There’s something about the way a baseball season is structured into these two-to-four game series that makes the result of the last game of a given set feel so weighty. Though impossible to quantify, momentum is definitely a thing in baseball, and dropping the last game of a series, even if the other games were won. Going into the two-game stretch in St. Louis against the Cardinals, the Jays had, yes, strung together a couple of series wins, taking two-of-three from both the Seattle Mariners and Cincinnati Reds, but while those were on paper positive results, something about the end result of each series’ respective final games, a loss in both cases, rubbed fans (by which I mean “me and maybe some other people”) the wrong way. On Wednesday against the Mariners, the Toronto bats looked as limp as ever, getting shut down by Marco Gonzales, a pitcher whose 3.74 ERA is absolutely confounding to anyone with basic Baseball Savant literacy. Versus the Reds, the Jays faced rookie pitcher Graham Ashcraft, and still managed to go down 3-2 against a team that could really only be called Major League by technical definition.
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They Are Risen (Series Preview: Toronto Blue…
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There’s something about the way a baseball season is structured into these two-to-four game series that makes the result of the last game of a given set feel so weighty. Though impossible to quantify, momentum is definitely a thing in baseball, and dropping the last game of a series, even if the other games were won. Going into the two-game stretch in St. Louis against the Cardinals, the Jays had, yes, strung together a couple of series wins, taking two-of-three from both the Seattle Mariners and Cincinnati Reds, but while those were on paper positive results, something about the end result of each series’ respective final games, a loss in both cases, rubbed fans (by which I mean “me and maybe some other people”) the wrong way. On Wednesday against the Mariners, the Toronto bats looked as limp as ever, getting shut down by Marco Gonzales, a pitcher whose 3.74 ERA is absolutely confounding to anyone with basic Baseball Savant literacy. Versus the Reds, the Jays faced rookie pitcher Graham Ashcraft, and still managed to go down 3-2 against a team that could really only be called Major League by technical definition.