George Springer's go-ahead homer could end up as the season-defining moment that catapults the BlueJays into the post-season. ✍️: ArdenZwelling | TD_Canada
could do in their team’s uniform. Amidst frustrating stops, tantalizing starts, and vague status updates in his recovery from a problematic quadriceps strain. On televisions, tablets, and phones broadcasting dimly lit scenes from minor-league parks in Dunedin and Buffalo while Rogers Centre sat empty. Throughout an uneven first-half of a 2021 season in which his team kept losing close games he could’ve helped them win.
That swing took Toronto’s win expectancy from 16.8 per cent — it was as low as 6.4 in the sixth inning — all the way to 83.6. It is not an exaggeration to call it the biggest, most meaningful hit of the Blue Jays season. It won a game, won a series, sealed a fabulously successful homestand, and put the Blue Jays 2.5 games back of a wild card spot. It was righteous. It was a long time coming. And it was worth every second of the wait.
It’s probably a little too simplistic to boil Ryu’s struggles down to purely location — but it certainly didn’t help. The 34-year-old was missing either too far off the plate to generate swings, or too far on the plate to avoid solid contact. That’s the fine line Ryu perpetually walks as a command-and-control pitcher whose fastball velocity is among MLB’s fourth percentile. He has to hit his spots, has to paint the corners. Otherwise, outings like Sunday’s are liable to occur.
It’s not like he was allowing laser beams to the wall. But the Red Sox did well to take what Ryu was giving them, serving singles and doubles onto outfield turf, piling up eight hits through three innings, only the fourth time in 22 starts this season that Ryu’s surrendered as many. Of course, incorrect rulings like those are to be expected when you’re asking a human to judge the location of a small object — one moving unpredictably with extreme velocity — within a variable, imaginary box in real time. Some of those calls aren’t going to go your way. You hope they don’t happen in such consequential moments. But them’s the breaks.
“For him to fight off some pitches and ultimately get to first base is huge,” Springer said of McGuire’s walk. “It shouldn’t get overshadowed because that's the at-bat of the game. Just an unbelievable at-bat. We all knew, as the Blue Jays spun their wheels a few games above .500 through June and July, that this team would eventually need to start making hay. It would have to outperform its first-half pace and start piling up wins to give itself a realistic chance of qualifying for postseason play. It would need to go on a run.
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