SEATTLE – Six ground balls do not make a national crisis, unless you happen to be the recently minted franchise player of Canada’s only Major League Baseball team staring at the eighth level of Dante’s version of Hell, which is to say not quite as low as it gets but just about there. In Dante’s nine levels of Hell, the penultimate level is Fraud. In the American League Championship Series, it is a near-must win in Game 3, having lost the first two games at home.
The Toronto Blue Jays were descending fast, marked most absurdly by going 1-for-42 in the third through ninth innings of the opening two games. Almost as troubling was how their bedrock hitting star, Vlad Guerrero Jr., after terrorizing the Yankees in the ALDS, suddenly had devolved into a ground ball out machine. Guerrero was 0-for-7, including six groundouts.
