Blue Jays Obliterate a Stunned Red Sox Team
It was a remarkable weekend of baseball which began with a historic smackdown of the Boston Red Sox and ended with a sweep. I don’t know what’s going on in that Boston clubhouse, but it appeared that the team has forgotten how to play baseball. The hitting was decent, but when the pitching and defence are giving up extra runs and extra outs, the decent offence isn’t going to cut it.
The Tapia inside the park home run got most of the attention, as it featured Sox CF Jarren Duran misreading the ball and then freezing in place as if his soul had left his body as the ball landed on the warning track.
The one that indicated to me that something was horrendously wrong was the infield popup, where the pitcher, catcher, and third baseman converged in a nice circle and watched it bounce between them.
Alex Cora's face in the dugout looked quite a bit like Charlie Montoyo’s face in that Seattle series that proceeded his eventual firing. The Blue Jays looked completely unbeatable, but they were a week removed from getting swept by the Mariners, with was the final nail in the Charlie Montoyo experiment (Yes, I did just mix those metaphors.) And those games were significantly tighter and the Blue Jays were the victim of the Mariners one-run win witchcraft.
Cora is an interesting case. He came to Boston from a championship-winning Houston Astros team and won the World Series with a team that ran the table in 2018. The Red Sox got into some hot water with cheating with video in 2019, and Alex Cora got suspended for a season, but not for the Red Sox stuff, but for stuff he did in Houston the season before as a bench coach. So Cora went from genius to suspended to rehired, with the Sox making the ALCS in 2021. And it truly looked like the team quit on him this weekend.
Chaim Bloom, Red Sox G.M., is going to face some kind of reckoning and the look on his face from the box in Fenway on Friday indicated to me that he knew it. The Red Sox look lost and overmatched, but only sit three games out of a wild-card spot. In MLB in 2022, the go-to would be to sell at the trade deadline. That’s what Tampa, the organization Bloom came from, would do. But will this fanbase accept that?
On the subject of the fanbase, the other remarkable thing was the audible presence of Blue Jays fans in Fenway Park. I heard, “Let’s go, Blue Jays” in Boston. Red Sox fans as a presence in away ballparks isn’t a new thing, but for the Sox fans to be so subdued in their home park is new.
The All Star Game was standard, with some remarkable plays and the AL winning.
A star was truly born when they mic’d Alek Manoah up during his inning.
It was a hit on Twitter during the game.
Manoah got into it with Bobby Dalbec on Saturday.
I don’t know what bee was in Dalbec’s bonnet (other than getting manhandled the night before) but I did find the Red Sox avoiding eye contact to be pretty funny. At 6’5” and 260lbs, a fired-up Manoah is likely not someone you’d rush to rumble with.
I look forward to the "Why don't you sit down, bitch?" merch.