Hope Springs Eternal

A long, long time before The Ghost and Mrs. Muir (co-starring Match Game stalwart Charles Nelson Reilly), Hope Lange was quite the babe. Gorgeous. And a lot better looking than Giuliani in a dress.

Technically, that Hope may be dead, but in our hearts it should be a different story.

Why? Because in the last 10 games, Toronto has gone 6-4. 6 and 4. If they had played Kansas City or almost anybody instead of us this past weekend, that could've been 5 and 5, maybe even 4 and 6. 

All of those number combinations are mortal. They are not unbeatable.

In fact, I got pretty damned tired of hearing YES and FOX announcers talking about what a great fastball-hitting club the Jays are...while the Yankee pitchers served up poorly placed off-speed stuff and way too many fastballs. (When Shreve wasn't walking them.)

But what happened when someone got on the mound and didn't throw fastballs, with some command of his curve and slider and changeup? The Jays folded like the St. Louis Cardinals. Professor Tanaka shut them out. Bettances shut them down with offspeed stuff. Miller made them look like the Phillies with a hangover.

Severino? Fastball boy got his head handed to him. Learn from this, grasshopper.

Here's the nasty secret from this weekend's semi-disastrous series:  the Jays can actually be stopped offensively. 

Here's an even better nasty secret:  the Yankees can hit their pitching. We scored 5 runs three times and 7 runs once. (Without Tex, by the way. Freaking Ackley was our hitting star Sunday, fer Pete's sake.) If our pitching was halfway decent, we could have taken 3 of 4 or even swept these clowns.

Here's an even better better nasty secret:  No matter how well Pennington Bear looked, he is not Tulo. And no matter how many ESPN Yankee-hating douchebags say so, the Jays may not suffer Tulo's absence as a mere blip in their march to immortality.

If we don't start CC the rest of the year and Larry Rothschild (no relation to the wealthy family hated so vigorously by anti-Semite conspiracist Lyndon LaRouche) can convince the rest of our guys to work on their non-fastball pitches before we head into Toronto for those three games....

Hope is beautiful. Hope lives.