It wasn’t how any of us wanted the series to end, and the fact that they were literally millimetres from walking it off was tough to stomach, but damn was it a good series. Damn, did the Jays play some good baseball this year. And while I may be snacking on grapes that are a little under-ripe, I know that they should have won that series.
People can point to the mistakes the Jays made – and they made plenty – but we can just as easily point to key bad ball/strike calls that significantly changed the outcome of the series (while also acknowledging that we got some almost shocking calls in our favour, too), or to the absolutely wild bad luck we had with broken bats, lodged balls, and BABIP.
They lost the series by millimetres at least 6 times by my count.
That’s wild. And it resulted in some of the best games I’ve ever watched.
Here’s to next year. We’re just 3 months from the start of Spring Training!
I’m not going to lie: I purposefully chose not to talk about baserunning, because the baserunning that everyone wants to talk about right now is IKF’s in the 9th, and I don’t think there’s any issue with what he did there. He could have taken a slightly longer leadoff. He could have tried running through the plate (though, I’m not at all convinced that sliding is actually slower, since you still need to get your foot down on the plate, not just over it, and there isn’t strong evidence that running through is faster). But these were not mental mistakes, they were hedges that didn’t pay off.
Bo, Springer, and possibly Barger (it’s not clear to me whether Kike faked Barger out by starting deeper in the field and inching in or not) made some incredibly embarrassing mental mistakes on the bases, but IKF’s been getting all of the hate, and I don’t think he deserves it.
I wasnt trying to calling out IKF specifically. There were tons of close calls on bases throughout the series. Just get 1% faster and that’s an extra base here or there. And that’s the extra run that could have won a game here or there
The whole team needs to get faster and smarter on the bases.
100%. They were sloppy as hell. I just know where all of the attention is right now, and didn’t want to give it any more.