The Blue Jays got screwed by an August losing sked; is anyone gonna talk about that?
The baseball season is a marathon, and not a sprint. The Toronto Blue Jays own their outcome, but they had a Heartbreak Hill courtesy of the MLB scheduler that seems to have been ignored. Why is that?
Let us play a game, since the Toronto Blue Jays do not have one ce soir.
As a preface, there is no wallowing or whining about how it played out for the Blue Jays, who have been my first and truest sporting love for 3½ decades. Close the tab if you think that is what this is about; I worked out all of those feelings before Game 162, knowing there was a chance the rug would be pulled and turn Sunday and Monday into a long, hard kick in the urethra.
If there is a reason for this space to exist, it is to get you, Fellow Athletic Supporter, to cease from wasting your energy on armchair managing and the couldawouldashoulda games. It seems better to examine how the cards were dealt, and how while there is likely no conspiracy, you should know how the screws are turned. Major League Baseball will always increase their edge in hope of getting the ‘right teams’ with biggest U.S. market capture and name recognition into the October playoffs. Ratings!
Major League Baseball is formatted into two conferences that are called the American League and National League due to nostalgia and institutional inertia. The AL and NL became conferences in the 1990s, when the league presidents’ offices were abolished. Remembering when AL and NL squads actually treated the all-star game like it was a point to prove league superiority is a signifier that you are an Old, like wearing pyjamas instead of sleeping naked.
The AL and NL’s geographical spread are overlaid, like the AFC and NFC in the National Football League. The other leagues have Eastern and Western conferences. As the climate catastrophe escalates, it will sink in that the AL/NL format will come to seem more indulgent and antiquated. There will be pressure to change from all angles. “Nice antitrust exemption you have there,” Speaker of the House Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez might say to the commissioner if MLB refuses to change because it doesn’t want to get ‘political’ about climate. “Shame if anything happened to it.” The players’ association rank-and-file will contain more and more players who have seen the effects of the climate catastrophe. And they will always advocate for more manageable travel, or always should. That is a post for another day.
For now, here is the game. The wild cards race came down to three teams in one division and the Seattle Mariners, who are both the northernmost and westernmost team in the sport. Match the Seattle trip to the Blue Jays, the Boston Red Sox and New York Yankees.
Team A: Had a Seattle-Houston swing just before the mid-July all-star break. They took 2-of-3 in each city. Then they had a four-day respite to re-adjust to the Eastern Time Zone, which is three hours ahead of the West Coast, before playing again.
Team B: Seattle was the second leg of their last out-of-time-zone trip in September. That trip began with a series against Chicago, which splits up the travel time reasonably well.
Team C: Their @ Seattle series was the middle leg of an August trip that took them to three different coastal cities. Anaheim, for four-in-three set due to a makeup game; three in Seattle; and an off-day before two games on the east coast at Washington.
Did that telegraph it enough? Team C, of course, is the Blue Jays. Again, before the knees start jerking, the run of 162 games is a grind for every MLB player and their team. Billion-dollar sports companies and their public-facing performers, the players, invest millions in to trying to improve their rest, their sleep and their recovery. That trip, though, stands as a tipping point that was too big of an ask. It was a Heartbreak Hill that the two old-guard teams did not encounter.
As a fan, that is where you should direct your ire. Poor scheduling drags down players’ ability to perform, and that spills into affecting the integrity of the competition.
Toronto to Anaheim is about a five-hour direct flight. The Toronto pitching staff then had to cover 30 innings over three days in a city that was having daytime temperatures in the 32 to 35 C range. They would have had a nearly three-hour flight for the Mariners series, three games there, and a five-hour cross-continent flight to face Washington.
You know the rest of the story. That was the trip there the Blue Jays won only three out of nine games, including two defeats against the Washington Nationals, who finished with a 65-97 record. The unravelling in the last game came from a bullpen meltdown by Brad Hand, against his former team.
No one really believes people are going to stop criticizing players, or stop second-guessing managers. But what they do is the obvious, surface-level stuff. There is a big picture where being a better fan, and being calmer fan, means looking for the underlying reasons for why it is tougher for some teams than others.
Besides, baseball really is a series of individual performances by artists. The winning-is-everything culture and the media’s desire for perpetual audience engagement (speaking of too much to ask!) will mean it’s always framed as being all about winning. But it is not, never has been, and there was some frickin’ art on this season.
Three-quarters of the infield set a club record for best Wins Above Replacement at their position.
Being gainfully employed means I have not had time to pore over any of the 1,000 analyses for how the Blue Jays fell short of the playoffs by one game for the first time in their 45-season history. This is a pandemic sports (and other stuff) diary that is meant to help with mental health. Putting the latter first also means having a strict sports diet: games and podcasts only, and none of the white noise of sports talk radio or the Bell / Rogers duopoly in your corded world.
I’m over it. Game 162 in 1987 remains the deep burn for Blue Jays fans..
Additional time added…
There should be more outrage that Ontario’s Government For The Property Developers has effectively surrendered to COVID-19. They have never been willing to seal up the cracks and crevices that would do more to keep the virus from getting into every sector of society, causing people to get sick and die. There is just a numbness toward it after nearly 19 months. Colin D'Mello CTVNews on Twitter: "Minister Lecce indicates the province will side with the CMOH and not make vaccines mandatory for Ontario students. “The government has been very clear, we’re going to continue to promote on a voluntary basis the vaccine for young people.” #onpoli" / Twitter
There is one underrated part of the “Joe Carter auctions off Derek Bell’s Jeep” clip that always circulates on the interwebs. At 17 seconds, you see Pat Tabler duck out of camera range. It’s like he' was saying he had nothing to add there. Just like in his broadcasting career… I didn’t say that.
This Day In Sports Clips on Twitter: "October 4, 1992: On last day of regular season, Blue Jays’ Joe Carter pranks rookie Derek Bell by driving Bell’s car onto the field as part of a mock “raffle” to give it away to a fan.Lastly, it is nice to see that Toronto FC is high profile enough in Canada that four of its players appear in a national ad for Ryobi Tools. But who feels comfortable buying power tools endorsed by guys who play a sport where you do not need your hands.
That is more than enough for today. Please stay safe, and be kind.