Giants/Blue Jays series preview

Quick: Give me a guess as to how many games the Giants and Blue Jays have played in baseball history. You, in the back:

Zero.

Wrong. You, with the eyebrows:

Less than zero.

Should be "fewer than zero," I think, and that's also impossible. One more, from the guy wearing the smock:

You just made the Blue Jays up.

Again, that's wrong. The Giants have played the Blue Jays 12 times. That's not a typo. There are a dozen Blue Jays/Giants games to go through if you're so inclined. You are not so inclined. Look, here's a list of the Giants' all-time saves leaders against the Blue Jays:

1. Matt Herges (2)
T-2. Brad Hennessey (1)
T-2. Robb Nen (1)
T-2. Brian Wilson (1)

Brad Hennessey has as many saves against the Blue Jays as Jeremy Accardo has against the Giants, which is totally a sentence you were expecting to read today. Alas, no one has taken the most-wins-against-the-Blue-Jays crown yet. Denny Bautista is tied with seven other Giants, including Ryan Jensen and Matt Morris.

Twelve times. The Giants and Blue Jays have played each other 12 times, six times in San Francisco and six in Toronto. Huh. Damon Minor was 4-for-4 with a homer and a double against Roy Halladay. Three years later, Jason Schmidt struck out 12 Jays in a no-decision, with the go-ahead run scoring on a Pedro Feliz triple and A.J. Pierzynski groundout. The next day, Feliz started at shortstop and drove in two more off Halladay.

See … this is some freaky Dark City stuff, right here. The memories they've implanted in them are plausible enough, but they don't ring true. They're a little too invented. If there's a 20-percent chance that we're living in a computer simulation, I think Feliz starting at short and hitting off Halladay bumps that up to 40 percent, at least.

Do you remember Fred Lewis striking out against Barry Zito? No, of course you don't. Because it probably didn't happen.

Look, I'm no conspiracy nutter. Sure, I don't think anyone's ever landed on the moon, but that's because it seems really, really hard to send something into space, land it, and return it. Occam's Razor, right? It's not because there's some vast cabal of people who were trying to fool the Russians. Come on, now. Be sensible.

But there almost certainly is a conspiracy afoot here. There has to be some reason why we've all been implanted with false memories of the Giants playing the Blue Jays.

Piece of evidence #1: Google results for "Giants playing the Blue Jays"

"Micko wanted to combine a Hogtown visit to watch the Giants playing the Blue Jays with a trip to the musical" over and over and over again, on different sites run by different bots. But that's it. The box scores are up on MLB.com, but when you search of the Internet, there's nothing.

Also, Hogtown.

That's the only piece of evidence I have. But it seems likely that the following sequence of events happened:

• The Giants really did move to Toronto in 1976.
• Something happened, possibly violent, that made the government put chips in our heads to simulate San Francisco baseball after that
• Ryan Vogelsong came back because they wanted to conserve RAM
• The fake Giants won the fake World Series twice
• Your brain's energy is being harvested as a food source, just like in that documentary, The Matrix

The alternative is to believe the Giants played the Blue Jays a dozen times. I don't know, man. I don't know.

Hitter to Watch

You're expecting this guy:

But important developments have come up. Mark DeRosa is hitting cleanup for the Blue Jays.

Mark DeRosa is hitting cleanup for the Blue Jays.

And why not? He already has more extra-base hits in his 51 at-bats with the Blue Jays than he did in his two years with the Giants. The earwigs in his wrist were apparently removed, and he's healthy again.

It's a shame that DeRosa never got better as a Giant. He seemed like an eminently likable guy, and his high-OBP stylings were exactly what the 2009 Giants should have been targeting. Look at how naïve! But I suppose if DeRosa stays healthy, there's no Pat Burrell, and if there's no Pat Burrell, there's no flurry of eighth-inning home runs, which means there's no division title, which means there's no championship.

So here's to Mark DeRosa! I have no idea why he's hitting cleanup, but it's good to see him playing again.

Pitcher to Watch

Let's see, R.A. Dickey goes the first game, Brandon Morrow was slated to go the second game, but he was just scratched for ... Ramon Ortiz? Oh, come on, pod people. At least make the fake memories plausible. And after Ortiz, the Blue Jays will ...

...

... wait a two-game series?

...

... they're flying the Giants all the way to another country to play a two-game series?

...

... _{this is so made up}

...

... alright, give me Dickey as the pitcher to watch, then, if only because he always is.

Prediction

Melky will almost certainly troll us. Not sure how, not sure why. But watch for it. It will be glorious.