#92. Double-Header (Saturday, September 12, 2015)

What was your best day…of seeing something you had waited a lifetime for finally become a reality?

I know I’ve hinted at it already (#116, #105), but here’s the full context for this Saturday’s events:

I’m a baseball nut. And 2015 was the first year in my conscious lifetime that my favorite team, the Toronto Blue Jays (#105), had done anything; or even got remotely close to doing anything. The Yankees and Red Sox¹ would typically spend their way to the AL East title every year; but this was a relative off year for both of them.
The Jays general manager, Alex Anthopoulos, actually took advantage of this miraculous window by going all-in at the trade deadline, acquiring big name players like David Price and Troy Tulowitzki (#116) to enhance that powerful slugging core of John Donaldson, Jose Bautista, and Edwin Encarnacion.
Since that point, the Jays have gone on an absolute tear (30-9 record), and now hold a slim 2.5-game lead over the Yankees in the AL East, with 22 games left to go in the season.
They’re playing a double-header today at Yankee Stadium on this day. So the outcome is important, to say the least.

And how did it turn out? (To be clear, I’m not actually at Yankee Stadium, but rather watching this all from my couch.)

The Yankees take the upper hand early in Game 1, going up 4-1 after A-Rod hits a two-run home run in the 4th inning (just as my brother walks in from doing his ACTs² and joins me on the couch).
Kevin Pillar has the worst game a player could possibly have, striking out four times and putting Tulowitzki out of commission for three weeks by smacking his chin on that guy’s shoulder and fracturing it going for a pop fly that wasn’t his.³
Despite that, the Jays manage to come back, forcing extra innings thanks to Cliff Pennington making one of the clutchest diving stops I’d ever seen. They then score four runs in the Top of the 11th and win.
With that win, I’m satisfied. Even if the Yankees win the next game (which eighteen years of disappointment have conditioned me to expect), the Jays will end the day with the same division lead they started with. So in my mind, today is a success no matter what.
Game 2. Marcus Stroman is making his long-awaited season debut, after he was deemed out for the season after tearing his Achilles in Spring Training. I would’ve much preferred it if it were any other game; the fact that this is being playing on the wet Yankee Stadium grass (after a rain delay between games) makes me hold my breath every time the Yankees hit a ground ball.
Jays win this game as well, 10-7. That final strikeout of John Ryan Murphy I watch nervously from behind the bars of my staircase.

Winning both ends of a double-header is a great feeling for any baseball fan. Winning them against a hated division rival to essentially seal your team’s first division title in 22 years is quite a few levels beyond that.

And for shorter periods, the Orioles and Rays as well.
He bombed the writing part, thus ending my attempts to live my high school Ivy League dreams vicariously through him (#116).
Unsurprisingly, he does not play in Game 2.