Blue Jays 4-2 to Start the Season

...which is objectively a perfectly fine start, except that the Jays' first three series are against the A's, the Rockies, and the White Sox, which means the rest of the schedule will be that much harder (plus, the 5-1 Yankees have somehow only allowed 6 runs in their first 6 games).

In a sense, they're starting off where they left off: starting pitching is excellent, bullpen is shaky, hitting is good enough and could be better. Unfortuantely, their 4th starter, Cody Ponce, went down with an injury two innings into his first game. He's likely done for the season. The Jays also have Trey Yesavage, Shane Bieber, and Jose Berrios on the IL to start the season. They're enormously fortunate to have the depth they have - 5th starter Max Scherzer, 41 years old, allowed a single earned run - but even that's being stretched.

This season I cancelled my Sportsnet+ subscription. There was another price increase, another $60 a year. A long ways from cable pricing, but at the same time, I just want to watch Jays games and nothing else, and I can't justify over $20/month for that. So, pirate streams it is. And honestly, as terrible an experience as these are, they're generally fine once they start running (once you get past the barrage of online casino and anime porn garbage popups). Last year when I had Sportsnet+, the game would start buffering and stuttering usually around the 5th or 6th. Other streaming services didn't have this problem, it was clearly a Rogers thing. Crazy that I get better service off a stream from an aggregator than I do from the team's official app. I went through the official channels, reported the issue, troubleshooted it with technicians, but they claimed they couldn't fix it. Okay.

So we'll see how the season goes. It'll be hard to repeat the magic of last year. I mean, you can't go in expecting the pennant (unless you're the Dodgers, I guess). The AL is, and always has been, a dogfight. I'm just hoping for playoffs, hoping for a good run, and secretly, yeah, I hope Vladdy walks off the Dodgers with a moonshot into the night.

gemlog