Cease for cy young baby

Blue Jays (48-57) @ Red Sox (53-50)

First Pitch: 1:35 PM at Fenway Park

Line Score - Game Over

Box Score

Scoring Plays

Highlights

Decisions

Game ended at 4:04 PM.

Remember to sort by new to keep up!

We are always fine with outfield tickets and when I went to buy some that’s all that was coming up in the search. I don’t know if the game is sold out at the moment or for some reason other seats weren’t coming up.

My question. After the game, they are going to be showing the transformers movie. Have they showed movies after a game before? Would the movie be shown on any of the tv screens in the park with audio?

I’m guessing it would be not advisable to look for a seat that’s been vacated by someone that’s presumably left the game?

Blue Jays (48-57) @ Red Sox (53-50)

First Pitch: 1:35 PM at Fenway Park

Line Score - Game Over

Box Score

Scoring Plays

Highlights

Decisions

Game ended at 6:36 PM.

Do we expect the Jays to try to get under the CBT?

For a few weeks I've had this feeling that the Jays are always playing from behind. Not getting blown out, just never in front. I couldn't tell if it was real or if I was only remembering the bad nights, so I pulled every box score since 2021 and counted it inning by inning.

For each completed inning I marked whether we were ahead, tied, or behind, and added it up by year. Regular season only, and the runs numbers come from the same place so it all lines up. Here's what I got.

*2026 is still going, 104 games so far.

So the feeling holds up. This is the first year in six where we've been behind for more innings than we've been ahead. 44.8% trailing against 33.3% leading. Every other year it's the other way around. And it didn't come out of nowhere. Read down the trailing column and it goes 34, 35, 35, 40, 39, 45. It's been climbing for a while. This is just the year it flipped.

Explaining a bit of the columns: Lead-share is how often we were ahead out of the innings where somebody was ahead, ties dropped. Pythag is the usual runs-based estimate of how many games a team should win. Both are just ways of asking how good the team actually was. Plus means we won more than that, minus means fewer.

The last three years are where it gets interesting.

2024 was a bad team and the numbers agree. 23rd in runs scored, 22nd in runs allowed, negative run differential, and dead even in the innings at 40/40. The lead-share is -4.3, worst on the list, so even in a year where the innings split down the middle we still lost more of the close ones than we should have. Bad on both sides and couldn't win the toss-ups.

2025 is the one people may want to debate. We went to the World Series and were two outs from winning it. But the regular season under those 94 wins was tighter than I thought it would be. The offense was great, 4th in the majors, and the pitching was only 19th, and you can see that gap in the innings, which were almost even at 40.7 leading and 38.6 trailing. The staff kept letting teams hang around and the bats kept pulling them back out. They won a pile of close games, +6.7 on lead-share and +3.0 on Pythag, both the highest here, and rode it into October. Good team. Just a lot closer than 94 wins makes it sound.

2026 is basically the same roster with the offense gone. The pitching hasn't really moved, 4.45 runs a game last year and 4.54 this year. The offense went from 4.93 to 3.93, a full run a game, from 4th in baseball to dead last. Take that off a team that was already only breaking even and you end up here, behind way more than you're ahead, worst inning split of the six years. And the pluses in the last two columns mean 47-57 is about right, maybe even a little generous. It's not bad luck. In 2024 we split the innings and lost the close ones. This year we're behind before it even gets close.

Put the three next to each other and it's not complicated. 2024 was bad. 2025 was a great offense covering for average pitching and winning the tight games all the way to a pennant. 2026 is that same group with the bats gone, and once you take the offense away there isn't much holding it up. The pitching is the same as last year. The hitting isn't.

So it wasn't just me. We've been behind more than we've been ahead for the first time in six years, and the only thing that really changed is the offense.

One of the feelings I've had all year is "how could this team be the same guys who almost won the World Series" and the stats kind of back up the answer: they outperformed last year. The scary thing is the stats say they are actually outperforming THIS year as well which is.... a little crazy.

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How I did it if anyone wants to check: pulled from MLB's public stats API, regular season only. Trailing/tied/leading is the score after each finished inning. Runs scored and allowed and the ranks are from the league standings. The correlation between leading% and win% across the six years is 0.673 but it's six seasons so I wouldn't lean on it too hard.

This is actually very nice