Steven Matz is worthy of Jimmy Key's digies, but before one gets into that . . .
Since this is a sports newsletter that is also the diary of living through pandemic, one must lead with sadness and guilt over living in a province where a 13-year-old child can die of COVID19.
It is hard to speak of sports when those we trust to lead us treat issues of life and death as a game …
Over the weekend
A child’s death, and on to the next Big Lie
A 13-year-old child, Emily Victoria Viegas, died of COVID-19 last week in Brampton, Ont., one of the hotspots within Ontario’s third wave of the pandemic. She was killed by pandemic politics, there, I said it.
The second-saddest aspect of a 13-year-old dying is that it might be “beneath her memory” to even ask the Adults In The Room if they have thought about her, or wondered about their own children. That is not emotion talking; it is just an observation gleaned from seeing how they are already on to the next round of blamestorming.
This new big Big Lie involves provincial politicians pointing fingers at their federal counterparts in order to start a game of Vice-Versa in the media that pushes everyone to choose sides, when there should be no side when children are dying preventable deaths. (So much for what one is taught as a child: control what you can control, and when you point a finger, remember that three will point back at you.) And how much guilt falls on us for being too cheap, too self-focused, to vote for representatives who actually think society should pull out more steps to prevent a 13-year-old from dying due to a virus whose death rate is much higher in older adults?
Emily’s brother, per the Globe & Mail, found her unresponsive in their shared bedroom on 22 April 2021. That would have been the same morning that Ontario Premier Doug Ford was preparing to hold a press conference where cried crocodile tears, likely more in response to his plummeting polls than his government for the property developers being caught out utterly “fail(ing) to support evidence-based science, paid sick days and access to vaccines in hotspots.”
Emily’s father had tested positive but was apparently asymptomatic. In terms of the timeline, her mother took ill on April 14, five days before Peel Region’s chief medical officer countermanded the province and “order(ed) all businesses with five or more COVID cases in the last two weeks to close for 10 days.”
Emily Victoria Viegas would surely be alive if the science had been followed by the province much, much earlier.
Minimizing that as second-guessing is not only ghoulish but also elides every informed opinion we have heard over the last six to eight months that we should, pretty-please-with-sugar-on-top, put public health ahead of the precious economy and also put a pin in the destablize-’n’-privatize agenda during this (hopefully) once-a-century global pandemic.
Fact: Most of Ontario’s COVID19 cases come from “workplace and education, not travel and recreation.” And Peel is ground zero.
From Fatima Syed, in an article published the day that Emily died.
The region is a complex cacophony of communities that has not been adequately assisted by the province’s one-size-fits-all pandemic response. Peel has been the fastest growing region in Ontario for decades, with the most underfunded health care system in the province: there is only one hospital in Brampton to serve over 600,000 people. It’s home to the province’s largest number of international students, new immigrants, and workers in distribution centres. Many of these people live in multigenerational homes, not just because it’s a feature of their culture, but because of their inability to afford housing and child care while working paycheque to paycheque.
The region houses some 80 percent of all companies in the Greater Toronto Area. Around 40 percent of all Amazon packages to Canada are processed here. Some 60 percent of trucking services begin here. Peel is the largest producer of everything from chicken and peanut butter to ventilators. It’s the logistics capital of Canada—a community of workers who have put themselves at risk so the rest of the country can comfortably stay at home.
All of this has set the region up for what one health care worker called “the perfect pandemic storm.” To the frustration of its residents, its mayors, and its workforce, that hasn’t been acknowledged at any point during this pandemic. (The Local, 22 April)
A brief note about Brampton having that one notoriously overcrowded hospital to serve 603,000 people. Similarly-sized Hamilton, where I reside, has six hospitals. That neglect and underservice is a long-running problem that covers both Liberal and Progressive Conservative provincial governments.
Young Emily not only resided in the hotspot in Peel, but also lived in an apartment. Her father is a warehouse worker who presumably did not get paid sick days, and he brought COVID19 home. Emily and many children like her also attended one of the schools that was likely affected by Ontario education minister Stephen Lecce deciding not to reduce class sizes or receive additional funding “to enable more safety measures be put in place” when in-person learning re-opened in mid-February.
The Ontario government wants to people to be mad about federally mandated travel restrictions instead of its murderous incompetence. On Sunday, six government-side MPPs wrote a grandstanding letter about that to their federal Liberal counterparts. So much for controlling what you can control, eh?
And so much for knowing we can focus on more than one thing. The hard facts are that it’s the government-side MPPs who have voted against restoring paid sick days over 20 times, voted against smaller class sizes, and have focused more on how many people are vaccinated than who is getting vaccinated and where.
Initially, my anger after learning of Emily’s death was directed at anti-lockdown conspiracy theorists, whose fear-based decision making leads them to make false prophets out of dirtbag opportunists such as Randy Hillier and Derek Sloan. But to quote Luke 23:24, “forgive them, for they do not know what they are doing.” But there is not necessarily a connection between the tinfoil hatters and Emily Victoria Viegas.
Rather, the dots go directly to the people in power who, quoting Bruce Arthur, “refused to protect the working class, has let Peel and the most vulnerable burn, and are wholly responsible for this wave.”
Leaders are supposed to know what they are doing, or who to engage That is not happening in Ontario. Emily’s death was preventable, but such an outcome also seems inevitable.
What else? How about those Padres, but mostly, how about Steven Matz?
The most enjoyable big shiny things in baseball, to me at least, is the San Diego-Los Angeles rivalry, and Toronto Blue Jays lefthander Steven Matz’s early returns.
The Padres had 0.07 per cent chance of winning before scoring seven unanswered runs in an extra-innings victory against the Death Star Dodgers on Sunday. What might escape notice is that the rally portion of the game did not involve hitting a single home run, just stringing together hits and pulling off a double steal to set up the go-ahead sacrifice fly. Any time a team wins getting away from the Three True Outcomes should be welcomed.
A Blue Jays follower of a certain age will always associate No. 22 with Jimmy Key, that classic crafty lefthander from the 1980s and early ’90s. It looks wrong on a righty or position player. Matz wears the double-twos, and so far he’s lived up to it with a 2.31 earned-run average with a low-3s FIP and 0.943 WHIP across his first four starts, all Toronto victories.
I was optimistic when the Blue Jays added Matz in January. He was always a year away from being a year away over his five full seasons with the New York Mets, so maybe 2021 would finally be his year. In 2020, he got jocked on the regular, allowing the second-most home runs in the National League even though he pitched only 31 innings over the 60-game season. It seems like that convinced Matz to commit to a change, and as the Jolly Olive pointed out he is worrying less about first-pitch fastballs for strikes and more about upsetting hitters’ timing. That helps explain why he is allowing home runs at the lowest rate since his rookie season in 2016, although, again, it has only been four starts.
Every old-school pitching coach falls asleep murmuring, get ahead of the hitter. But it seems interesting Matz is succeeding by not sweating whether the count starts 1-and-0 or 0-and-1. Another crafty lefty of yore, Tommy John, once said he used to subtract one ball from the count in his head, even if he had three balls on the batter and the bases were loaded. Even if John walked him, it still meant allowing only one run instead of four on a grand slam home run.
That is more than enough for today. Please subscribe (it is free), and thank you for allowing these words on to your screen.