news The Dog Days of the Baseball Calendar



Photo by ablankface from the Torontoist Flickr Pool.

There are times when the Major League Baseball season is an interminable slog. This is one of those times.

Inevitably, given baseball’s 162-game schedule, the season ebbs and flows. Right now it’s ebbing. The last lingering vestiges of excitement from Opening Day are long gone. It’s still too early to get really excited about the playoffs; the all-star game hasn’t been nearly the same since 2001’s infamous tie. The major storylines are being exhausted; if we aren’t aware by now that steroids are a problem for Major League Baseball then there’s a reasonable chance we’ll never catch on. Thus, the sport’s limping towards its halfway point; it’ll inevitably regain its momentum as the non-waiver trade deadline approaches, a date that traditionally signals the beginning of the playoff races.

In Toronto, meanwhile, surprise at the Blue Jays’ scorching start to the season has given way to what could almost be described as an odd sense of entitlement, as though fifteen years without a playoff berth has been an illusion and the team should be competing like this. Consecutive wins over the Cincinnati Reds pulled the Jays level with the New York Yankees in the übercompetitive American League East. (Last night’s laugher continued the Jays’ recent tradition of beating up on Cincinnati pitcher Bronson Arroyo: a year to the day after putting up ten runs against Arroyo in a single inning, the Jays jumped out to a 5–0 lead before he recorded a single out.) Roy Halladay should be back next week; Vernon Wells and Alex Rios are showing faint signs of life. And yet it’s still hard to get geared up for a midweek series against the Reds. Maybe it’s because it’s been an absolutely crazy month for sports. Two of North America’s four major leagues awarded their championships; Barcelona and Manchester United met in the Champions League Final; Roger Federer staked his claim to being the world’s all-time greatest tennis player; this week, a protracted U.S. Open ended just as Wimbledon was beginning. That’s a lot to follow; given all that, and it’s almost inevitable baseball would take a backseat for the next little while.

This isn’t a condemnation of the sport in general or the Blue Jays in particular; to borrow a popular expression, it simply is what it is. The dog days of the baseball calendar will be here for a few more weeks—and then they’ll be gone just as quickly as they arrived, giving way to a pennant race which might, just might, keep baseball relevant in Toronto deep into September.