The Toronto Blue Jays blew a 6-1 third-inning lead over the Texas Rangers on Sunday and lost 12-6. Unless you are a Blue Jays fan, you might enjoy the tidy symmetry this formed with Friday's season opener between the teams, in which the Rangers opened a 6-0 lead in the first two innings, chased Toronto starting pitcher Jose Berrios before he'd recorded two outs, and then found a way to lose, 10-8. The Jays might just be that kind of team this year, the kind that will sock dingers in great big bunches and score a lot of runs, but also give up a lot of dingers and runs. Again, unless you are a Blue Jays fan, this makes them a very fun kind of team; they're probably fun if you are a Blue Jays fan, too, but maybe in a way that is not ideal for your blood pressure. I like the Jays but am not precisely a fan; I tune in pretty much entirely for the possibility that I will get to see Vladimir Guerrero Jr. doing unimaginable violence to the vile baseball.
Great googly moogly, did he ever deliver on Sunday. The Jays already led 5-1, off homers from George Springer, Matt Chapman, and Danny Jansen, when Guerrero came up to lead off the bottom of the third inning. Toronto play-by-play guy Buck Martinez was just wrapping up a bit about how Guerrero was sure to catch shit from teammate Teoscar Hernandez for not yet having homered in a series that already to that point had featured six Toronto dingers when, with the count 1-1, Texas starter Spencer Howard hung an absolutely miserable floating garbage ball high over the middle of the plate, and young Vlad sent it whistling into the coldest depths of outer space:
Hoo buddy, did he ever sock the daylights out of that piece of shit. 467 feet! 117.9 miles per hour! That baseball is in hell now. What landed in the recesses of the left-center stands in Toronto shortly after Vladimir Guerrero Jr. swung his bat at the 1-1 pitch was a ghost. I watched this dinger live, and I have watched the above video of it a further dozen times, and I have erupted into loud, involuntary laughter at the very instant of contact between bat and ball each time. A ball hit that hard should simply explode, or travel back in time to hit Abner Doubleday on the back of the head and kill him.
