Sooner or Later....




It's amazing how a little winning streak just smooths over frustrations. A 1-0 score late in the game and Jose Bautista misplays a ball in the outfield, letting three Rangers score. 

"I think I just attacked the ball a little too hard and the outfield grass is cut kind of funky here," Bautista said. "You get a lot of ground balls that snake around. We noticed that in BP the first day. I feel like my mindset was right and everything I was doing. I knew who was running at second, I knew they were going to stop him, but I was too aggressive attacking the ball. I came in with sort of an angle and I had to get around the ball, and by the time I got to it, the ball snaked on me a little bit."

It was ugly but Bautista seemed to take it in stride.


I remember reading once that Bautista eats sugary cereal with milk as comfort food.

It was ugly, but the Jays still ended up going 6-2 on the roadtrip.

Edwin Encarnacion extended his hit streak to 22 games, which has to be the quietest hit streak. It really says something about the general excitement surrounding the Blue Jays that Encarnacion's streak, the longest since Scott Rolen's 25 game streak in 2009. Encarnacion's comments on the streak were about as low key as the attention.

"I'm just looking for my pitch, try to be aggressive in the strike zone, looking for my pitch," Encarnacion said in reference to the streak. "It has been great, the way I have been seeing the ball the last couple of weeks."

The Jays really handled the Rangers the way they handled the Angels. Josh Donaldson busting it up the line in the first game, which made Adrien Beltre rush his throw, is one of my favourite plays of the year. Players are expected, of course, to do that all the time. But Josh Donaldson is hungry for winning. They are all hungry for it. 

The team. The fans. The city. Hungry.

Baseball is like having your soul crushed slowly by a steamroller made of platinum and diamonds. (The sunshine and the smell of fresh-cut grass are nice, too.)

Michael Baumman wrote something for Grantland about the success of the current version of the Blue Jays and what it means to fans of the team. He writes a few things that ring true for me and something that made me pause. 

The Blue Jays haven’t made the playoffs in 22 years, the longest drought in North American professional sports, and in the intervening years they haven’t even been conspicuously interesting.
 How have I managed to write countless things about this "uninteresting" team? Various players, events, GMs and managers.There is a whole lot of us who have managed to write and talk about countless things involving a team that isn't "conspicuously interesting".  Thousands of words. For many seasons.

So I guess they were pretty damn interesting.

Stacey May Fowles wrote a rather clever article about how it's ok for "serious" female fans to have the hots for baseball players. 



Quite frankly, I've grown real tired of pretending that Bryce Harper isn't a scorchingly beautiful specimen of masculinity. I've become exhausted denying that Buster Posey has the most adorable, angelic boy-band face I've seen since perusing Tiger Beat as a teenage girl. I'm weary from saying that Justin Verlander's pants look "uncomfortable," or that Matt Kemp looks "like an athlete." I've actually come to think that every time I deny my inevitable attraction to players—I'm only human, and you know what Matt Kemp looks like—I'm supporting that terrible notion that real fans don't have crushes, or that crushes hysterically cancel out all other considerations, and finally that women should simply shut up about how they feel if they want to watch a game with everyone else.

I'll just come out and say it. I don't use this space to write about who I find attractive, mostly because I think it'd be a boring read but also because I wanted to be seen as a serious fan.

But I certainly have the impulses. Which begin with Jose Bautista's quad muscles in his ESPN Body Issue picture (and his general confidence and intelligence), continue through Josh Donaldson's devilish grin/ ass combination and my desire to speak French with Russell Martin.

Throughout the league, let's just say Kevin Kiermaier is the most beautiful man, Matt Kemp is schorchingly hot, so is Trevor Plouffe. I completely get why Justin Verlander landed a super model and Robinson Cano can get it.

All the Jays' homers have been set to Johnny Cash's God's Gonna Cut You Down. 





It's glorious.