Transcript generated automatically by AI and may contain errors.
Chapter 1: What is the main topic discussed in this episode?
Alright, welcome to Blair and Barker brought to you by Capital One. Capital One, giving credit to over 4 million Canadians and Counties. If you're watching this on TV, Mr. Barker, whose wedding is it tonight?
This is how I dress every day, Jeff.
Yeah, no it's not. It's not. Unless that's hunting gear. That's silly talk. You look nice. Yeah, don't act so surprised. Well, I'm not, but... Yeah, every once in a while. Barker's wearing... Barker, either you're doing Blue Jay Central tonight or you're... You're going to be playing. Or it's date night. Yeah, wow. No, it's not date night.
You've been married long enough that you don't have to get that dressed up for date night.
Hey, that's our role.
Yeah.
Anyhow.
Yeah. You look good. Good to see you. I appreciate that. Well, you know how it is.
I know that's hard for you to say. Not really.
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Chapter 2: What were the highlights of the Blue Jays' series against the Yankees?
you know, to pick at. And, you know, again, this is sort of the thing where whenever you're attacking the zone, you can get away with some things that are in the middle of the plate. And then you start to expand. He's never thrown harder for me. I mean, that's a terrible swing if you watch that on TV. That thing was like 40 feet. But, hey, it is what it is. Again, he's attacking the zone.
You attack the zone, you can expand after that with some secondary stuff. It looks to me like he's throwing it. He's not aiming it anymore, which is a big deal. He seems to be, you know, kind of comfortable in the role that John's put him in. You know, you get loose about the fifth inning on. You know, when the fifth inning rolls around, start getting loose.
I mean, it's not the ninth inning anymore, so it was nice to see him go out there and do that. But everybody, right? I mean, the five guys, 14 punches. You get the big hit. You play good enough defense. That's how you win a bunch of baseball games.
The Jays have now held Aaron Judge to zero extra base hits in their last seven regular season meetings. Explain that. Now this, I think we can admit, and I'm not taking anything away from the Jays pitchers, but I think we can admit that this wasn't Judge at his hottest. This isn't the best we've seen Aaron Judge. I'm just going to say that. I'm not taking anything away from anybody because...
It happens. But, man, they seem to know the secret sauce when it comes to Aaron Judge. And it seems as if they kind of discovered it halfway through last year. Because Aaron Judge, now, I mean, he still hits a ton of home runs at the Rogers Center. But it seemed to me that almost halfway through last year, either they figured something out or... He stopped fish-eyeing people? Well...
I mean, I would have to go back and look as to whether or not that's when it all started. But you have to admit, they do have his number. They've got him figured out.
Yeah, maybe. I mean, he's a giant human. Giant humans have a tough time all the time keeping it connected. You know, if you throw it in different quadrants. You know, they did a really good job, John did and Petey did, of throwing a bunch of different looks at him. You know, different kinds of speeds, different kinds of locations.
You don't get him sort of locked into the same guile over and over and over again. You know, the misses against him are really good. He did have, you know, a couple of pitches there that normally if he's rocking and rolling, you know, you're asking for a new baseball. So, you know, they kind of did get lucky with a couple of good pitches.
But, you know, to their credit, right, they didn't sort of let it affect them. They continued to attack the zone against him. You know, you get the people out kind of around him, which is a big deal. You know, it wasn't too many times that he came up with a bunch of traffic on the bases, too, which is a very good thing.
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Chapter 3: How did the Blue Jays' pitching perform in the recent games?
It wasn't, you know, falling across the plate. It just looked like, you know, I'm out there taking my A swing, you know, no matter what the pitch is doing. And you kind of like that. You know, as an educated guesser, educated guessers sometimes, you know, swing at things because they're guessing for that pitch no matter where it's at.
Yeah.
Just looked to me like yesterday, kind of simplified it enough that I'm going to look velocity because the guy's throwing really, really hard. If I start attacking that the way I should be attacking it athletically, then everything else kind of falls in place. And if I get a hanger, I can hit that thing to the moon. That's exactly what happens.
So, you know, maybe that's a stepping stone for him. Maybe he can build off of that, gain a little confidence. You know, it just doesn't seem like the toe anymore is an excuse. I mean, if he's playing, he's in the lineup, you're penciling his name in. You know, he's not hurt. Not hurt enough not to play.
So, you're going to talk about him like he's healthy enough to go out there and give you a competitive advantage. him getting hot would seriously help, right?
I think just somebody else around Vladdy that could get smoking hot driving the ball out of the yard would just take enough pressure off of Vladdy that he could go up there and zone into whatever location he wanted to zone into, and maybe we'd start to see a better version of Vladdy, which would be kind of nice.
Yeah. Again, it... it was just, it was a, it was an intriguing series on, on, I thought on, on many levels. Um, Not the cleanest series the Jays have played. There's still some things they want to... Obviously, they want to work on. But, you know, look at this point. I think at this point, you just need wins. I mean, you really do. You know, I was of the opinion, don't dig too deep into it.
You just need wins. You need a win series. You need to go in a little bit of a roll.
Really good pitching will dig you out a bunch of holes.
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Chapter 4: What impact does Aaron Judge have on the Blue Jays' strategy?
I know guys who are going to get ā Larry Walker would have never made them, but Larry Walker was getting paid. There's no way he would have done that. There are a lot of guys who wouldn't have done that. I'm not sure about that. No, you're right. I shouldn't say there's a lot of guys who wouldn't have done it. Yeah. But my point is that, I mean, I'm not surprised he's still hitting second.
It's a perfect storm. Your team's not hitting the way you want them to hit. Vladdy's not hitting basically at all. So ā You know, it's sort of a great time for John to go to whoever he needed to go to. I'm assuming it was Vladdy. I'm assuming it was the 15 hitting coaches that they got and, you know, say this is what's best for the team. I just like that it's carried over to the home side.
Again, that's the thing. You got to be in a hurry your first at bat to do the things you're trying to do to get in the flow and how important that first at bat has been for guys that are struggling. You know, we'll see how he takes it and runs with it. Again, I just like his last couple games. You know, it's... I don't think he's, you know, liked the results.
But I can't remember a time you saw him get to a big finish. We saw that, you know. When's the last time you saw him get to a 100-mile-an-hour fastball? It's been a while. Just the timings all over the place and just, you know, what game plans and timings just not matching up to the best version of Laddie. So this is a good thing. Hopefully they start running in some balls.
And, you know, this guy they're facing tonight, You know, we'll walk the house.
Yeah.
So it will be very interesting to see how the lineup for the Jays handles. You know, the Jays lineup a lot of the times this year swings at everything. And this guy throws it all over the map. You know, he's in different area codes. Can you slow it down? Can you keyhole him? You know, keyhole is look for something as small as you can possibly look until he forces you to look somewhere else.
Can the Jays lineup do that? Now, not everybody, you know, the Ernie Clements in the world ain't going to do that. But a lot of the guys need to do that. Would you allow him to walk you? Maybe you sort of pass the baton that way. You get a couple guys on, somebody runs into one, now you cook them a gravy and you can get on a little bit of a winning streak.
So it will be intriguing to see how they handle all over the map. Because he will throw it all over the map if you let him.
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Chapter 5: What can fans expect from Kevin Gausman in the upcoming game?
Bubba Chandler on the mound. Tomorrow, if you're going to the game, lucky you, you get to see Paul Skeens. Mitch Keller pitching on Sunday. The Jays running out. Kevin Gossman tonight. Patrick Corbin tomorrow. Dylan Cease on Sunday against the Pirates team. They're two games over .500. They took two of three from the St. Louis Cardinals at the start of this road trip.
This is going to be their first game against an American League team since they played Texas on April 23rd. And the Pirates, this is kind of... Kind of interesting. They got the seventh best run differential in baseball. And behind Atlanta, Los Angeles, Milwaukee, New York, Tampa Bay, and Chicago. All of them pretty serious teams. So, yeah, it'll be fun.
And, of course, they've got, in addition to Paul Skeens, they've got Connor Griffin.
Got a decent rotation, but their bullpen's a little spotty.
Their bullpen is, to put it politely, a work in progress. There it is. And we had Ben Sherrington, their general manager, and he admitted that. You know, he admitted that that's kind of the ā they're looking ā well, they're looking for a way to close out. They're looking for a way to finish out games, I think, more than closing them out. They're looking for a way to finish off wins.
And, you know, it's funny because Felipe Alou always used to talk about this, about ā We always used to have this debate about what is the point of having an elite closer on a losing team, right? And we always used to talk about, well, what's the point? Why don't you trade the closer to get something in return? And I remember Felipe saying, nothing's worse for a young team.
And this is probably this holds true now. He said, the more you think about it, nothing's worse for a young team than blowing a bunch of leads.
Yeah.
You know, you're human beings. They like to go home at the end of the night and go, man, you know, I was two for four, and we won.
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Chapter 6: What performance should we anticipate from Paul Skenes?
It's just guys need to get better jumps. Guys need to run better routes. Guys need to catch balls that they're supposed to be catching. So, you know, hopefully they can do a little bit more of that. You start playing defense better with the way you're pitching now, I think everything is going to start to fall in place. That's just me.
We're also getting to the point in the year where the Dome should ā I don't know if it's open tonight. I don't think so. But we're getting to the point of the year where that becomes a talking point as well. Does that prevent ā present more issues for that uncertain outfield because now you're going to introduce wind into the situation?
I think they're used to it, you know, other than people like Jesus Sanchez, who's, you know, never really played in the outfield here consistently. So, you know, I think everybody else kind of, you know, knows which way the wind's going to blow. And I think it's just kind of, you know, when you're not hitting, you forget you still got to play defense. I think there's a little bit of that.
Certain guys, I think, have taken a step back defensively. But you can still get good jumps, good reads, you know, off the bat, that kind of thing. You can position yourself according to what the count's telling you, you know, where you need to stand, which would kind of help make up for the jump that you're not getting. Yeah, I guess I've always ā Not like Everton.
No, you know, I guess I always just kind of assume, though, that ā positioning is less of an issue in the outfield than it is in the infield, you know, because there's only so much you can do. Balls hit in the air into the outfield and it starts doing stuff that ball's going to do in the air. That's a lot different than positioning a shortstop to make a play.
I guess what I'm saying, I don't know how much positioning can help outfielders if they're not going to get a great jump, I guess is what I'm saying.
Maybe. You know, I think it would sort of eliminate one move, right? Even if you made a bad move to start running towards the baseball, if you're a little closer to the baseball, you can make up for that because of the positioning, right? They've always been really good at that. Like, again, I get back to that.
But since he's always moving people around, when's the last time you saw a line drive wasn't caught in the outfield? I mean, you could go back, I'm sure, and find one. But, boy, they're really far and few between. So it's just, you know, it's those little kind of late in the game where fly balls are not being called that last year just felt like they were always called.
And that urgency of, you know, for us to go on a run and sort of be one of those teams in the American League, you got to have that urgency when it comes to just catching every single thing that you should be catching. Think if they get back to that. with the way they're pitching. You can win a bunch of games out pitching and out defending people and out smarting people on the bases, right?
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