Here's an almost-end-of-season overview of the 2006 Blue Jays season. Executive summary: it hurts more when you care more.

This is it. A mere 1.5 games behind the Red Sox, the good guys have a golden opportunity to swipe second place in this weekend's four-game set at the RC. But there's a catch: to liberate the metaphorical princess that is the AL East silver medal from the clutches of Boston, they'll need to slay a metaphorical dragon - four straight righthanded pitchers...

It's the last home series for the Jays before three-gamers in Detroit and the Bronx. Will they clinch second place and force Boston to accept the Robert Goulet Memorial Trophy?

On to the Advance Scout!

So Adam Lind looks good.

It's been a while since we've seen a photo of the day of Vernon Wells' mighty swing.  So today's photo is of Vernon Wells' mighty swing:

Jays win, but Yankees clinch.

And did he ever deliver against the Yankees on Wednesday night!

Nice work, Davis Romero -- today's photo of the day is dedicated to you:

Adam Lind makes it three in a row.

Bleah.

As requested in Friday's thread, here's new (to the Jays) pitcher Jeremy Accardo, watching his pitch:

Eric Neel over at ESPN.com has this gem today:

Boof Bonser. It doesn't hurt that he has posted a sub-4 ERA and a handful of wins since coming back from Triple-A, but even if he threw grapefruits in batting practice, he'd be worth it. If we had a metric for names -- say, VORN (value over replacement name) -- and that metric took into account how much fun the name is to say (both at home and away), and how the name somehow managed to be worthy of both ridicule and respect at the same time, and how the name used alliteration to good effect -- Boof Bonser would score roughly 82.7 on that metric, putting him head and shoulders above his next nearest competitor, Coco Crisp of the Red Sox at 63.9.

Which leads to this obvious challenge ... What major leaguer, active, retired, whatever ... has had the highest career VORN? (Basically, whose name has been the most fun to say?)

Bonser and Crisp are on the table -- that sounds like a mid-summer's picnic menu -- so who else gets the nod? Nicknames are welcome (like "Boof' obviously) but given names are even better. Alliteration optional (say that three times fast). Bring it on, Bauxites!

 

Bleah.

Here's another image from Saturday's Toronto Bauxite Baseball League championship game -- this time, it's a colour panorama as the fog rolls in:

As Magpie discussed, this could be the series that sees the Yankees as division winners for the 54th straight year. New York has actually lost two in a row (shock and awe, I know); losing both games of a doubleheader to the Red Sox on Sunday. Before then, though, they had won 7 in a row and their recent THT sparkline ("up" for a win, "down" for a loss) looks like this: .

The immortal trio of Darrell Rasner, Jeff Karstens and Sean Henn are the probable pitchers for this three-game set. Am I the only one who thinks that sounds like a law firm rather than a championship rotation? (Also note that Rasner will be going on three days of rest.) Anyway, with virtually no time to put together a preview of a team most readers already know pretty well in advance of a series that means very little to the home team at this point of the year, this Advance Scout will be more of a collaborative effort.

Call it groundbreaking, call it Wikipedia-like, call it a cop-out in favour of spending more time with the identity matrix. In any event, it's time to proceed...

On to the Advance Scout!

The Yankees come into the RC for three games. They may be in a snarly mood. A sweep of yesterday's double-header would have eliminated the Red Sox. Instead Boston swept them. Just to make matters worse, Derek Jeter's hit streak ended at 25 games, with the Yankee captain standing in the on-deck circle, his team trailing by a run, and the tying run on base. It was the longest hitting streak by any Yankee since Joe Gordon hit in 29 games in a row back in 1942. I think the team record was set the year before that...

And there's more...

The Toronto Bauxite Baseball League had their championship game on Saturday night; what follows is twenty-seven photographs that I took at the game. When the fog rolled in and obscured centre field... well, see for yourself.

I've presented these without naming the participants or describing the game -- Bauxites who were there, feel free to name and shame yourselves and tell stories of being hit by pitches or being cracked up by inappropriate striding-to-the-plate music. Personally, I have to thank Jobu for his inspired choice of the theme from Family Ties. What would we do baby, without you?

Enough blather -- on to the photographs!