeared largely unaware of this improvement.

Article content material

After the ultimate out in Toronto, the group gave the house aspect a standing ovation. It’s unclear what number of in attendance knew that the workforce’s destiny was being determined over in Washington, the place the sport was nonetheless tied within the ninth. Moments later, the Sox-Nats recreation was put up on the scoreboard, and moments after that — truthfully, on perhaps the second or third pitch that was proven to the emptying stadium — Boston’s Rafael Devers crushed a ball over the centre-field fence to provide the Purple Sox a 7-5 lead.

The Jays did what they needed to do, however the two groups they wanted to bail them out as an alternative gave up game-winning runs within the ninth.

Playoff baseball might be heartbreaking, even when your workforce isn’t enjoying.