Strange as it may seem, Zola was no pessimist. Or at least I don't think he was a pessimist. Now, Blue Jays fans in the last few years: they have a right to be a bit pessimistic about their bullpen, though this year's version has been fairly reliable. So maybe pessimistic is too strong. Lugubrious? Nah, too bombastic. Wait, here's the word, especially after last night's misery: pissed.

Not to cop out of doing a Game Report—in fact, I volunteered to take this one—but truthfully, what can be added? What statistical balderdash can I conjure from my arse? Magpie said it all in the Instant Replay: "Felix Friggin' Escalona? There are no words..."

Never one to hide my verbosity, however, I'll add a few words before letting Bauxites vent. My present palaver is not related to Miguel Batista's cruelty, but rather to what happened two weeks ago to the day in the Oakland Coliseum. The event I refer to is when Frankie Rodriguez, frustrated from a perceived bad call while throwing yet another breaking pitch, lazily dropped the return throw from the catcher, flat-out costing the Angels the ball-game as Nick Swisher, the winning run, dashed home with more flair than your average three-card monty dealer.

Though of course it's possible a hit could have scored Swisher anyway, it's easier—and much more fun!—to blame K-Rod. At once I said to myself, "The Angels are done. They're not going to recover from this loss." (At the time it put them a game behind the A's in the AL West, though they remained in first place in the wild card standings.)

However, since then it has been the A's who appear to have peaked: they have lost nine of 11 games, scoring 24 runs in the process, even losing two of three to the Royals. They are now three-and-a-half games behind the Angels, who have gone 7-4 since the K-Rod debacle, in the AL West, and are now a game behind the Yankees in the wild card race.

But the A's know something about how the Angels must have felt, and indeed how the Blue Jays must feel now. Back in late May, after the D-Rays torched Joe Blanton for 148 first-inning runs (the actual total may be lower, I'm having a tough time seeing thru the fog of fury) en route to a 183-0 shutout (please accept my apologies if I am exaggerating the figures), I was sure the A's were done. Granted, they were 190 games below .500 at the time (again, the actual number may differ from the one my memory has established), so that wasn't a great leap forward in the intellectual history of humanity. Just as it looked grim for the A's in late May, it looked grim for the Halos two weeks ago. But -- cliche alert! -- it's not over until it's over.

The Jays are not done. It may seem so after a brutal loss like the one last night, but given the small evidence I presented above, it is possible to come back from the dead.

For further evidence, I turn away from brutal endings which represent not an end but a new beginning, from Biblical stories of chaps named Lazarus, from long losing streaks that seem to never end but which eventually turn into winning streaks that seem to never end. Indeed, I present just two words for evidence that it's possible to be born again, and on more than one occasion:

Julio. Franco.