What to play for when it's over early

Baseball always has intrigues and spurts of pleasure, no matter how ugly the big picture

- ROSIE DIMANNO

A bitty factoid email from the Blue Jays drops into my inbox: Alek Manoah has been transferred to the 60-day injured list.

Oh yeah, Manoah. Almost forgot about the big galoot. Full of brass ‘n’ balls in 2022, twice demoted to the minors in a disastrous 2023, and out of the picture on May 29, 2024 — departing the mound after 1.2 innings against the White Sox, complaining of a sore right shoulder. Sprained ulnar collateral ligament in his pitching elbow, as it turned out, fixed up with reconstructive surgery in June — hybrid internal brace procedure, modified Tommy John — but won’t return to the bump until mid-2025.

So maybe we can hang the debacle of this season on Manoah? Like, it would all have unfolded so differently for Toronto if the fleeting allstar had simply reverted to his grand sophomore form.

Of course not. But as a theory for this spectacularly disappointing Jays season — arguably the most disappointing team in Major League baseball circa ’24 — it probably flies as straight as anything else. (Unless you’re listening to the Sportsnet broadcast, where everything is just amazeballs, hear them tell it, so many bright shiny objects to excavate from the slag.)

Chris Bassitt, one of Toronto’s three surviving starters from the Opening Day quintet, came tantalizingly close to spilling the tea on a podcast, “the Chris Rose Rotation,” a few hours before game time Monday — droopy Cincinnati Reds in town, to kick off a seven-game homestand at Rogers Centre.

What went awry? Bassitt was asked.

“We put I think $700 million into Shohei Ohtani’s basket and didn’t get him. We really didn’t have a pivot.”