Lohensports

 As most Jays fans probably did, I needed a couple of days to recover before starting to think about the Jays again. I know I'm also late on a Steelers reaction, being so bummed from the Jays I honestly hardly watched that game, but they won so that's nice! This post is going to be all positive, no reliving the plays that could've won the Jays the big dance but just barely didn't, there's tons of places you can go for that. This is just remembering the best team of my lifetime and giving flowers to the players that made this season so fun. I think I'm just going to go series by series and just pour my heart out on what I can remember. The best part of a deep playoff run is how it brings people together to watch like nothing else can, so I'll try to include some of those memories in here as well.  Daaaaaa Yankees Lose! Despite having the same record, all regular season the Jays took care of business against the Yankees and showed they were the better team. Th...

 Ok, I've taken a bit of a hiatus on this blog with work getting busy and me just reevaluating if I want to continue these or how I want to if I do. I missed a Steelers reaction from their Thursday night loss, I'll try to come back late with that as well. Today is a special day though, for the first time in my life the Toronto Blue Jays are going to the World Series. If that doesn't call for a blog post, I don't know what does. Honestly I'm just going to memory dump as many of my Jays memories as I can in this one.  My first ever sports love was the Toronto Blue Jays. It's easy to see why. My whole life Raptors and Leafs tickets were >$100 per game, not really something you can take your family of 5 to regularly unless you're pulling in the big bucks.  The Jays though you could get 500 level tickets for $15 each, and with my dad being a sports fan that meant we went to a lot of Jays games. I distinctly remember going as a kid to a baseball card giveaway d...

 If you've been following the Jays this year, congratulations it's been a really fun season! You also may know that the Jays magic number for the division sits at 6 after a narrow victory against the Rays last night. 6 is coincidentally the number I always chose when playing sports growing up so I've had a unique bond with the number my entire life. With that in mind, I thought I'd pretty much just list guys in Toronto sports who I remember wearing 6 to celebrate the magic number being down to 6. These are all going to be guys from my lifetime who I can actually pull a memory or two from. It's a slimmer list than you'd think, the Leafs retired number 6 for Ace Bailey, some dude who played in the 30s and the NBA retired number 6 league wide in honour of Bill Russell.  Before we get into that though, the Rays last night got gifted maybe one of the worst calls I've ever seen in an MLB game. In the 3rd inning Brandon Lowe hit a ball deep to right field, Nathan L...

 If there ever was a question what this Blue Jays team's biggest weakness is, it was answered in dramatic fashion this long weekend. The Jays lost 2/3 in a series against the league leading Milwaukee Brewers, not a ton of shame in that but the way they lost was frustrating. They followed this up by losing the first game against the Cincinnati Reds on Monday in equally frustrating fashion. The way each of these losses came should cause Jays fans to question this team's ability to go on a deep run this season, as unfortunate as that might be. Lets get into some doom and gloom:  Brewers Game 1 I was at this one! The idea behind rallying a crew to go to this game was the Jays are in first place, playing the first place team in the NL with Shane Bieber making his home debut. I thought it had all the elements for an immaculate vibes game. Coming into the stadium, it definitely lived up to it. People were buzzing on the way to our seats with lets go Blue Jays chants starting early. B...

 I just noticed as I signed on today that this is my 200th post on here! I can't believe I made it to pumping out 200 of these without even really thinking of advertising or optimizing it, but here we are. If you've read a good amount of these, thank you! That's pretty cool, I'm just some dude with a lot of sports takes that I wanted to get out somewhere and this has been a nice vehicle to do it. I appreciate the love and encouragement for sure! Now to the point of the post, the Jays had a pretty exciting series win against the Marlins this weekend. I'll qualify this with saying the Marlins are a very young team, especially on offense, and that showed up in some of the Jays pitching performances this weekend. Still though they are scrappy and annoying, almost like a lite version of the Jays offense this year and it made for some fun baseball. The only game I missed was the one where they lost, so we won't be talking about that much. Lets get into it:  Bieber Fev...

 This is a quick post today, and it's not something that I haven't done before I just think it's timely given the game yesterday. All off season, fans and myself were hating on the Jays front office. We wanted Juan Soto or Roki Sasaki and got neither. This made the fanbase, and myself, overlook the moves the front office did make bringing in real contributors to winning. I'll save some of the other guys for another day, today the focus is on Myles Straw and Max Scherzer, two guys brought in this offseason without much noise and two guys who won the Jays a ballgame last night.  Myles Straw I'll be the first to admit that I hated this move when the Jays made it. To be fair to myself and the fans, the Jays were coming off a season where they had the best defense in baseball, only to have nobody hit anything making the defense useless. At this point of the offseason, the Jays already missed on Juan Soto which bummed the fan base out to a significant degree. It was ok th...

 Hello everyone, been a while! I took both Thursday and Friday off last week because Thurs I had a half day where I was going to the Jays game and Friday was Friday. With that in mind, I have a lot of Jays stuff to catch up on which is perfect for  a quick Monday post! Side note here, the stadium is rocking now. Every game is sold out in Toronto and the energy is immaculate. Ticket prices are going up but the experience is as well, love when the city starts to vibe like this. Ok lets get into it: Vlad Guerrero Jr. is Clutch (I was Wrong) Yum, humble pie! I've already come on here and talked about how Vlady is heating up and getting some extremely timely hits. That post I made about the "Flu game" had a whole section apologizing to Vlad. I have to come on here again and say sorry once more right off the top though. Vlad's been on a stretch of doing whatever it takes to will the Jays to wins, and it's been so exciting. On Thursday against the Cubs we got a real pitc...

 Here I was thinking that the Jays Dodgers series was going to be boring as a Jays fan. The first 2 games certainly were, it was looking like I'd have to hop on here and try and claim the Jays aren't frauds, which woulda been tough. Then came yesterday and we got what might end up being the game of the season. Thank goodness, I have something to write about today! Everyone on earth who covers the Jays is going to be talking about this game, but it's easy so lets hop on too. Skip to the last section if you want just the recap of the fun stuff, though I thought it was fun to set up why the ending needed to happen by giving the context of the first 7 innings.  Tough One for Lauer, Great One for Middle Relievers I guess I should start at the beginning of the game. Eric Lauer, who has been awesome all season, didn't really have it to start this one. After Guerrero doubled to score a Bichette walk in the first inning, Lauer gave up homers to Ohtani and Freeman in the bottom h...

 Sorry loyal readers, bit of a hiatus from me! I took Thursday off due to lack of feeling it, then it was Friday, then it was the long weekend and so it ballooned into a 5 day break. With that in mind, I have the trade deadline to react to and I think the Jays did pretty well! I thought about doing a couple other baseball sections in here but I am pretty busy at work today along with the fact that I should save them and parcel them out throughout the week. Anyway, here's how I thought about the Jays deadline:  Bieber Fever! This one came out of left field! Early in the day on Thursday the Jays traded prospect Cal Stephen to the Guardians for Shane Bieber. Having only just gotten back into baseball pretty recently, I initially reacted to the name and was hyped! I remember this guy was lights out when I was watching every game a few years ago, and the headlines reminded me that he won the Cy Young award in 2020. Then upon doing a basic amount of research I was reminded that he h...

 Just as I got super excited to watch every inning again the Jays go on a 4 game skid including losing both games of a double header yesterday. To show how little I know about the MLB now, I thought they had changed the rules so that double header games are only 7 innings. I guess they changed it back to 9, I'm not complaining! The season is long and rough stretches will happen so I'm not too shook here, though the last few games have certainly been less fun to watch. Anyway, lots to talk about so lets dive in.  4 Game Losing Streak It was bound to happen again at some point! The beauty of the Jays hot stretch in July is that it was done mostly against the Yankees allowing them to build in a bit of a cushion on the division. The season is really long, everything was going right for a stretch and it made the Jays look like the best team in baseball. Now in the last 4 games the Jays have been outscored 40-14 making them look like the Colorado Rockies. There's still some thing...

 Here I was thinking that the summer would be slow with not much to write about. Thank you Blue Jays for having the most exciting season in the last 10 years to fill up my free time and give me ideas to write about. So exciting that tickets for any game against the Kansas City Royals are going for $90 minimum. I guess people have caught on to this team. Anyway, the Jays just took 3/4 against the Detroit Tigers and moved to sole possession of the best record in the entire MLB. With that I've been thinking about the Jays team construction for a while now and with guys coming back and the deadline looming, I am concerned they may have some good problems on their hands: Good Problems To Have The Jays don't necessarily have big stars at every position, but this season with the emergence of a bunch of guys they don't have bad players at any position either. This poses a unique problem for the Jays coming into the deadline, and with players returning from injury. The first good pr...

 Holy this Jays team is a lot of fun. I watched every game this series and came away with a lot of thoughts, mostly around how unserious the Yankees are. For a team that was supposed to be a World Series contender, they have a lot of problems that if they don't address will spell their doom. That being said, the Jays played their game this weekend and they managed to come away with 2/3 games with the 1 loss being a real close one (and of course the game that I was at.) Lets get into it all! Jays Are Built to Beat the Yankees I was trying to come up with a comparison while watching the game yesterday and the only one that made sense to me is the Yankees are the Jameis Winston of baseball teams. Long time NFL fans know that Jameis once had a remarkable 30 TD 30 interception season, something I doubt we'll ever see again. The Yankees have a bunch of guys who can hit bombs, or throw 30 TDs. They also have a bunch of guys who absolutely suck on defense giving it all back, 30 interce...

 Happy Monday, we're back at it! The Jays had such a hot stretch coming into the all star break, to the point where I was just coming up with as much Jays content as I could out of pure excitement. Then they lost series against the terrible White Sox and As and I thought they were coming back down to earth again. Turns out the Jays only like to show up against good teams. Coming out of the break the Jays decisively swept the Giants at home to move only 1.5 games out of the best record in baseball. Out of pure excitement for the team again I'm going to just go over some random thoughts about the great weekend they just had.  Everyone Contributes This Jays team is really fun to watch because they're getting contributions up and down the order. The last few years the Jays would have a solid top 4 hitters, but then after that the lineup would drop off and you'd be lucky if they did anything to keep the offense going. This year there's no inning that you can turn off, ev...