Well, I’m back! Been busy trying to be a novelist.
Anyways, a few points.
-
I’ve been watching the Blue Jays for 40 years and absolutely without doubt this is the biggest positive difference between how I expected them to play and how they did play. Not even CLOSE. They outperformed my expectations by 15 games or so. Had you told me they’d win the division, and be in first place the entire second half of the season, I would have laughed in your face.
-
Winning the division is a big deal. It’s winning the Wild Card round except you also rest your pitchers.
-
The Reds making it ahead of the Mets delights me to no end. I hope they beat the Dodgers too.
I do NOT like the fact MLB allows division rivals to play in the WC (granted, this would be inevitable if all wild cards were from one division.) It seems silly for Cleveland, having just won the division over Detroit, to have to play them right away. It’s be more fun if Detroit, say, played the Yankees, and Boston visited Cleveland.
More Jays notes:
-
The Blue Jays went 94-68, but no pitcher on the team won more than 11 games. That has to be a record somehow, right?
-
I have a system for determining team MVP by assigning “Stars” to every game, and wins get way more points assigning to players… well, anyway, the Jays MVP was George Springer by this reckoning, and it does make sense.
-
Trey Yesavage. Holy SHIT.
Yesavage is 22. He STARTED THIS SEASON in A ball and was promoted 4 times. When they brought him up to enter the rotation I couldn’t understand what the hell they were doing, and by God, he’s pitched fantastic. Yesterday, five scoreless innings, in front of 42000 fans in a must win MLB game. Incredible,
Anyway I don’t know who will win it all but if I had to pick a team it’d be Milwaukee.