Loud crowds. Louder bats.
That pretty much sums up the late summer scene at the Rogers Centre in Toronto, where the bashing Blue Jays are drawing noisy, sell-out crowds to their one-time echo chamber of a ballpark.
That is what happens when a team surges toward its first play-offs appearance since 1993, and does it with a barrage of runs.
Three Jays players — Josh Donaldson, Jose Bautista and Edwin Encarnacion — already have cracked the 30-home-run mark. Bautista and Encarnacion are likely to join Donaldson north of 100 runs batted in.
The Canadian club lead baseball in home runs, total bases, on-base percentage, slugging and, of course, runs.
“Everybody talks about our power, but we have good hitters,” outfielder Kevin Pillar told MLB.com after a recent blowout win. “Our middle-of-the-order hitters take what the pitchers give them. Encarnacion goes the other way to hit a home run. Donaldson hits a couple of balls the other way.
“It’s a special offence.”
Donaldson, a winter-trade gift from the Oakland Athletics, has moved ahead of Mike Trout of the Los Angeles Angels in the Most Valuable Player race, at least in internet chatter.
Encarnacion recently had a season’s-best, 25-game hitting streak come to an end.
In this post-steroids era, as pitching has tipped baseball’s delicate offence-defence balance in its favour, the Jays are an anomaly: a scoring machine that has scored 730 runs this season. That is 85 more than the next best team, division rival New York Yankees.
That would not mean much if Toronto’s pitching staff were leaking runs at a similar high rate, negating the scoring surge, but they are not, for a change. The Blue Jays’ scoring differential is an impressive plus-197, which is 55 better than that of the St Louis Cardinals, the team most pundits still tout as the best overall in baseball.
If the regular-season numbers favour Toronto in a big way, there remains the lingering notion that the offence still may not be enough to cover the pitching.
The Jays did pick up a top-of-the-rotation pitcher in left-hander David Price, at the trade deadline, and he has delivered a 2.28 earned-run average and a 4-1 record.
But the rest of the starters inspire suspicion. Late-bloomer Marco Estrada, 32, and veterans RA Dickey and Mark Buehrle do not possess the kind of overpowering repertoires that carry a pitcher through the World Series.
The bullpen is led by 20-year-old closer Roberto Osuna, who has had the job for all of two months.
Toronto certainly have enough to lock down a play-offs spot over the final month, either by holding off the second-place Yankees for the American League East title, or coasting in with a wild-card berth.
Whether the Jays can sustain their three-ring circus of an offence through the play-offs against some of the world’s best pitching, and get enough of their own, is the question.
In the meantime, at least, no one else’s fireworks are more fun to watch.
Voice of the Dodgers will leave major void
Baseball fans are familiar with the term, “Wait till next year,” that sad concession that this season has been a bust, but another chance will be coming.
Los Angeles Dodgers loyalists, however, are getting closer and closer to an even sadder lament: “There won’t be a next year.”
That will be when their legendary poet of the airwaves, broadcaster Vin Scully, finally retires. This week Scully, 87, announced that he is returning for his 67th season next spring, but ventured that it will be his last.
Scully confessed he has been “raging against the dying of the light” of his career, quoting another bard, Dylan Thomas, but conceded the time has come.
Scully called his first game in 1950, when the Dodgers were an institution in Brooklyn, and moved with them to LA in 1958 where he became the institution.
As his popularity and voice-recognition grew, he took on national network baseball games, and called football, golf and tennis, too.
With age he cut back his work, eventually cutting out his Dodgers road trips. He remains, however, the franchise’s most popular figure — more so than any players.
When it was announced during a recent game he would be back, the crowd stood and applauded. Always humble and self-effacing, Scully stood and applauded them back.
Major League Baseball in LA has never existed without the accompaniment of Scully’s voice.
No doubt Dodgers fans will listen a little more carefully next year, while there still is one.
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