“Mercy!” cried the Blue Jays. The Angels give it to them.

Blue Jays 7, Angels 5

It was a regular Thursday, way up there in Toronto. Nothing too out of the ordinary. The Los Angeles Angels were set to play the Toronto Blue Jays.

But something was different. You could feel it in the air, you could feel it on the site. Hope.

Hope is such a beautiful, fragile emotion. It pulls and pulls on a string, but it might break at any moment. Success is the sun, while hope is Margot waiting five years to get an hour of sunshine. We enjoy success, but we only truly, really, appreciate hope.

Going into Thursday, the Angels certainly had hope. And because this is the Angels, the team destroyed that hope.

That hope definitely riled up the crowd a little bit. Justin Upton needed a day at DH, but there was annoyance that Shohei Ohtani wasn’t in the lineup.

Luis Rengifo couldn’t score from second on a double that Dustin Garneau hit because Teoscar Hernandez badly misplayed it, but there was annoyance at Rengifo’s baserunning.

To compound matters, Garneau tried to stroll home on a wild pitch but was easily gunned down, leading to this fun exchange:

There was grumbling when Luis Garcia pitched two innings (justifiably), there was grumbling when Albert Pujols hit in a GIDP situation, there was grumbling when Cam Bedrosian entered with inherited runners, there was grumbling when Jonathan Lucroy entered the game...

It was pretty frenetic, much like the style in which this postgame is written. Rengifo hit 3-5 with a homer and two singles, but he GIDP’d in extra innings when it most mattered. Ty Buttrey, the relief ace, gave up the walkoff shot to pinch-runner Billy McKinney. That’s right; McKinney couldn’t even crack the Blue Jays’ starting lineup. Some guy with a 9.52 ERA got the win. José Suarez looked his age. The bullpen is tired for St. Louis, where pitchers will need to hit.

Such is baseball, which proves how hard it is to sweep a four-game series, much less a seven-game season series. It ebbs and flows over 162 games, and all of a sudden, the Angels are back to .500.

Enjoy some fine defensive work:

And get the Cardinals tomorrow.