A whole pile of numbers

 Baseball is the old man who remembers the Great War like it happened yesterday, or maybe it was the Spanish-American War, or maybe it was the Napoleanic Wars. It is a game besotted with its own history.

And so come with us this morning to Fenway Park in Boston, itself an historic landmark. And enjoy one of those history wallows seamheads glory in like few others.

What happened in Fenway last night was the Toronto Blue Jays played nine innings of baseball against the homestanding Boston Red Sox.

The final score was Blue Jays 28, Red Sox 5.

The Blue Jays scored 27 of those runs in the first six innings, by which time they'd already eclipsed a club record that had stood for 44 years.

That was nothing, however. The Red Sox, see, had never surrendered more runs in a game.  Not in the club's entire 121-year history. The previous record was 27 runs, and that happened 99 years ago, when Cleveland laminated them 27-3 in 1923.

That was the score last night in the middle of the sixth inning. At that point the Boston faithful who hadn't already caught the T home might have been reminded of Super Bowl LI, when the Patriots famously trailed the Falcons 28-3 before the Pats staged the greatest comeback in Super Bowl history.

All heads immediately swiveled to the Sox dugout, waiting for Tom Brady to emerge.

OK. So they didn't.

What did happen, aside from a whole pile of numbers, was notable enough, at least in a Yakety Sax sort of way. Raimel Tapia of the Jays, for instance, hit an inside-the-park grand slam in the third inning. It happened because Red Sox center fielder Jarren Duran misjudged Tapia's routine fly ball, and it sailed over his head to the warning track. There it lay until left fielder Alex Verdugo swooped in to scoop it up, because a shocked Duran simply stood and stared.

Two innings later, another Blue Jays run scored when an infield popup fell harmlessly to earth while Red Sox catcher Kevin Plawecki, reliever Kaleb Ort and third baseman Rafael Devers all waited for one of the other two guys to catch it.

That made the score 16-3. The inside-the-park grand slam, meanwhile, stretched what was already a 6-0 lead to 10-0. More cruel embarrassment ensued.

And Tom Brady never showed. Now that would have been historic.