Long Ball Stories

We’ve reached the last day of July, and as we approached today’s game we couldn’t help but feel that finally all the stars were aligned, and the universe was unfolding as it should: the Blue Jays are in first place.

When Robert Browning wrote “God’s in his heaven/All’s right with the world!” he was talking about baseball, wasn’t he? Sure he was. Aren’t those lines from Pippa Passes? Isn’t that Browning’s epic about the mythic day that Lou Gehrig’s consecutive game streak commenced, when he took over first base for the Yankees because Wally Pippa had a headache? No? I’ve had it wrong all these years?

It was a lovely summer Sunday on a holiday weekend, especially sweet for those who remain behind in a quiet city while the hordes head off to cottage and beach. And a perfect day to contemplate the start of game three of the current series between the Jays and the Orioles here in Toronto at the blessedly open TV Dome. What could go wrong? Aaron Sanchez at eleven and one was going up against Chris Tillman at fourteen and three, in a battle of aces. Given that I’m newly philosophical about the occasional loss, even seeing Tillman prevail over Sanchez in a well-pitched game would be a delight and a balm for the soul. Or would it?

Last night, long after we were all cleaned up and cooled out, basking in the glow of our having dismantled the Orioles yesterday afternoon for our second straight win in the series, the happy news came in that Albert Pujols had led the LA Angels to their second win in three games over the Red Sox, which placed us not only first in the division, a half-game ahead of the Orioles, but a full two games ahead of the Red Sox, who, I remind you yet again, are the real threat to the Toronto team this year.

Today’s game had to be gut-check time far more for the Orioles than the Blue Jays. First of all, they’d lost five in a row. Secondly, the Jays, their closest pursuers in the division, had taken the first two games of the series, and had actually taken over first place with Saturday’s win. Thirdly, with their starting pitching seemingly in disarray, Chris Tillman, their ace, their rock, the only starter they could really depend on, was going today, and if they lost to the Jays behind Tillman, they’d find themselves in a six-game tailspin, with four more games to play before Tillman’s turn would come up again.

As for the Jays, it’s not as if things were free and easy for them. Having finally squeezed into the lead, the last thing they wanted to do was fall right back out of it. And today;s the last day of this late July homestand; tomorrow they’ll embark on a difficult road trip of seven games in seven days, four against the surging Astros in Houston, and three in Kansas City against a Royals team that has been licking its wounds lately, and may just be waiting to take their frustration out on last season’s ALCS rivals. Finally, the Aaron Sanchez dilemma is likely creeping closer to its resolution, especially with the trade deadline tomorrow offering the team the possibility of picking up another starter. Having a replacement starter available and knowing that Sanchez would pass his previous high in innings pitched today meant a very loud clock would be ticking over his head. Like the Orioles not being able to afford wasting a Tillman start, the Jays could not afford to waste a Sanchez start.

Through six innings, Sanchez was the better pitcher, cruising as he has since his one loss back in April. Only in the third inning and the fifth, through the first six, did he leave baserunners on, Jonathan Schoop’s infield single in the third, and a walk to Matt Wieters followed by Schoop’s second hit in the fifth, both of which came with two outs.

In the seventh, when the Orioles scored two on Sanchez, it was the first inning that he let two hitters on consecutively, walking Chris Davis and giving up a double to Mark Trumbo, at the start of the inning, and though he closed the door on the Orioles hitters after that, the second-and-third with nobody out scenario was his undoing, because the Orioles cashed both runners while making outs, a Pedro Alvarez ground out to second, and a Matt Wieters fly ball to left. That was it for Sanchez, as he finished the seventh inning having given up 2 runs on 4 hits, while walking 2 and striking out 3. He took just 91 pitches to accomplish this, and even dropped his league-leading ERA among starting pitchers from 2.72 to 2.71.

Chris Tillman certainly kept his team in the game, but he didn’t go as deep as Sanchez. He ran up 111 pitches in his five and two thirds innings, and he left with his team down 2-0, and no chance of claiming a win for the Orioles. All that being said, for the most part Tillman made the pitches he needed to make. In the first, after walking Jose Bautista leading off, he threw a double-play ball to Josh Donaldson. In the second, when the Jays scored their first run, it could have been worse. With one out Russell Martin doubled to right, and was followed by an infield single by Kevin Pillar. Like Sanchez, he gave up the run on a fielder’s choice, not a hit. In the third he stranded Bautista’s leadoff double. In the fourth he made his one serious mistake, grooving a first-pitch changeup to Troy Tulowitzki, who hit it a long, long way for the two-nothing Jay lead. Though he followed by walking Martin (as who wouldn’t?) he then got the double play he needed, and struck out Kevin Pillar to end the inning.

After retiring the side in order in the fifth, Tillman still looked good for at least another full inning, especially when he started the sixth by striking out Edwin Encarnacion and Michael Saunders, though by then he was up to 98 pitches. But then a streak of wildness and a long at bat for Troy Tulowitzki allowed two runners on, sent his pitch total to 111, and spelled the end of his day. On his seventh pitch to Tulo, he came high and inside, and nicked the Jays’ shortstop’s throwing hand, on the thumb. After being attended to, Tulo took his base and waited while Martin drew a six-pitch walk. At thiat point, manager Buck Showalter called for Darren O’Day to come in to retire Kevin Pillar on a popup to Chris Davis at first. There would be no two-out heroics for Pillar on this day.

The pitch that Tulo took on his thumb was an obvious worry, and though he returned to the field for the next half-inning, and even threw out the third out on a routine play. But as we later learned, he couldn’t grip the bat properly, and Josh Donaldson came out to play third in the top of the eighth inning, with Darwin Barney sliding over to shortstop and the Jays consequently losing their designated hitter, which was of some significance in a game that would eventually go twelve innings. Not only did the loss of Tulo impact the game at hand, but his departure naturally left a heavy pall over the proceedings from the viewpoint of the Jays’ fans, who of course could only remember his loss to the team during the stretch run after the freak collision with Kevin Pillar last year. After the game he would be listed as day-to-day with a small chip fracture in his thumb.

With the game tied two-two after seven and both strong starters gone, it moved quickly through the next four innings, as one effective bullpen squared off against the other. For the Jays, Joaquin Benoit, Roberto Osuna, Jason Grilli, and Brett Cecil gave up two hits and one walk over four complete innings, while striking out five. For the Orioles, O’Day, who picked up Tillman in the sixth and then pitched the seventh, Brad Brach, Zach Britton for two innings for the first time this year, and Mychal Givens were equally effective, giving up one hit and two walks while striking out four.

Then we came to the twelfth, and the Jays’ sparkling run of relief work came to an end, as the Orioles’ bullpen proved just a little deeper on this particular day. Franklin Morales came in to match up with the left-handed-hitting Pedro Alvarez, but committed the cardinal sin for a lefty reliever, walking the lefty leadoff man on four pitches. Then home plate umpire Brian O’Nora for some incomprehensible reason called a balk on Morales on what looked for all the world like a routine throw-over to first. After Morales struck out Matt Wieters for the first out, Jonathan Schoop followed with his third base hit of the night, a single to left, and the Orioles had broken through. When Morales walked J. Hardy on a full count, Manager John Gibbons had seen enough, and called down for Jesse Chavez to come in face Adam Jones with two on and one out.

Jones put the game out of reach on the first pitch from the hot-or-cold, never warm, Chavez, as he drove it over the fence in left centre, extending the Baltimore lead to six to two. With the horse already trotting down Bremner Boulevard, Chavez locked down the Orioles by striking out Nolan Reimold and Manny Machado. Too little, too late.

Logan Ondrusek, whom the Orioles have just signed after a year and a half in Japan, where he was the closer for the Tokyo Yakult Swallows, and who pitched for them in yesterday’s loss to the Jays, mopped up today, and pitched exactly the same as yesterday, a clean inning with one strikeout. He looks very effective, and might be a surprisingly valuable addition to the Baltimore bullpen.

(A word about the names of Japanese Nippon Baseball League teams: each team is directly sponsored by a corporation, and the corporation’s name is included in the team name. Thus the fabled Tokyo Giants, which are owned by the predominant newspaper publishers Yomiuri, are in fact the Yomiuri Giants. If you look carefully at their logo, which at first glance resembles the old New York Giants logo, it is actually an English monogram of “YG”. The Tokyo Yakult Swallows, who do incorporate the city name in their team name, are owned by a pharmaceutical company that developed a probiotic dairy product, yakult, which is marketed worldwide.)

So after a disappointing finale to another terrific performance by Aaron Sanchez, the Orioles’ bullpen outlasted the Jays’, and the Orioles escaped town with a desperately-needed win. Meanwhile, the Jays’ fans were likely more troubled by the condition of Troy Tulowitzki than they were by the loss. We did take two out of three, and it’s not even August yet, after all.

Off to Houston tomorrow night. The Tigers shellacked Dallas Keuchel and the Astros 11-0 yesterday. We hope they don’t recover from that any time soon.

Beating a dead horse as I am wont to do, let me say one more time that I was quite pleased when the Blue Jays brought Jay Happ back to the nest last November, and I refused to utter a word about the significance of his signing vis-à-vis the inevitable departure of David Price to the Red Sox, which was announced about a week after Happ’s signing.

That said, another angle from which to consider Happ’s acquisition is in relation to the free agency of his mound opponent today, Yovani Gallardo. To start at the end of this little story, behind Happ’s stellar seven innings of work today, when he gave up one run, on 3 hits, while walking 3 and striking out 11, the Jays pounded out a decisive 9 to 1 win over the Orioles, and vaulted over them into first place in the American League East for the first time since the second day of the season.

The starter and loser for the Orioles, Gallardo, pitched an effective four innings, holding the Jays scoreless and giving up only three hits, but walking three and building up a fairly high pitch count. Then he totally hit the wall in the fifth, giving up a game-tying solo homer to Devon Travis with one out, then walking two, yielding a double to Edwin Encarnacion that put the Jays in the lead, and intentionally walking Michael Saunders to load the bases before departing the scene. All three runners eventually scored, closing his record at five runs allowed, which gave the Jays more runs than Happ and his successors would need today.

Gallardo came in to today’s game with a 4-0 record against the Blue Jays, having been one of their most difficult mound opponents while with Texas last year, including an effective outing in the ALDS. But he also came in, despite a modest record of 3 and 2, with an ERA of 5.37, and an average of barely 5 innings per start. So today’s performance for Gallardo was very typical of what the Orioles have been getting from him this season.

And today’s performance by Happ was very typical of what the Jays have been getting from him this season, going into today’s game at 13 and 3, with an ERA of 3.27, and an average of six and a third innings per start. And here’s the deal: Jay Happ and Yovani Gallardo were free agents together, and in the same pool of pitchers offering roughly the same career records, and looking for similar deals. As was, I should add, Marco Estrada. Now, the Jays took care of Estrada quickly, securing him for two years for 26 million on November thirteenth, only about ten days after the free agency period opened. They they signed Happ for three years for 36 million on November twenty-seventh. It was obvious by then that having committed the money to Happ and Estrada there was certainly not enough left in the bank to even pay for a phone call to Price’s agent. Of course he signed with Boston on December fourth, about a week after Happ signed with the Jays.

The Orioles did not sign Gallardo until February twenty-fifth, which suggests that a lot of teams had doubts about his worth, but in the end that did not stop the Orioles from committing almost the same money, 22 million for two years, and an option for a third at the same price, to Gallardo. The Jays came up regularly in speculation about Gallardo, but it’s clear in retrospect that the front office felt they had filled out their rotation with Happ and Estrada, and didn’t need to spend more money on another pitcher who seemed to offer a similar upside.

Looking at all of this from the perspective of a 2016 season that’s two-thirds completed, and also through the prism of today’s game, it seems clear that the Jays came out far better in signing Happ than the Orioles did in signing Gallardo. Given that the significant weakness exhibited by the Orioles’ rotation through the season so far, a weakness that their hitters and bullpen are not likely to be able to paper over forever, is now becoming obvious to anyone who can read elementary stats, it just may be that the Blue Jays, in locking up Jay Happ and Marco Estrada so early in the free agent market, also locked up the division for themselves.

We’ve already seen how Gallardo met his downfall today. But how good was Happ’s start? In the first he retired the side in order on nine pitches. In the second he gave up a solo home run to Pedro Alvarez, the only run for either side until the Blue Jays chased Gallardo in the fifth. But he also struck out his first two. He retired the side in the third, with strikeouts three and four. In the fourth he walked Manny Machado, but then added strikeouts five and six on the big bombers Davis and Trumbo. In the fifth he issued a walk to Matt Wieters, struck out number seven, and retired Wieters on a fielder’s choice to end the inning. In the sixth Adam Jones led off with a single but was erased in a double play. He walked Machado, again, and struck out Davis, again. In the seventh there was little evidence of fatigue, as he struck out the side to boost his strikeout total to eleven on the day.

Manager John Gibbons sent him back out for the eighth inning with 95 pitches under his belt, but pulled him after he gave up his third hit, to J.J. Hardy leading off. I have no doubt that he sent Happ back out with a 9-1 lead for the sole purpose of letting him walk off to the roars of the faithful at the TV Dome.

In case you weren’t counting closely enough, Pedro Alvarez was the only Oriole batter in seven innings plus one batter to touch second base safely, on his home run trot in the second. So Happ was good, really good, today. Whatever portion of his 12 million salary for 2016 he earned today was worth every penny of it. I say give the man a bonus! We went into the season with Marcus Stroman pencilled in as number one in the rotation, with Marco Estrada rated as maybe one-A. Now, how do you even rate Estrada, Happ, and Aaron Sanchez at the top of the order?

Joe Biagini came in to replace Happ and made things interesting by loading the bases on two more singles. But then he and Brett Cecil combined to keep the O’s off the board. Biagini started the force at the plate on a Jonathan Schoop comebacker, and then got Machado on a short fly to centre, Nelson Reimold holding at third. Then Gibbie turned to Cecil, who accomplished Job One for a bullpen lefty by fanning Chris Davis to end the inning. Jesse Chavez pitched a clean ninth, ending the game by striking out Ryan Flaherty, to mop up for the Jays, and Mr. Jay Happ. BTW, how could a guy who calls himself “Jay” have signed with anybody else?

Let’s turn our attention to the Jays’ hitters now. After all Gallardo and his successors didn’t exactly serve as bird walkers to escort the home team around the bases. Our boys did swing a few bats, not to mention not swinging at crucial moments as well.

Gallardo started out the fifth in fine fashion, fanning Kevin Pillar on three pitches, but that was his swan song. On a three and two pitch Devon Travis hit one out to left centre, and the Alvarez dinger was finally equalized. Then he walked Jose Bautista. He walked Josh Donaldson. Edwin Encarnacion doubled to left to score Bautista for a 2-1 lead, Donaldson stopping at third. Orioles’ Manager Buck Showalter waved Gallardo to put Michael Saunders on to load the bases, and then yanked him for the hard-throwing Mychal Givens. At least Showalter did it right, having Gallardo walk Saunders before departing, rather than asking his reliever to start his work by lobbing four wide ones.

Unfortunately for Givens and Showalter, however, the intentional pass was followed, as it so often is, by a second, unintentional, walk to Troy Tulowitzki, which extended the Jays’ lead to three-one. Russell Martin doubled to right to plate runs four and five, and send Tulo to third. After Melvin Upton struck out (and busted his bat across his knees, his slow start with the Jays getting a little frustrating), Kevin Pillar delivered a two-out double to left that extended the lead to seven-one.

So as Ernie Harwell used to say, the Jays broke open the game by unleashing “a little lightnin’ in a jar”.

In the seventh, with Odrisamer Despaigne on the hill for the Orioles, the Jays applied a some icing to the cake, just to reward Happ for striking out the side in the top of the inning. Now, I’d put Despaigne on my Best Ballplayers’ Names All-Star Team as a reliever, but he hasn’t pitched very well against us, and besides I’d have to spell his name more often if I did. I should say, though, that if I had my druthers, I druther come back as David Despaigne. How classy is that? Then I could expand my purview as yer humble scribe to plumb the history of the Expos, as well. But Odrisamer? Not so much.

Once again it was the doubles boys, Martin and Pillar doing their magic, and once again, Pillar did it with two outs, which is always sweet. Despaigne walked Michael Saunders. Cue thousands of radio broadcasters of yore, all reciting in chorus, “Oh, those bases on balls!” Then he fanned Tulo, but that just brought Martin to the plate, after which he was on second and Saunders on third. Then Melvin Upton flew out to centre to set the table for Pillar, and as far as we could see, no more bats were injured in the making of that out. Pillar then stroked a two-base liner to left, and the scorecard was complete at nine to one for the Jays. Despite Josh Donaldson’s one-out single in the eighth, Despaigne found his mojo, or at least a better one, and ended the Blue Jays’ day at the plate by striking out Encarnacion and Saunders.

So, if we had it to do over again, would we sign Jay Happ and leave Yovani Gallardo dangling in the breeze? With all due respect, you bet your sweet ass we would!

Tomorrow it’s stud versus stud, Sanchez versus Tillman, as the Jays go for the sweep, and the Orioles go for the all-important face-saving one out of three.

In some ways it’s easier to be a fan of a mediocre team, one that is playing below the.500 level. Because losses come more frequently than wins, each one doesn’t take on quite the same emotional weight as a loss like this afternoon’s to the Padres does for Blue Jays’ fans. They’re spared the existential angst of having to decide how to react to a loss.

If we’re going to take an optimistic view, here are some of the things we can say: We’ve won three of the last four. We’re allowed two losses a week, and that’s only one since Sunday. You can’t win ’em all. Hey, we didn’t lose any ground. (True, because the Orioles and the Red Sox both lost too.) A struggling team like the Padres has still won 44 games out of 102; not all of their wins can come at the expense of the real bottom-feeders. Better to lose an inter-division game than an intra-division one, because the games against AL East rivals count double. Hey, the relievers did okay, except one. And wasn’t that a great double by Pillar?

If we’re going to be pessimists, we can choose among: How can we lose to those stiffs? Dickey sucks. We want Syndergaard back. Yeah, well we were lucky Tuesday night. Shoulda lost two out of three. Look—we missed a chance to pick up a game on Baltimore and Boston. Dickey sucks. Who traded Syndergaard? Just what we needed, a downer before the Baltimore series. Bautista sucks. Lookit the attendance, another sellout. Why didn’t they bring back Price with all the money they make? We’re doomed, doomed, I say, can’t even hit a rookie. Oh, and Dickey sucks. And Syndergaard. And Syndergaard.

How to choose? What to say? How about just: What happened today? How did we lose? How did they win? What should we remember about this game, number 102 out of the 162 games of the 2016 season?

On the surface, it’s simple enough. They hit R. A. Dickey. We didn’t hit Luis Perdomo, and for once their bullpen held.

Take it a little deeper, and it might be a question of day game after night game, or more tellingly, day game after twelve-inning gut-twister of a night game. The Blue Jays could have come out flying, still high on the exhilaration of the dramatic win the night before. Or they could have come out flat and drained. The Padres could have been listless and morose, knowing that they had blown a game they should have won. Or they could have come out mad as hornets, determined to salvage something from what was looking like a lost mid-week north of the border.

In some ways, these two levels of analysis complement each other. Is baseball a physical and highly technical exercise in which fine-tuned execution is paramount? Absolutely. Is it a highly emotional game, perhaps the most emotional of all, given the tension that builds in the moments of stillness before the action happens? Sure is.

Manager John Gibbons juggled the rotation to start R.A. Dickey today. There were two purposes, he claimed, for doing this. We hope that there wasn’t a third one lurking below the surface that he didn’t want to admit. The first was to align the top end of his rotation to face the Orioles this weekend, by moving Marco Estrada from today to Friday night, and, not coincidentally, keeping those big Oriole bats away from any Dickey flutterers that might not flutter just right in the cozy confines of the TV Dome. The second was to give Russell Martin two more days of rest for his sore knee, after having returned to the lineup Tuesday evening and catching twelve innings, and running the bases, and sliding, as well. We sincerely hope that the change was not also made because Estrada’s back issues really aren’t quite resolved yet.

On a hot and breezy day that should have favoured the knuckler, Dickey started out well enough in the first, albeit losing Wil Myers on a 3-2 pitch. He promptly made up for that by picking Myers off first. He had fanned Travis Jankowski prior to the walk, and fanned Matt Kemp afterward, so all good.

All good through the second and into the third, as he retired five in a row after the pickoff. Then the capricious fates intervened, or the wind changed direction, or something, as he approached the bottom of the order. He nicked number eight hitter and former Blue Jay prospect Brett Wallace. This brought the number nine hitter, third baseman Adam Rosales, to the plate. When the lineups came out, it was announced, that Rosales was subbing for Yangervis Solarte, who’d been called away on personal leave. A number nine hitter at third instead of Solarte hitting cleanup and threatening mayhem at every turn at bat looked like a good thing.

Rosales had never faced Dickey before, and the camera caught a good image of the smile of disbelief on his face after Dickey’s first knuckler floated in for a strike. Didn’t last long, though, as he timed up the next one and jacked it over the wall in left centre for a two-run Padres lead. Come back, Yangervis, we’ll take our chances with you! After the homer he walked Jankowski, but got Myers to ground into an around-the-horn double play.

In the top of the fourth he continued to dominate the meat of the San Diego order, popping up Matt Kemp and fanning the doughty young Dickerson. (I’m curious: does anyone say “doughty” any more?) But then a blip, a bop, and a double bumble helped the Padres to double their lead. The blip on Dickey’s part was a walk to Ryan Schimpf, with two outs, remember. The bop was a big double off the bat of catcher Christian Bethancourt to the wall in centre. The first bumble was Kevin Pillar fumbling the carom off the wall, which had to be retrieved by Zeke Carrera. The second bumble was Devon Travis short-hopping Josh Donaldson at third with his relay from Carrera, which skipped away. Instead of being on second with a double, Bethancourt had joined Schimpf in the dugout, cooling out, and it was 4-0 Padres.

Normally, 4-0, or even the 5-0 that it became when Brett Wallace homered off Dickey to lead off the fifth wouldn’t exactly seem insurmountable, except that the Jays were going exactly nowhere against the slants of Luis Perdomo. Perdomo, a 23-year-old rule 5 player who started the year in the Padres’ bullpen, has now made ten starts since being put into the rotation. Things started to crystalize seriously for Perdomo in his last start against the NL East division leaders the Washington Nationals on July 22^nd, when he gave up two runs on four hits with only one walk in seven innings for the win. Today he was if anything better, at least through five, but he couldn’t escape the Jays’ hitters in the sixth, when they finally decided that familiarity breeds.

In his first five innings, though, this is how it went: he gave up a seriously tainted ground-rule double to Josh Donaldson in the first, on a catchable fly ball into the right-field corner that Wil Myers, patrolling right field for the first time after two games at first base, seemed to give up on, and then react with surprise when it bounced in front of him and then into the stands. It mattered little, however, because around the double Perdomo fanned all three of Bautista, Encarnacion, and Melvin Upton, hitting fourth in his first start for his new team.

In the second, he gave up a leadoff single to Kevin Pillar, but stranded him on third as the Jays couldn’t coax another base hit off him. That was it. Even when we finally scored a run in the fifth, it was without benefit of a base hit. He walked Devon Travis, who advanced to second on a wild pitch, to third on a right-side ground-out, and scored on a hard liner to left by Darwin Barney that went for a sacrifice fly. So, after five, he had given up one run on two hits, one tainted, and one walk. He had thrown only 63 pitches, and his five-one lead looked pretty good going to the sixth.

It looked even better at 7-1 and Dickey out of the game by the time he took the mound for the bottom of the sixth. Dickey’s last inning was a familiar story for him this season. After walking the leadoff batter, he quickly dispatched the tough guys, Dickerson and Schimpf, before another Bethancourt double rocked him, bringing Matt Kemp around to score from second. That was it for the knucksie, 5.2 innings, five earned runs on four hits, four walks, five strikeouts, and 102 pitches. There was also the matter of Bethancourt at second, also his responsibility. Joe Biagini came in to finish the inning, but not before yielding an RBI single to Brett Wallace which scored Bethancourt and closed Dickey out at six earned runs.

The sixth proved to be Perdomo’s Waterloo too. When you think about it, it’s going to be the rare case when a rookie starter is able to sail through the Jays’ order for the third time without being burned. And while Perdomo was good today, he wasn’t rare. The only saving grace for him was that he had a big lead starting the inning, and a big enough lead left when he exited at the same five and two thirds point as Dickey.

Emulating Dickey to the letter, Perdomo got two quick outs on the big guys, popping up Bautista in foul territory to the third baseman Rosales, and fanning Donaldson. But then he walked Encarnacion, and gave up his first hit as a Blue Jay to Melvin Upton. This brought Kevin Pillar to the plate, hitting fifth today with Troy Tulowitzki, Russell Martin, and Justin Smoak not in the lineup. Pillar hit the only serious shot of the whole day for the Jays, a blast to left centre that went for a double and scored both Encarnacion and Upton, who showed his speed running from first. Devon Travis followed with an infield hit toward third on which Pillar took third, and Zeke Carrera singled to right to score Pillar and send Travis around to third. That was it for Perdomo, and he left having given up four runs on six hits with two walks and four strikeouts, and a pitch count pushed up to 91 with his sixth-inning troubles. Brad Hand, one of the Wild Men of Tuesday night’s game, came on to face the gritty Darwin Barney, and high hopes were entertained for diminishing the gap even further, but this time Hand got the upper hand (sorry) and Barney flied out to right. But the lead was now only 7-4, and after such a barren start to the game, the rally suggested that, like last night, anything might be possible.

But this time it was not to be. Hand walked Josh Thole to start the seventh, and the sound you still hear is the echo of Padres’ Manager Andy Green’s teeth grinding,  reverberating yet around the world hours later, that his reliever should issue a leadoff walk to the light-hitting number nine batter Thole. But Jose Bautista grounded into a quick double play, and all was peace and light in the San Diego dugout. As for the Jays, Thole was their last baserunner of the day. Jose Dominguez struck out two in the eighth, Brandon Maurer struck out two in the ninth, and the other two batters were retired on a checked-swing dribbler to the catcher Bethancourt in the eighth, and a comebacker to Maurer in the ninth.

Biagini threw a clean seventh for the Jays, and Franklin Morales made his second appearance in the eighth and looked good except for the leadoff dinger hit by Dickerson he (please, somebody, kneecap that guy before he wrecks the whole league), which extended the lead to four runs and sunk spirits in the third-base dugout even lower. Ancient newcomer—hey! He’s the Ancient Mariner!–Joaquin Benoit pitched a wobbly but runless ninth, walking two and giving up a stolen base on the way. The activity on the bases all came after two were out, of course.

So, were the Jays flat and the Padres cranked? Their hitters hit ropes and their pitchers threw strikes, and ours hit grounders and walked/hit batters. Was it emotion or execution, or a little of both? Or just another day on a long and wandering journey to October? One thing that’s for sure, though: I’d rather be following the Jays who lost today, than the Padres who won.

Speaking of Ancient Mariners as we were, I’m going to close with one of my favourite baseball cartoons. “Brother Juniper” was a sweet and corny one-panel strip featuring the naive and rotund Brother Juniper, whose innocence and fecklessness lead him into various comic scenarios. Occasionally the strip featured the monks’ baseball team (does this fit in here, or what—we just finished playing the Padres), and in one of them, the elderly brother who coaches the team is commenting to his assistant, while watching Brother Juniper, decked out in catcher’s gear, chase a wild pitch. “Brother Juniper is like the Ancient Mariner”, says the coach, “he stoppeth one of three.”

I appreciate it and good night, as Jim Nabors used to say.

Well, that was an exciting day, and night!

If people weren’t feeling much of a buzz about the pennant race so far this summer, the tectonic plates of Blue Jay fandom started to shift today, and a subterranean rumble can be felt.

In mid-morning the announcement was made that the Jays had indeed acquired Melvin Upton Jr. from the San Diego Padres, as the reports had had it, and that he would be switching dugouts for the evening game at the TV Dome. Before going any further, just to be clear, this new Blue Jay Upton is indeed the very same player formerly known as B.J. Upton, whom we knew well from the beginning of his career with the Tampa Bay Rays, and the brother of Justin Upton, who just passed through town with the Tigers. The story of how B.J. became Melvin Jr. is now well documented in the press coverage of the trade, so I won’t linger over it here.

I was initially puzzled at the talk that Upton was coming here, because I didn’t see much of a role for him, especially since I assumed the cost would be pretty high, given the interest his availability had generated. As it turns out, though, this is really a sweetheart deal for the Jays. The Padres are eating most of his large salary through next year, and the player cost was a pitching prospect, Hansel Rodriguez, currently at rookie-level A-ball, who was not on most people’s radar yet. As for Upton’s role, more astute observers than I have pointed out that he is in some ways an acquisition for 2016, since he will still be under contract when both Michael Saunders and Jose Bautista could walk as free agents. So, insurance for the future in a good ballplayer with a proven track record, but what are the implications for the current 25-man roster? Ryan “Yo-yo” Tepera was shuffled off to Buffalo again to make immediate room for Upton. Poor guy, this time he didn’t even throw a pitch in anger.

But how long can the Jays go with a seven-man bullpen and five outfielders? It seems that the real sticking point is what is to become of Zeke Carrera, currently the fourth outfielder, who has endeared himself to his team-mates and fans alike by stepping up at some important moments when given the chance. The other consideration here is that Ryan Goins is getting closer to coming back from his arm injury, and some thought has to be given as to how he fits into the mix, especially since he has been developing his skills at first and in the outfield.

So, lots to talk about, roster-wise, for the Jays, without even considering that they announced a further acquisition after the game, actually getting something in return for Drew Storen, which was a surprise, which means that the Ben Revere legacy still lives, for the time being. Coming our way from the Mariners is thirty-nine-year-old Joaquin Benoit, another senior citizen to join Jason Grilli in the bullpen. The Blue Jays will have to go back to LazyBoy to get another rocker so that Benoit and Grilli can be comfy when they sit out there chatting about back in the day and so on. Benoit had some great years as the Tigers’ closer, but of course that was then. I guess the thinking is that Grilli worked out so well it’s worth taking a chance on another veteran arm.

There’s nothing that stirs up the fans and the commentators in this city quite so much as player transaction activity, and today was no exception. But I’ll leave the chatterers to chatter, and go on to the most exciting part of the day’s news, the improbable, mercurial, come-from-behind twelve-inning 7-6 Jays’ win over the Padres.

Sometimes at the end of a game all you can do is sit back and echo the familiar old Mel Allen line, “Well, how ’bout that?”

Through five innings, Marcus Stroman looked like the last Marcus Stroman we saw, which was a good thing. Other than a single in the third to Wil Myers, Stroman only had a spot of trouble in the second, when Ryan Schimpf’s double to left scored Yangervis Solarte, all the way from first, after the latter had led off with a single. This cut the lead the Jays had taken in the bottom of the first to 2-1. Andrew Cashner, auditioning for a major role with a contender (isn’t this a strange time of year?) started off the first by walking Jose Bautista, and then giving up a booming home run to centre by Josh Donaldson. Then Edwin Encarnacion hit one so hard off the left field wall that he was held to a single. At this point all the scouts in attendance except the rep from the Mickey Mouse Club started to close their notebooks and get out their sun screen, but their attention was quickly brought back to focus on Cashner as he caught Michael Saunders looking and got Troy Tulowitzki to ground into a double play.

Despite walking, then stranding, leadoff batters in the second and fourth innings, Cashner basically cruised until the fifth, holding the score at 2-1 until Justin Smoak, leading off the fifth, took him out to centre, extending Stroman’s lead to 3-1.

That’s how it stood in the top of the sixth when Stroman wavered for the second time, gave up the lead, and pretty well lost his chance for the win. The Padres sandwiched singles by Travis Jankowski and Matt Kemp around Stroman catching Wil Myers looking. Yangervis Solarte made the second out, but it was a loud one, as he drove Kevin Pillar right back to the wall in centre. This allowed Jankowski to advance to third, which didn’t much matter when the next hitter, Alex Dickerson, who is obviously ready to take over for Upton in left field, hit another homer to right, but this time only to the second deck. The lad must not have finished his power steak before the game. That’ll teach him. A chastened Stroman managed to freeze Shimpf to end the inning, and headed for the dugout hoping the Jays might tie it up for him in their half of the frame.

Didn’t happen, though. Cashner cruised through his last inning on 15 pitches, giving the army of scouts enough to think about, with a line of 6 innings, 3 runs, 4 hits, 3 walks, 6 strikeouts, and 108 pitches. Working on a fairly low pitch count of 81 for 6 innings, Stroman was sent back out by Manager John Gibbons to try to get one more inning, and another chance at salvaging the win with a Jays’ rally in the seventh, but he didn’t quite make it, getting two outs but unable to finish off the side. Alexei Ramirez flied out to centre and Brett Wallace fanned. But then Stroman walked the number nine hitter Derek Norris, and gave up a double to Travis Jankowski, with Norris stopping at third. That was it for Stroman: no chance to benefit from a comeback. His line: 6.2 innings, 4 runs, 7 hits, 1 walk, 7 strikeouts, on 99 pitches. This brought Joe Biagini in with runners on second and third and two outs.

It took Biagini exactly one pitch, and Troy Tulowitzki exactly one play, to strand the baserunners and keep the score at 4-3. But oh, what a play it was. Wil Myers hit a

slo-o-o-o-w bouncer past Biagini towards short and Tulo, charging in, and still charging in, barehanded the ball and threw in one motion to nip Myers at first.

As of the bottom of the seventh, then, the game was in the hands of the two bullpens. Though much happened in the four and a half innings before the game would be decided, the essential fact is this: the Jays relievers threw strikes, and the San Diego relievers, in crucial situations, did not. Starting with the bottom of the seventh, when Padres’ wildness gave the Jays the tying run, through to the bottom of the twelfth, wild pitches by San Diego would determine the outcome. And even though Jesse Chavez grooved one to Matt Kemp with one aboard in the twelfth to give the Padres a short-lived 6-4 lead, the inability of their bullpen to hold two different leads stemmed from wild pitches.

With Cashner out of the way, the Jays capitalized on the wildness of left-handed reliever Brad Hand, and the seeming reluctance of Padres’ Manager Andy Green to do anything about it. He started the inning by throwing eight straight balls to Russell Martin and Kevin Pillar. This brought Melvin Upton to the plate for his first appearance as a Blue Jay, an at-bat that offered a glimpse into the thinking of John Gibbons in regard to the use of Upton. He was hitting for the switch-hitting Justin Smoak, which seems odd on the face of it, except that the perception is growing that Smoak is struggling somewhat against left-handers, and Upton would provide a better option.

Though he didn’t break the game open, Upton had the opportunity to show off the one tool that he has which is badly needed by the Jays, his speed. He hit a grounder to first on which first baseman Wil Myers tried to turn the double play, but Upton beat the relay, while Martin moved to third. He moved up immediately on a short wild pitch. With runners at second and third and one out, it looked good for the home team to tie it up, but it didn’t come easily. Devon Travis topped one up the third base line that Solarte could not make a play on, but the runners had to hold, so the bases were loaded for Bautista, who struck out swinging, but not before he had a ring-side seat to see Martin finally score the tying run on a wild pitch. Hand had in fact bounced a couple of pitches to Bautista, but playing it cautiously, coach Luis Rivera had kept Martin close to home, until he decided to take the chance on the strikeout pitch. Things still looked good, with Donaldson coming up and Upton and Travis in scoring position, but Hand got Donaldson to pop up to short to end the inning. What’s not clear is why Hand was left in the game. He was the first in after Cashner, and Green had only used two relievers for an inning each the night before, so it’s hard to imagine why he didn’t go to a right-hander to face Upton. Oh well, not my problem.

The game rolled from the bottom of the seventh into extra innings with a sense of inevitability, the only real challenge on either side the pickle that Roberto Osuna put himself into in the top of the ninth. Perhaps feeling the effects of his third outing in a row, Osuna hit two batters and allowed a stolen base before narrowly escaping with his skin when Wil Myers hit a screamer with two outs, but right at Donaldson. Jose Dominguez came in to pitch the bottom of the ninth to the Jays, and immediately plunked Martin to return the favour to Osuna but then retired Kevin Pillar on a soft flare to Schimpf at second, and got Tulowitzki to hit into a double play, squelching any hope of a regulation walk-off for the Jays.

The extra frames were marked by solid pitching on both sides, and no threats to end it before the twelfth. Jesse Chavez and Brandon Maurer went pitch for pitch through the tenth and eleventh, Chavez retiring six in a row, and Maurer only facing six, as he erased an Encarnacion leadoff single in the eleventh by getting an inning-ending double play.

Chavez continued his domination of the Padres through the first two hitters in the twelfth, extending his streat to eight consecutive outs, before teeing one up to Wil Myers, who hit a liner to right that went for a double, but to me was a catchable ball. I had the sense that Jose Bautista maybe thought it was out, and didn’t go hard enough for it, with the result that it went over his head. Regardless, this was the wedge that San Diego needed against Chavez, and brought the tough Matt Kemp to the plate. Kemp lined a one-one pitch over the wall in left to give the Padres a two-run lead. Fortunately, as it turned out for Chavez, Gibbons left him in the game to get Solarte on an easy grounder to first to end the inning. This out would eventually give him the win. You can hardly fault Chavez, who’d been perfect through eight hitters, and maybe should have had the ninth out as well, for giving up the homer to Kemp.

The bottom of the twelfth brought former Jay Carlos Villanueva to the mound for the save, but like Hand in the bottom of the seventh, things just got away from him. Russell Martin led off with a line single to centre. Kevin Pillar hit a potential double-play ball, but beat out the relay to first, a good result for the Jays, replacing the slower Martin with the swift Pillar at first. This brought Darwin Barney to the plate for his one and only at-bat of the game, a result of Gibbie’s having hit Upton for Smoak in the seventh. With Smoak out of the game, Encarnacion had taken over at first, and when your DH takes a fielding position, you lose your DH. So Smoak’s eighth place in the batting order became the pitcher’s slot, and Barney came in to hit for Chavez. Not for the first time showing a flare for the clutch at-bat, Barney turned on Villanueva’s sixth pitch and drove it hard up the alley into left centre. He hit it so hard that Pillar had to stop at third.

This brought Devon Travis to the plate, for a battle with Villanueva that contained the whole game, and all of baseball in the drama that played out between them. Fourteen pitches. The first five pitches took the count to three and two. Then Travis fouled one off. And another. And another. Villanueva threw three fast balls, two sliders, and three more fast balls. Travis spoiled them all. All but one. On the twelfth pitch of the at bat, Travis turned on an inside fast ball and caught it square. He danced sideways down the first-base line, watching it all the way, until it just hooked out at the left field foul pole. The whole stadium, the whole watching city, deflated like a big dead balloon. Finally, though, on pitch fourteen, Villanueva tried a changeup, it missed low, and the bases were loaded for Bautista.

That was enough for Andy Green, who called in another right-hander, Paul Clemens, to face Bautista. It wasn’t pretty, but thanks to another bout of wildness from the new Padres reliever, all three runners scored to give the Jays the walk-off win without benefit of a hit. Bautista walked on a three and one pitch to score Pillar. Josh Donaldson went to a full count, then hit a ground ball to second. Schimpf turned it over to Ramirez for the force on Bautista, but Bautista’s hard legal slide disrupted Ramirez, Donaldson was safe at first, and Barney had scored the tying run. Finally, with Edwin Encarnacion at the plate, Clemens bounced the first pitch to him, and though it didn’t go too far off to the right of catcher Derek Norris, coach Rivera took one last chance and unleashed Travis, who slid across the plate ahead of the tag, and the game was over.

In two minutes short of four hours, the Jays had led, trailed, tied, lost, and finally won the game, in a rush of excitement that might just carry us into the lead in the AL East, and sooner, rather than later. In a few short hours, R.A. Dickey will face Rule 5 rookie Luis Perdomo tomorrow afternoon as the Blue Jays go for the sweep.

Here’s an important message for Blue Jays’ General Manager Ross Atkins: Put down that phone, back away from your desk slowly, and no one gets hurt. And don’t talk to Manager John Gibbons about anything other than the weather, either.

I am getting tired of all the talk about the trade deadline and roster moves, which is taking away from the really important thing: what’s going on right in front of our eyes down on the field, such as Aaron Sanchez’ brilliant performance tonight in shutting out the San Diego Padres over seven innings. In fact, I’m so determined not to write about the controversy swirling around whether Sanchez gets moved to the bullpen that I actually considered starting off by writing about the Padres’ uniforms.

Now that I’ve mentioned it, I might as well get the uniform thing off my chest anyway. I was so relieved that the Padres showed up for their first game ever at the TV Dome wearing very nice blue tops with retro piping and a lovely monogrammed Old English SD on the left breast. After watching (some of; it’s not my cup of tea) the Home Run Derby last week, I was having nightmares of the Padres showing up here wearing the incredibly ugly brown and yellow tops that have been their trademark for years. I’m not sure why they even chose those colours. I can guess that the brown was for the monks’ robes of the original padres, and the yellow maybe for the blazing southern California sun, but to me they suggest other, more vulgar manifestations of things brown and yellow. Which, when you think about the fact that the high point in San Diego Padres’ history is winning one game against the Tigers in the 1984 World Series, is probably an appropriate interpretation of their traditional colour scheme. If I were a Padres fan, and had to suffer with that shitty team all these years, frankly, I’d be pissed too.

Okay, back to Ross Atkins, and the physical threat to him implied in my opening paragraph. I don’t think the Blue Jays should be talking about finding another starting pitcher when they’ve got the best young starter in the American League right under their noses. Tonight was the tenth time in Aaron Sanchez’ last eleven starts that he held the opposition to one or zero runs. I’m not even going to comment about that. Just take a moment and think about it. Bullpen? You’ve got to be kidding.

Tonight, behind Sanchez for the first time this season, the Blue Jays fielded intact and hitting pretty well on all cylinders the team that they were supposed to deploy from the beginning of the year. What other team in either league can lead off with a proven slugger like Jose Bautista, just because the manager has to pick one of his heavy hitters to lead off, because that’s pretty well all he has? What other team can hit a proven if streaky slugger like Justin Smoak eighth, and a blue-chip young star like Devon Travis ninth? Really, if it weren’t for the fact that Bautista and Russell Martin aren’t quite one hundred percent physically at the moment, it would only be fair for the Blue Jays to spot the other team a couple of runs at the start on nights when someone like Sanchez, or Jay Happ, or Marco Estrada, or Marcus Stroman at his best, is on the mound.

That is not to say, of course, that the Jays always jump out on top, even if they’re not facing a premier starter. Tonight, for example, with right-hander Colin Rea going for the Padres, they were basically looking at the guy who, along with Andrew Cashner, who pitches tomorrow night if he’s still a Padre, is about as good as San Diego has, now that Drew Pomerantz is off to Fenway. Despite an ERA over five, and the fact that he walked three batters, he held the Jays hitless through three, facing only two batters over the minimum thanks to an inning-ending double play in the third. He did get outs on three really hard-hit balls, however, so there was a sense that it was only a matter of time before hits would start to fall in, especially as the Jays started to go through the order the second time.

The first hit fell in in the fourth, when the Jays got to Rea for a run, and could have had more. After Edwin Encarnacion, who has gone a bit quiet lately, led off by grounding out to third, Michael Saunders hit a booming drive up the alley in right centre, and by the time the fielders tracked it down, he had a triple. Troy Tulowitzki immediately delivered him with the loudest sacrifice fly of the season to date. Tulo hit one right on the screws and sent it on a line right over the fielder’s head in centre. But Travis Jankowski raced back and to his right, made a desperate leap towards the wall, and snagged it, but with no chance of getting Saunders from third. Russell Martin ended the inning by driving the ball equally deeply to centre, but into a more routine catch by Jankowski. So after four the Jays had one run, one hit, three walks, and six balls hit about as hard as they could have been hit.

The slashing continued in the fifth, and yielded two more runs for Toronto. Kevin Pillar led off by roping one into the alley in right centre for a double. After Rea struck out Justin Smoak, and had Devon Travis on the ropes with a one-two count, Travis got out in front of one that shattered his bat lengthways down the barrell, a strange sight. Even stranger was to see that he had muscled the ball fair down the left field line until it one-hopped the fence, driving Pillar in from second and arriving there himself with the second double of the inning.

Maybe feeling a little spooked by the weird RBI, Rea walked Bautista on a three-two count, and went 2-0 on Josh Donaldson, forcing him to come in with a pitch. Donaldson was on it like karate-man and slashed it through the left side of the infield for the third Blue Jays’ run on the night.

Rea got through the sixth, stranding an infield single and stolen base by Pillar, so he qualified for a quality start, albeit a shaky one, giving up three runs on five hits with four walks and four strikeouts on 103 pitches. Not a bad outing at all for a guy like Rea, against a lineup like he was facing, but way short of what was needed, which was near perfection, against Sanchez tonight.

A second right-hander, Jose Dominguez, took over for Rea in the seventh, and got out of the inning without being scored on, despite giving up lead-off singles to Travis and Bautista. He was helped by New York overturning a safe call at first on Josh Donaldson, resulting in the ever-popular 3-5-1 double play. Rather comically, Dominguez had gotten tangled up with himself getting to the bag, and ended up taking the return throw from second as he flopped to the ground, his rear end somewhere in the vicinity of the bag. First-base umpire Dan Iassogna, blocked by Donaldson crossing the bag, initially thought the pitcher hadn’t made contact with the bag, but the replays clearly showed that he had, and the out call came from New York. Taking off his headset, Iassogna altered the traditional symbol by pointing to his own butt before raising his right hand. Travis then died at third as Encarnacion skied to left.

Matt Thornton came on for the Padres in the eighth and was victimized for the Jays’ final run by ringing doubles off the bats of Tulo and Pillar, the latter down the left field line, after he had just spiked one barely foul down the right field line, a graphic display of hitting from line to line. This last run caused a bit of a flurry in the Jays bullpen, because it took the save situation off. Roberto Osuna, who had been warming up, sat down and Bo Schultz quickly got up to take his place. In retrospect, though, it was a good thing that Osuna had already warmed up.

With the four runs, given good support by his bullpen, Sanchez could have chalked up four more wins, the way he was pitching. It did take him an inning to settle, as the Padres mounted their only threat, if you could call it that, in the first inning, when after two quick ground ball outs, he walked Matt Kemp and gave up an infield single to the right side to Yangervis Solarte. Sanchez snuffed out the inning by fanning Alex Dickinson, who as it turned out was the only hitter to solve Jays’ pitching the whole night.

From the strikeout of Dickinson in the first, the imposing young right-hander cruised through nine straight Padres, until Dickinson came up again in the fourth, and hit a little nubber toward second. Travis came in for it, Encarnacion ranged over for it, but Sanchez beat them both to it, corralling it skidding on his knees, only to discover that the only player near first was Dickerson, for infield hit number two for the Padres.

Sanchez ended the fourth by getting former Jays’ farmhand and current San Diego rookie Ryan Schimpf to pop out to Donaldson at third. He retired the side in order in the fifth, and made a little mess for himself in the sixth by walking leadoff hitter Travis Jankowski and wild-pitching him to second with only one out. A sharp play by Tulo and a dumb play by Jankowski erased the runner, though, for the second out. Matt Kemp hit a fairly hard grounder to the right of Tulowitzki, who fielded it easily, and looked up in surprise to see Jankowski moseying along toward third without a care in the world. Tulo fired to Donaldson, who chased the scrambling Jankowski back toward second, eventually diving to lay the tag on the runner’s lag. It looked like an instant (well, 24-years-later-instant) replay of the non-call of Kelly Gruber’s triple play tag on the foot of Deion Sanders. This time the ump got it right, and Jankowski was out.

The Padres’ lineup turned over to bring Dickerson back up to the plate leading off against Sanchez in the top of the second, and he finally made the first solid contact off the Jays’ starter, hitting a double into right-centre field. Sanchez quickly reverted to form and stranded Dickerson at second with his seventh strikeout, a grounder to

short, and a weak fly to left to end his night, at seven innings, no runs, three hits, two walks, seven strikeouts, and 103 pitches.

Jason Grilli came on in the eighth for Sanchez and did another good job setting up for Osuna. He struck out the catcher Derek Norris, hit Jankowski, who had an adventurous night, with a pitch, then erased him with a double play ball from San Diego All Star Wil Myers.

With the save off the table, for the moment, anyway, Schultz came on to finish up for the Jays, but the Padres quickly finished him, as he had his first really bad outing since being activated from the DL, and gave Osuna his save opportunity after all. Matt Kemp led off with a double, and moved to third as Solarte grounded out to first. This brought Dickerson back up. Dickerson, who was clearly indifferent to which big flamethrower he was facing, squared one up off Schultz and hit it about nine miles to right. I wish somebody would hit a ball into the 500 level when I’m sitting there!

That was it for Schultz, and Osuna came in and wrapped it up in seven pitches for his 21^st save in 23 opportunities. By the way, Dickerson’s prodigious dinger broke a streak of 18 consecutive scoreless innings by the Blue Jays’ pitching staff. Oh, why did they let David Price go?

Tomorrow night Aaron Sanchez’ best bud Marcus Stroman goes against Andrew Cashner for the Padres, if, that is, Cashner is still a Padre. Funny days, these.

This morning was a tense time for the Blue Jays’ faithful.

Going into today’s series closer against the Seattle Mariners, here’s where we stood: we’d lost four of seven since the All-Star break. We’d been stifled for two straight games by strong Seattle pitching. After a classic Friday-night pitchers’ battle, the loss of which could be tolerated, we’d been humiliated on Saturday, as R.A. Dickey had his shortest start of the season, and the bullpen imploded in Titanic proportions. The Orioles were still rolling along, finding ways to win with a starting rotation consisting of Eric Tillman and a lot of bailing wire. Boston was still winning enough to stay ahead of us, with a starting rotation in which their two best pitchers are not named David Price, and their high-priced acquisition might be a dud. And the Yankees were doing a number on the tough Giants, staying uncomfortably close in our rear-view mirror despite declaring to the entire world that they’re going to be sellers this July.

In short, we needed a win in the worst way. (That’s a funny expression, isn’t it? Can you need something “in the best way”? What would that mean, even?) And what better way to get a W than with a short, crisp, clean 2-0 shutout, in which four Jays’ hurlers combined for a one-hitter, and the offensive punch was provided by Edwin’s big bat and Josh Thole’s cheeky hand?

But before we get on to the satisfying story of today’s game, here’s a philosophical question for you: If the player you were traded for is released, did you ever really exist? Before the game the Jays’ front office made an announcement of a player change that both surprised and didn’t surprise. Drew Storen has been “designated for assignment”, and Ryan Tepera, designated yo-yo, has been called up yet again from Buffalo to take his place on the twenty-five man roster. I hope Tepera puts in a claim for mileage for the time he spends on the QEW.

Like most Jays’ fans, I suspect, I was sorry to see Ben Revere go in the off-season, but totally understood that with Michael Saunders returning and Dalton Pompey waiting patiently in the wings it made perfect sense to cash in Revere’s value in exchange for an important piece of a bullpen that was short of important pieces. Drew Storen seemed to fill the bill, even if there were some concerns about his loss of status in the Washington bullpen in the latter half of 2015.

On the other hand, I liked having Ben Revere around. I liked him a lot, his infectious smile, his bounce, his obvious joy in playing the game, and getting to play it with big chips on the table for once. Yet, in reality, he was a short-armed corner outfielder (for us—he would never have switched to centre over Kevin Pillar) who lacked power, was slower than the norm for outfielders and especially for a leadoff man. His OBP wasn’t really all that good for leading off, and frankly it became annoying to see him slap the ball the other way and ground out early in the count so often. Ben Revere, meet Jose Reyes. He was a stop-gap at best, who made one great catch and got a couple of clutch hits, but struck out way too often, especially in high-leverage situations. He was not a major contributor in the playoffs, hitting .255, down from .319 in the regular season with the Jays, with one double in 47 plate appearance. He did steal two bases, but struck out more than he walked (7/4).

There’s not much need to dwell on why Drew Storen is no longer a Blue Jay this fine July Sunday. Though he had some good outings, his numbers overall were terrible, and he suffered through some of the worst relief outings in recent Jays’ history. The role that he had been expected to fill seems to have fallen firmly onto the capable shouders of Jason Grilli, grateful for the opportunity, who wasn’t on the radar when Storen was acquired. Still, some thoughtful commentators have pointed out that the unintended positive outcomes of Storen-for-Revere still outweigh the negatives. Storen’s arrival made it easier to make the call in the spring to move Aaron Sanchez to the rotation, and Revere’s departure provided the playing time that Michael Saunders has used so well to his and the team’s great good. So, other than the fact that the Jays will have to eat some or most of Storen’s contract, it’s all good for the team, and too bad that it didn’t work out here for Drew Storen.

So with Storen gone, Tepera on hand, Jose Bautista apparently returning for Monday’s game, Ryan Goins in the wings, and Chris Colabello trying to get his bat untracked at Buffalo, there’s a sense of reinforcements on the way. I expect the Jays to play the hand they have from this point, and not get too caught up in the trade deadline frenzy. They might want a starting pitcher if, heaven forfend, the decision is made to shunt Aaron Sanchez to the bullpen, but at the extreme cost established by the Boston deal for Drew Pomerantz, it’s likely that Drew Hutchison will give them as much of what they need as any rental pitcher on the market, and all they have to do is keep paying his salary.

As we’ve noted (ahem!) more than once in this space, the Blue Jays stand fortunate indeed in terms of the quality of their starting pitchers, especially within their own division. The sensible decision to let David Price go, spend some of his cash on Jay Happ and Marco Estrada, and pocket the rest of the difference for a rainy day is looking better and better. Today Happ showed once again how significant was the early-winter decision by the Jays’ front office to bring him back to Toronto, regardless of the huge level of indifference with which the news was greeted by many at the time.

I was a little worried about how Happ would do today, given the abbreviated nature of his last outing. You will recall that last Sunday in Oakland he soldiered on to finish the fourth inning and go two thirds into the fifth inning after having a baseball tattoo stamped on his left forearm by a vicious line drive. With Happ it’s a two-fold worry, firstly, of course, that his pitching arm was hit, but secondly, and of more long-range concern, that he is a recent victim of severe concussion caused by a batted ball. In his previous tenure with Toronto, he was stretchered off the field in Tampa Bay in May of 2013 after being hit by a line drive off the bat of Desmond Jennings. Though he’s obviously recovered long since from the physical effects of the injury, and is currently achieving at the very highest level of his entire pitching career, you can never discount the lifelong trauma that must be associated with such an event. So, how would he react after the incident in Oakland?

If you just looked at his pitching line, you would think, and rightly so, that he came back just fine from last week. 6 innings, no runs, one hit, what’s not to like, right? But though he was extremely effective at getting outs and avoiding hard contact, he did have to work a little harder than usual, resulting in a pitch count of 103, and a slightly earlier departure, after six innings, than you would expect from someone throwing a one-hitter. Besides his six strikeouts, he did have four walks and hit Robinson Cano in the fourth inning after walking Chris Iannetta, the only inning in which he struggled even slightly. I wouldn’t want to dwell on this further, but it’s hard to tell if he was back to normal; he has been tending to higher pitch counts in his more recent starts in any case, so was this the forearm hurting some, or just a bit of trouble spotting his pitches?

In any case, Happ and his three successors totally suppressed the Mariners for the entire game, which was an impressive feat considering how freely they’d swung on Saturday against Dickey, Chavez, and the now-departed Storen. Happ gave up the only hit, a single to right by Leonys Martin with one out in the third, but the Mariners to my mind wasted that one by having the shortstop, Luis Sardinas, who admittedly is only hitting .188, sacrifice him to second for the second out. That’s a move I just don’t get unless you’re playing National League rules and you’ve got a really poor-hitting pitcher at the plate. Aoki grounded out to Devon Travis at second to end that “threat”.

Brett Cecil, Jason Grilli, and Roberto Osuna for the save picked up the left-handed starter, and all contributed to preserving the one-hitter he had passed on to them. Cecil walked Kyle Seager with one out in the seventh, and that was the only runner allowed by the three relievers, who struck out four of the nine batters they faced. If this is the new face of the back end of the Blue Jays’ bullpen, I like it. On past record this year, Cecil is the question mark of the three, but he was particularly sharp today, with his curve ball mesmerizing batters as of old.

Wade Miley, whom the Jays have battered somewhat in the past, today matched Happ pretty well pitch for pitch. He gave up two runs on four hits over six innings, while walking only two, and striking out four, and kept his pitch count to 89 over the six innings. The paper-thin margin between the two performances on the mound was the two hard drives given up by Miley, Edwin Encarnacion’s solo blast to centre in the fourth that eventually stood up for the win, and Josh Thole’s leadoff shot to right centre in the sixth that split the outfielders for a double. Thole, who has begun to contribute offensively from time to time, then showed a bit of daring that resulted in the insurance run that it turned out the Jays didn’t actually need.

Darwin Barney hit a sharp grounder right to first baseman Dae-ho Lee. Without hesitation Lee whipped it to third baseman Seager to try to cut off the advancing Thole. The throw was there in plenty of time, but a little on the home plate side of the bag. Thole slid to the left field corner of the bag, and extended his hand to the bag just as Seager tried to sweep across with the tag. The initial call was safe, and as we awaited the review there was little doubt from the replays that the call would stand. With runners on the corners and no one out for Josh Donaldson, Thole scored easily as the latter hit into a double play, and the Jays turned a 2-0 lead over to the bullpen.

Tom Wilhelmsen and Joaquin Benoit finished up for Miley, and were equally as effective over two innings as the Jays’ trio was over three innings, and at the end of the game, when Roberto Osuna caught Adam Lind looking for the third out in the ninth and his twentieth save, the scoreboard still showed a big, fat goose egg for the Mariners, who had to pack away their unused brooms before leaving town.

Tomorrow night it’s back to interleague play as the Padres come in for three, and Aaron Sanchez looks to keep pace with Jay Happ in the double-digit win column. I have no idea how effective he’d be against the Blue Jays, but it’s a good job Drew Pomerantz is now wearing a Boston uniform, and won’t be pitching against us this week.

For the first time this season, having gotten all the way to game 98 of a 162-game schedule, I am going to write about a game that I did not watch, and that’s probably a good thing, because this 14-5 drubbing by the Mariners, in which Victor Cruz single-handedly out-produced the entire Blue Jays lineup, wasn’t much worth watching.

You see, I had a very important luncheon date downtown for Summerlicious yesterday with the two most important ladies in my life, the one I have lived with for 48 years, and the almost-nine-year-old grand-daughter who brightens my days. I wouldn’t have missed it for the world, or for the Blue Jays (well, maybe we’d have worked around a playoff game . . .)

So, like the Jays today, I’m mailing this one in.

You may not realize this, but there is a hallowed tradition in baseball reporting of creatively describing games that were not actually seen. The first baseball game broadcast over the radio was produced by pioneering station KDKA in Pittsburgh on August 5, 1921, a game that the Pirates won 8-5 over the Phillies. The game was broadcast by Harold Arlin (not the Harold Arlen who composed “Somewhere over the Rainbow” for the movie), the first salaried radio on-air broadcaster. Arlin had initiated the live broadcasting of events the previous November when he read out the results of the 1920 presidential election. I have no information on the time that Arlin projected a victory for Warren Harding, based on exit polls.

However, Arlin did not attend that first game. He broadcast a description of the game from the studio, by making up the details of each play as he received it via a typed transcript of a running account sent over a telegraph line. So, if Arlin, and other early broadcasters received a report, say, that a hitter grounded out to the shortstop, he might embellish this to “he hits a slow roller that gets past the pitcher, but the shortstop races in, grabs it, and fires it on the run to first, and ooh, that was a bang-bang play at the bag.“

The recreation of these early broadcast games became their own stylized art form. The studio technicians added sound effects, recordings of crowd noise, used a second mike to simulate the public address announcer from the ball park, and so on. The era of radio recreation of major league games didn’t last long, as KDKA actually sent legendary sports writer Grantland Rice on location to report the games of the World Series that year between the Giants and the Yankees.

Small-town radio stations continued the tradition of recreating the games on the radio even into the 1950s. There is a wonderful article you can find here http://www.modestoradiomuseum.org/recreations.html by Big Jim Williams, who covered the team in Ventura, California, in 1951 and 1952. He describes sitting at the mike console with a baseball bat dangling over his head that he whacked with a wooden ruler for the crack of the bat. He wore a glove and slapped a ball into it for the sound of a catch, and he had recordings of peanut vendors and the like that he could play in the background.

Of course these broadcasts were vulnerable to technical difficulties. There were an awful lot of “rain delays”, or pauses for “repairs by the groundskeeper” reported over the radio to paper over the delays caused by glitches. His best story is about the time that the transcript brought to him made absolutely no sense. It reported four outs in one inning by the Modesto team, and then the report had Modesto coming back up to the plate immediately after making the four outs, with no intervening half-inning for the Ventura team. While Big Jim filled the air with made-up nonsense, his producer frantically called the ball park, to have the phone answered by a Western Union telegraph operator who was very obviously drunk.

So in this wondrously modern age of technical wizardry, I don’t feel badly at all about reporting a game I didn’t watch. Between hearing Jerry do the first two innings and the last two on the radio, referencing the modern-day equivalent of the Western Union wire, the running play-by-play account on MLB.Com, and catching a round of Blue Jays in Thirty on Sportsnet, I’ve got the gist of it, and it wasn’t much of a gist anyway, was it?

The pitching matchup was very different from last night’s, when it was Paxton’s power against Estrada’s finesse. Today it was Hisashi Iwakuma against R. A. Dickey, so it was a case of Iawakuma finesse against Dickey craziness.

Theoretically, on a hot day with the dome open, Dickey’s knuckler should be very effective, but the two major problems Dickey has to deal with, wildness and a susceptibility to the home run, are inextricably linked. If his knuckle ball is lively and he’s throwing it for strikes, his 80-plus MPH “fast” ball is a very effective out pitch. But if he suddenly loses control of the funny one, forcing him to come in with the fast ball, hitters sit on it, and it’s mighty juicy. That’s what happened in the third inning today, and it led to Dickey’s quickest exit of the year.

There was no real sense of impending doom after two innings. Dickey had given up a two-out single to Robinson Cano but stranded him by fanning Nelson Cruz. Scorers should have put a big gold star next to that one, as the highlight of Dickey’s outing. In the second, he allowed a single by Kyle Seager and walked former Jay Adam Lind, but erased Lind on a double-play ball by Leonys Martin, and stranded Seager at third by fanning Chris Iannetta.

This was typical Dickey dipsy-doodling through the lineup, and in fact he was rewarded for his efforts with a nicely-executed Jays’ run for a 1-0 lead in the bottom of the second. After Iwakuma struck out Justin Smoak for the first out, he walked Kevin Pillar, and then Pillar and Devon Travis pulled off a perfect hit-and-run, Pillar going around to third on Travis’ single up the middle. This brought Josh Thole to the plate, in the lineup to catch Dickey, but also the only regular catcher available again, because of Russell Martin’s sore knee. Thole did a great job of squaring up one of Iwakuma’s soft little darts and hit a liner right on the nose to left. Unfortunately, it was right at Nori Aoki, who came in and took it on the run. By all rights, Pillar, who had tagged up, should have been DOA at the plate. But a combination of his speed and some good scouting on Aoki, that had pinpointed his mediocre arm, enabled him to swoop across the plate as the ball came in a bit up the first base line. This was the kind of nice work that we should see more of from the Jays.

So Dickey should have been feeling pretty good going out for the third, ready to settle down and start on a roll. But the damned ball just wouldn’t behave for him. After Shawn O’Malley topped one to third and beat it out for a hit, Aoki forced him at second, and then the demon really got loose. He hit Seth Smith. He hit Cano. Now he had to pitch to Nelson Cruz, and he really had to pitch to him, with nowhere to put him. A walk, another hit batter, a wild pitch or quasi-wild-pitch/passed ball had to be avoided at all costs. He threw a pitch too good for Cruz to miss, and it was 4-1, just like that, the dreaded grand salami turning the game upside down in an instant.

With no one left on base, Dickey got Kyle Seager on a fly ball to centre, and fanned Adam Lind to end the inning. Manager John Gibbons, faced with the usual Dickey conundrum, that once the damage is done he is as likely to settle down and go four quick innings in a row, sent him back out for the fourth inning. This time it was not a good idea. Single, walk, single, single, and it was 5-1 with no one out and the bases loaded, and Gibbie was coming out with the hook.

With the left-handed Seth Smith at the plate, it seemed like a good idea to give the lefty Franklin Morales, just reactivated from the DL where he had spent the entire season, a chance to show his stuff, and he looked pretty good. He got Smith to ground into a double play, allowing the sixth Seattle run to score, and then got Cano to pop out to the catcher for the third out. Morales then came back out for the fifth and quickly worked through the Mariners, getting two fly balls and a groundout, though he did yield a two-out single to Adam Lind. So in his 2016 Blue Jays’ debut, Morales went two innings, gave up one hit, and allowed one inherited runner to score, albeit on a double play ball. All of this on just 17 pitches; so far so good for the veteran lefty. He’ll come in handy if he can keep it up.

I haven’t said any more about the Jays’ offence, but maybe that’s because it’s not easy to swing a bat when you’re dragging your tail between your legs. It’s certainly not that Iwakuma blew them away. Even though he avoided very much hard contact, he was neither here nor there, taking 98 pitches to get through six innings, as he nibbled his way through four hits and three walks. Only in his last inning did Michael Saunders give the Jays a glimmer of hope by hitting one out to the opposite field on him in his last inning of work; Iwakuma departed with a 6-2 lead which, thanks to the horrors to come from the Jays’ bullpen, was to prove impregnable.

After the carnage of the Mariners’ sixth and eighth innings were behind them, Justin Smoak with a two-run blast and Saunders with a solo homer in the bottom of the eighth rounded out the Jays’ scoring at an embarrassing nine-run deficit, 14-5 Seattle, which is how it ended. The two Jays’ homers in the eighth came off former Jay supernumerary Wade LeBlanc, who was handed the ball for the seventh after Iwakuma finished up, and presumably told that he was it, and just let them hit it. He had two goals: keep the Jays from scoring twelve runs to tie it, and save using another Seattle reliever. He accomplished both goals.

Wait a minute, you say, how did we get from 6-2 to 14-2 in only three innings? Well, I was hoping you wouldn’t ask that, because it’s a pretty sad story.

Next up from the bullpen for the Jays after Morales’ work was done was Jesse Chavez, who has had a lot of good outings, both holds and mop-ups, but some really dreadful ones. This one was the worst, but strangely enough, looking at the sequence of at-bats in rapid succession on Blue Jays in 30, he got exactly the contact he wanted, and could have been out of the inning long before Kyle Seager administered the coup de grace by taking him over the wall. On the face of it, five runs on six hits with one double play in seven batters is pretty awful, and Chavez certainly didn’t earn any laurels for his work.

But watching it was really strange. Chris Iannetta led off with a double to left, one of only two drives hit off Chavez. Shawn O’Malley bunted him to third and beat out the throw to first. Then the nightmare loop started. Three straight batters, Aoki, Smith, and Cano, hit ground-ball singles to right field, driving in two runs in the process, for an 8-2 Seattle lead. Three times we saw Devon Travis chasing after grounders that he couldn’t quite catch up to in short right field, and three times we saw Zeke Carrera picking the ball up and throwing it in. Honestly, I thought there was something wrong with the spooling of the video, and it was all the same play. The only way you could really tell what was going on was that Carrera threw it in a different direction each time he picked it up. In another world, those are three ground ball outs, Iannetta scores on the first of them, and Chavez is out of the inning down a not-insurmountable 7-2. But in this world, they all got through, making it five straight hitters reaching base, and the two runs in. Just for a little variety, Nelson Cruz grounded into a double play and Chavez was almost out of it, though Aoki scored on the play to extend the lead to 9-2. I said almost, because Chavez had one more batter to face, Kyle Seager, who hit one out to centre to make it 11-2, and send Chavez from the mound in anguish. (I didn’t see the anguish, of course, but it doesn’t take much recreation to know that it was there!)

Bo Schultz came on to get the last out, and worked the seventh, giving up just a single to Iannetta, before turning it over to Drew Storen for the eighth. Gibbie called on Storen because he wanted him to get some work, but I don’t think what happened was what he had in mind. Like Chavez, Storen came in throwing flames. Not fast balls, but actual flames, igniting the Mariners gas once again.

Like Chavez, Storen failed to get an out until the damage was done. He walked Seth Smith leading off, gave up a ground-rule double to Roberston Cano, and then a three-run homer, his second of the day, to Nelson Cruz. This completed the Mariners’ scoring at 14 runs, and upped their hit total to 17. Storen was left in to sort things out. He struck out Seager, gave up the M’s eighteenth hit to Adam Lind, then saw him erased on a double-play ball by Leonys Martin.

After the Jays’ futile flurry of power in their half of the eighth, Joe Biagini mopped up for the Jays in the ninth, giving up a single, Seattle’s nineteenth hit, to Aoki, who died at first. LeBlanc got in a bit of trouble in the bottom of the ninth, yielding a ground-rule double to Travis leading off, but he died at third and the score remained 14-5 Seattle.

Last night’s was an understandable, even acceptable, loss to a fine pitching performance. Today’s was a disaster and an abomination. It pointed to the fact that the Blue Jays still have a hole in their bullpen to address before the trade deadline, and it made Sunday’s series finale considerably more crucial as a game to win than any single game should be at this point in the season.

In the run-up to tonight’s first game of a three-game weekend set with the Seattle Mariners at the TV Dome, I thought that the pitching matchup looked pretty favourable for the home team. Marco Estrada got the start for the Blue Jays, which always promises an interesting, even compelling drama unfolding between pitcher and hitters. Added to this was the frisson of doubt created by the fact that it was to be his first start since returning from the DL, his back issues that developed before the All-Star break presumably resolved.

Starting for the Mariners was the left-hander James Paxton, about whom I knew very little going in, save for a current record (2-4, 4.56 ERA) that, like the record of Patrick Corbin whom they faced Wednesday afternoon, I could only have characterized as equally “meh”.

By the conclusion of Paxton’s outing tonight against the Jays, there were four more things about Paxton that I didn’t know before. First, he has been highly regarded by the Mariners—and by the Blue Jays before them—for quite a while, ever since his college baseball days at the University of Kentucky. Second, he is Canadian, from Ladner, British Columbia, and would be facing fellow Canadian Left Coaster Michael Saunders for the first time, but not fellow Canadian Russell Martin, who apparently got woozy in the sauna, fell, and hurt his left knee, taking him out of the lineup for a while. (I wish I were making this part up.) Third, he was the centre of a very strange and tangled legal case involving a player agent and the National Collegiate Athletic Association (NCAA) in the United States, a case which I vaguely recalled, but did not connect with the pitcher starting tonight until it was mentioned on the broadcast—I’ll fill you in on what seem to be the main lines of the story as I’ve been able to ferret them out.

Fourth, and by far most relevant for our discussion of tonight’s game, he was about to make the vaunted Blue Jay hitters eat cheap Dollar Store bird seed out of his baseball cap, which didn’t leave a great taste in their mouths.

The Mariners’ lineup is a little deceptive, in that as constituted last night the leadoff hitter was recent callup and suspected banjo hitter Norichika Aoki leading off, followed by somebody named Seth Smith hitting second, who is actually more of a somebody than I thought, though he’s been hiding out in the National League and exclusively out west, for a number of years, hitting .273 this year with 11 homers in a little less than full playing time. After them, it gets interesting. Very interesting. Robinson Cano. Nelson Cruz. Adam Lind. Kyle Seager. Whew. As it turned out, though, it wasn’t any of the big bashers in the middle of the order, but Aoki, Smith, and number nine hitter Shortstop Shawn O’Malley, a .220 hitter, who did what little damage was done to Marco Estrada tonight.

When the crafty, reliable, right-handed ace of the Jays’ staff took the mound in the first inning, it was quickly evident that a bit of rust had to be shaken off before the typical Estrada performance would start to unroll.

Aoki quickly made me regret dismissing his slight self as a possible threat on the second pitch of the game by lashing a shot to right centre that perfectly split Kevin Pillar and Junior Lake. Lake played it off the wall perfectly and hit cutoff man Devon Travis dead on with his throw. The latter whirled, cocked his arm . . . and ate the ball, because the speedy Aoki already had third base sewn up. Not surprisingly discombobulated by such a start to his night, Estrada plunked Smith, setting up the double play, though not of course intentionally. Cano obliged, with a grounder to Troy Tulowitzki, but the Jays didn’t turn the double play, thanks to a strange bobble by Devon Travis after getting the force at second that let Cano reach first, with Aoki scoring on the play. The bobble of the DP ball didn’t really contribute to the run, because it would have scored even if the ball had been turned over to first. It just made Estrada’s work a little tougher. But after giving up a single to Cruz, he retired Seager and Lind to escape the inning down only a run.

Estrada retired the Mariners in order in the second on just seven pitches, suggesting that he had found his equilibrium after the rocky start. I wouldn’t say that he cruised after that, stranding doubles by Aoki in the third (I swear, I will never diss unfamiliar Japanese players as banjo hitters again!), and Lind in the fourth, and loading the bases with one out in the sixth on a base hit, a walk, and another hit by pitch—lucky that Marco doesn’t throw very hard. He got out of this one by striking out the nine hitter, O’Malley, and getting some help from Kevin Pillar, who raced in and slid to his knees to grap a sinking liner to centre by that damned little Aoki, that ended the inning but could have broken the game wide open.

Only in the fifth inning did he allow another base runner to score, and that cost him, and the Jays, the game, because, as we shall see, two runs was just enough for Mr. Paxton, hurling for Seattle. The winning run didn’t exactly come from muscle or an Estrada mistake, either, except possibly for his giving up a leadoff single to O’Malley. Estrada then retired the dangerous and imposing Aoki on a popup to first. Aoki having failed to move the runner up, O’Malley took matters into his own hands, and swiped second. The mysterious Mr. Smith, Seth, then doubled O’Malley home with the only run that mattered. But this wasn’t your typical double, a boomer off the wall, or a liner into the corner or between the outfielders. Oh, no, we now have a new kind of double to add to the lexicon. Let’s call it the Willie Keeler double, after the great early singles hitter Wee Willie Keeler, who famously explained his success thus: “I hit ’em where they ain’t.”

With the Jays in the exaggerated pull shift for the left-handed Smith, the hitter bounced a simple grounder up the line at third. It bounced and bounced and bounced. Josh Donaldson ran and ran and ran. Josh Donaldson dove, but it wasn’t even close. Agonizingly, the ball bounced slowly down the line and kicked into foul territory, and by the time Darwin Barney, playing his second major league game ever in left, ran it down, Smith was at second and O’Malley was taking fives high and low in the dugout. Estrada ran out the string, but his night was done with a decent line, very representative of his body of work this season, at six innings, two runs, seven hits, one walk, three strikeouts, and the two hit batters, neither of which were involved in the scoring. Welcome back Marco!

And welcome to the bigs James Paxton, because tonight was your night anyway.

The story of Paxton’s road to a position on a major league roster is a strange and rather tangled one, and the specific details of it have to be pieced together. Suffice it to say, though, that if tonight’s start represented Paxton’s breakout performance as possibly even a marquee major league starter, it’s a form of poetic justice that it should have come at the expense of the Toronto Blue Jays.

Paxton had been high on the Jays’ radar not just because he was a Canadian pitcher who had talent, but because he had proven himself as a starting pitcher over three seasons with the University of Kentucky Wildcats. They drafted him in the first round in 2009, but he was the only first-round draftee not to sign that year. He rejected the Jays’ bonus offer, which was supposedly within guidelines set by MLB, and announced that he would return to Kentucky for his senior year of baseball and to finish his degree. From here the story seems to be that Blue Jays’ President Paul Beeston felt that Paxton had been unduly influenced by superstar players’ agent Scott Boras in making his bonus demand, and he let his suspicions leak to a reporter of the Globe and Mail, who published it in a Globe baseball blog.

NCAA athletes are not allowed to have professional agents directly represent them in negotiations with professional teams if they hope to retain their eligibility status with the NCAA. When the compliance office of the NCAA somehow picked up the story of Boras’ involvement with Paxton, it announced that it would investigate, and invited Paxton to an interview. Paxton refused to participate in the investigation, the NCAA warned Kentucky that their whole team’s status could be questioned if Paxton was allowed to play, Kentucky suspended him, he sued the university, the lawsuit was thrown out, and Paxton was out of college ball, out of his degree programme, no longer tied to any major league team. He played independent professional ball for part of one season, and then was drafted by the Mariners in 2010. Since then he has worked his way up the ladder but at an uneven pace, making his major league debut in 2013, but even this year waiting to be inserted into the Seattle rotation until just recently.

Rocky road that it’s been for Paxton, judging from his performance tonight, he shouldn’t have any concerns about staying in the rotation for the foreseeable future. In the first five innings tonight he faced one batter over the minimum, giving up an opposite-field home run to Michael Saunders in the second, while striking out seven. In the sixth he walked Josh Thole and gave up a double to Josh Donaldson but escaped unscathed, and in his last inning, the seventh, he gave up a leadoff single to Troy Tulowitzki, who was promptly erased in a double play. Summing up, he faced three batters over the minimum, ended up with nine strikeouts, and left the game with a one-run lead, after 97 pitches over seven innings, having given up one run on three hits with one walk and the nine strikeouts.

Most impressive is what he did to the heart of the Jays’ order. With excellent command, blazing speed, and a sharp curveball, he struck out Encarnacion three times, Donaldson twice, and Tulowitzki twice, as well as Saunders and Barney once each. So blown away were the Jays by Paxton’s dominance, they remained back on their heels against Edwin Diaz, Seattle’s setup man, who retired the side in order in the eighth with two strikeouts. In the ninth, the Mariner’s closer Steve Cishek, wobbled, showing a tendency for serious wildness, gave up a walk to Encarnation and a single to Tulo with two outs, but struck out the side, fanning Michael Saunders to end the game with the two runners aboard. Thus the Jays’ record of futility at the plate extended to 14 strikeouts against three Seattle pitchers.

But it was Paxton’s night, and if he smiled a secret smile that it had come at the TV Dome against the Blue Jays, who can blame him?

Sometimes a pitcher overwhelms you, and you just pack it up and get ready for the next one. After all, winning two out of three all season gives you a winning percentage of .667, even if it is a little harder to keep that pace when you have to win two in a row to make up for a loss. Let’s see if R.A. Dickey can point us in the right direction tomorrow.

The Blue Jays needed a win today to come back from their short post-All-Star western road swing with a winning record, and they got one, big time and easy-peasy, dumping the Arizona Diamondbacks 10-4 in an afternoon game that was effectively over after the first two batters in the top of the first. Or, if you will, after the bottom of the first when Marcus Stroman extricated himself from a potentially bad start with minimal damage.

After the conclusion of the evening games in Boston and New York, the Jays found themselves in third place in the American League East, but only one game behind the new leaders, the Red Sox, and a half game behind the Orioles, who suddenly found themselves dumped out of first place after leading the division for most of the season.

Before I go on to parse the ways and means of today’s win, which was a delightful event with lots of impressive plays (for the visitors, at any rate), but not very dramatic, let’s look at where the Blue Jays are today, where they were last year at this time, and consider how we should be feeling about them in this hot and sunny season of July.

I have just posted a new piece in the “Articles and Ephemera” section that was inspired by a column in the Toronto Star this morning by veteran baseball writer Richard Griffin, a column that I would place in the category of pieces taking the approach that “if things are looking good, they must be really, really bad”. In my new post I take issue quite vigourously with the gloom and doom and conspiracy hunting that Griffin’s column, for whatever reasons, espouses.

For a more detailed consideration of the “state of the [Jays’] nation”, I would direct you to that post, but I offer an overview of my main points here.

First of all, our boys are 12 games over .500 after today’s game, rapidly closing on the two teams ahead of them in the division. They currently hold the second wild card playoff spot by a clear two and a half games over the Tigers. They trail Baltimore/Boston by one game for the first wild card spot. (Since Baltimore and Boston are at this moment tied for the division lead, one of them—pick a team, any team—is the division leader and the other by definition the first wild card team.) It wasn’t until the fifteenth of August that the 2015 Blue Jays were in anywhere near the position they are right now. On that date they were ten games over .500, a game and a half behind the Yankees, and three games in hand on the first wild card spot.

Now that last sounds pretty impressive, but last year there was a significant drop off in the won/loss record of the last wild card team. The Jays were fourth best at ten over .500. This year they’re fifth best at 12 over .500. And even Houston, the sixth-best team, is three games better than the Angels, who held the second wild card spot last year at only four games over .500.

The fact that the Blue Jays are in a much better position now in 2016 in comparison to even three weeks later in the season last year must be seen in the context of the status of the roster of each team at the point of the season under discussion. The Jays’ roster of mid-August last year had been substantially changed by the flurry of activity that took place before the trade deadline, a change that was clearly needed, given the malaise into which the team had fallen by mid-July. We know, of course, the results of those changes.

This year, however, as of the third week of July, the team is substantially unchanged from the one which opened the season on April third in Tampa. Devon Travis has been added, while Ryan Goins is down with an injury at the moment. Jason Grilli and Bo Schultz have been added to the bullpen to great effect. And of course Jose Bautista has missed a significant portion of the season with two stints on the DL. So, assuming that the front office doesn’t make any major additions before the deadline, the team should be stronger on the first of August than it is now, with Bautista back in the lineup, Goins available to fill in as he does so well, Travis continuing the upward arc at the plate that he has been following recently, and possibly the return of Chris Colabello, if he is able to shake the cobwebs out of his batting gloves.

So this team whose performance we have fretted and fussed about since opening day, this team that has been essentially the same for the entire 2016 season so far, is 12 games over .500, and right in the thick of the pennant race. Toronto fans: don’t worry, be happy!

And happy we were today to see Marcus Stroman, gifted with a two-run lead by Josh Donaldson as the second batter in the game, pitch over a first-inning Arizona run aided and abetted by a Junior Lake throwing error, settle down, not give up another run over seven more innings, and strike out six while walking none.

This marks the third time in his last four starts that Stroman has looked like the Stroman of old, if September 2015 qualifies as “old”. More importantly, it was a decisive turnaround after the one bad outing of the four, his start against Oakland on the fifteenth of July.

Much has been said of the child-like spirit of Marcus Stroman, and nothing brings it out more in him than starting in a National League park where he can actually take his turns at the plate. Today, for example, he was 0 for 3 with a sacrifice bunt, but made contact every time. The first time up he reached on an error by the second baseman, who couldn’t make the play on a tricky hopper, the second time he grounded out to shortstop, the third time he executed a perfect sac bunt to move Devon Travis, who eventually scored, over to third after he had led off with a double.

In the eighth, he came up with one out and Travis on first with a single. Asked to bunt again, this time he pushed it too hard toward the pitcher, Daniel Hudson, who threw the ball away trying to get the force at second. Stroman rounded first, then saw his opening and accelerated into second, hitting the bag with a perfect pop-up slide. He was immediately cashed, as well as Travis from third, when Darwin Barney hit a triple to dead centre. No doubt the run scored is as important to Stroman tonight as his excellent pitching line. In fact, though, his performance was so strong that only in the third inning did he even allow so much as a second baserunner.

Just as Stroman took care of business on the mound, so did the Jays’ hitters. It didn’t help the D’Backs that Patrick Corbin, a lefty whose most recent outings have been about as meh as his season record going in to the game, of 4-8, with an ERA of 5.25. And it didn’t help Corbin that the Chase Field surface for whatever reason was a tad quirky today.

Darwin Barney led the game off with a sharp grounder to second baseman Jean Segura. Segura only came into focus on my radar when the D-Backs were here last month, mainly because almost all of his major league experience has been recorded in the National League, with Milwaukee until moving to Arizona this year. But he’s a good ballplayer, quick and alert, who runs well and hits well for a second baseman, with a bit of power. And he’s a guy whose fielding has improved exponentially in terms of errors since leaving Milwaukee: last year he committed 19 errors in 622 chances, and this year so far he has committed four in 421 chances.

But on Barney’s leadoff grounder today, the field ate him up. He moved quickly a couple of steps to his right, but the last hop took the ball back into his body, on his glove side, and went through to centre field for a hit. It certainly should have been an out off the bat, but it was also certainly not an error. He didn’t have a chance on it. Perhaps shaken by such an unpropitious start to his outing, Corbin immediately made two mistakes. He wild-pitched Barney to second, and then grooved one to Josh Donaldson, who took him over the right field wall. Two batters, five pitches, and a two-zip deficit. As my two-year-old grandson said when asked to comment on the boiled potatoes served with dinner, “Not good!” Understandably not interested in challenging Edwin Encarnacion at that point, he walked him on a three-one pitch before settling down to fan Russell Martin and Troy Tulowitzki, then stranded Edwin at first when he got Kevin Pillar to fly out to right field.

When the D-Backs came back with one in the bottom of the first to narrow the gap, it looked like a ball game. Even after the Jays tacked on a third run in the top of the second on a sac fly by Barney that converted Devon Travis’ leadoff double, Travis having moved up on Stroman’s right-side grounder, it looked like a ball game, though when Stroman stranded a single by catcher Tuffy Gosewych in the bottom of the inning, it was starting to look like a ball game where the Jays were in charge.

By the way, Tuffy Gosewych has just been added to the starting lineup of the American League Best Ball-Player Names All-Star Team. With Gosewych behind the plate and co-captain Coco Crisp patrolling centre, it’s starting to look like the team’s going to be pretty strong up the middle.

It continued to look like a ball game into the top of the fifth, when Corbin ran into some bad luck at second, and ended up giving up two more runs on two-out base hits—what a treat—by Tulo and Pillar. With two outs and Donaldson on first via a walk, it looked like the Arizona lefty was out of the inning when he induced Russell Martin to ground into what should have been a forceout at second, started by shortstop Nick Ahmed. But wait, cue the replays. Second-base umpire Ramon de Jesus had made a really terrible call to punch out Donaldson at second. Even my pet bat could see that Josh’s slide beat the throw by a clear margin. (I really did have a pet bat once. Like the potatoes, it was “not good”.) This kept the inning alive for Tulo and Pillar to come through for the good guys, and Corbin finished the fifth down 5-1.

He came back out for the sixth, but unfortunately for him another two-out RBI hit brought his day to an end. After Stroman’s perfect sacrifice bunt had moved Travis, on second with a leadoff double, to third, the D-Backs starter looked fair to get out of it when he got Barney to ground out to second on a play on which Travis had no chance to score. But Josh, smelling an RBI, smacked a double to centre, that just missed going out, and poor Corbin was dead in the water. Randall Delgado came in and got Edwin to end the inning, and finish Corbin’s ledger with six runs allowed, but only 3 of them earned, in five and two thirds innings.

With better defensive support it was a fair matchup, Stroman against Corbin, but after six innings Stroman was rolling with the five-run lead, and it basically became a mopup action for the Jays after that.

It didn’t much matter that Daniel Hudson came on in the eighth and threw gas on his own fire by botching the force at second on Stroman’s second sac bunt attempt, and then grooved one that Barney crushed to centre for a triple scoring two, and that he grooved another one to Edwin (yes, again with two outs) for a a homer scoring two. Going to the bottom of the eighth, the Jays were up 10-1, and the Jays’ charter flight back to Toronto was revving up on the runway. Hudson had given up four additional runs to the Jays, but because of his own error, only one of them was earned. There should be a special stats category for unearned runs given away by a pitcher’s own defensive failure.

It was a bit of a surprise that Manager John Gibbons had let Stroman bat for himself in the eighth, but the reason for that became clear, because with the nine-run lead it was even more of a surprise that he sent Stroman out to pitch the eighth instead of giving him a rest. Stroman was up for it, allowing Segura to reach on an infield hit that glanced off his glove, giving Travis no chance to make the play at first. But he eventually threw a double-play ball to end the inning in fine style, finishing up at 99 pitches. Nobody’s quite clear on why Stroman isn’t in the same category with his buddy Sanchez in terms of accumulating innings pitched, but there it is. I suspect it has something to do with personalities. Sanchez seems more phlegmatic and willing to take things like it is, but I see the hyper Stroman as a little kid who probably gets very annoying when he’s whiny. Maybe Gibbie just can’t stand listening to him.

In the last analysis it almost didn’t much matter that Brett Cecil, brought in to get some work to finish up, struck out the left-handed Ryan Lamb to lead off the inning, and then gave up three straight hits, culminating in a home run to left by Tuffy Gosewych, which gave the Diamondbacks a bit of dignity, at least, in the end. I guess a 10-4 loss is marginally better than a 10-1 loss, eh?

Oh, I almost forgot to mention. Michael Saunders was called away from the team on what was described as a “personal matter” before the game. With Zeke Carrera still nursing a sore Achilles tendon and Junior Lake already covering for him in right, Darwin Barney was sent out to patrol left field for the first time in his professional career. Not to worry though, because it was Barney, right? Can’t he do everything? Even pitch, mostly well, anyway? Besides going two for four and knocking in three and keeping his average at .297, he made two difficult catches in the second inning out there, and played flawlessly the rest of the game. What a find this guy is, and why shouldn’t he play short on the Best Ball-Players’ Names team? The middle is looking better all the time!

The Jays return to Toronto for a day off tomorrow, while they savour having restored their dignity with three straight wins after the two difficult one-run losses in Oakland. Friday night it’s the Mariners, and we welcome Marco Estrada and his hopefully reinvigorated back on his return to the rotation.