Long Ball Stories

The informal definition of a “laugher” is “a contest or competition in which one person or team easily overwhelms another; easy victory”.

If there was any chance of tonight’s game being a laugher after the Mariners batted in the bottom of the third, you would have thought it would be for Seattle. How little we knew.

If there was ever a pitching matchup where something had to give, it was this one. Seattle’s starter was Hisashi Iwakuma, who has quietly been compiling a very fine season for the Mariners, going into tonight’s game with a 16-ll record and an ERA of 3.87. More to the point, the only time he had faced the Jays this year, on July 23^rd in Toronto, he had emerged victorious, having gone six innings, given up two runs on four hits with three walks and three strikeouts on 98 pitches. Moreover, if there has been a type of starter that has mesmerized the suffering Blue Jays’ hitters this season more than the strike-throwing power pitcher, it has been the corner-nibbling, breaking-ball-throwing soft tosser, the type we used to call a “junker”. Jared Weaver, are you out there?

Actually, if the Jays have had a trouble with flame-throwers and more trouble with soft-tossers, that kind of covers the gamut, doesn’t it? The only type left is the knuckleballer, the only one in the league is Steven Wright of the Red Sox, and as I recall our heroes didn’t hit him all that well either. In fact, though he only won one and lost two against the Jays, he only gave up three earned runs on 15 hits in 17.2 innings, so the losses can’t be pinned on him. So that pretty much covers it: the Jays have struggled against all kinds of pitchers.

If the Mariners had to feel good about Iwakuma against the Jays, the Jays had to feel good about Happ against the Mariners. In his only prior appearance against them, in Toronto in July, he pitched six innings of one-hit shutout ball to take the win. Moreover, after a little dry spell of a loss and two no decisions, including his shortest outing of the year, in which he threw 85 pitches over only two and two thirds innings in Tampa on September fourth, he had won his last two starts, giving up only three earned runs in twelve innings, and tonight stood on the brink of his landmark twentieth win of the season. Finally, unlike any other member of the rotation, Happ has generally been blessed with strong run support by the fickle Toronto batsmen.

The game started as the pitchers’ duel that the matchup might have predicted. In his first two innings, Happ gave up only an infield hit to Franklin Guttierez in the first on a smash to Josh Donaldson that the Toronto third sacker made a great play on, but had no chance to throw out the hitter. Iwakuma kept the Jays off the board for the first three innings, with a little help from the pitcher’s friends, the double-play ball and the raging wind coming in from centre field. After two easy outs in the top of the first, Edwin Encarnacion absolutely smashed one to centre. Everyone, including Edwin, thought it was out, but the wind or the hand of some Seattle-friendly benevolent being pushed it back in and into the glove of Leonys Martin at the fence.

One of the funniest sights of the season was Edwin’s reaction when he realized the ball hadn’t gone out. He had started out, obviously, in his home-run trot, admiring the ball as he headed for first. Then when he saw it stay in he stopped in his tracks with a “Wait, what?” incredulous look on his face, like “what just happened here, what world have I entered?” Equally funny was his sheepish laugh as team-mates and opponents alike gave him the gears for his reaction.

In the second inning Iwakuma walked Russell Martin after striking out Jose Bautista but immediately got Troy Tulowitzki to ground into a double play. In the third he relied on his own wits to strand two one-out opposite-field singles by Kevin Pillar and Zeke Cabrera when he struck out Devon Travis and Josh Donaldson.

But the bottom of the third was when it started going very wrong again for Toronto. And, though I hate to dwell on it, the fielding adventures of Devon Travis were front and centre in this strange and disturbing inning.

Catcher Chris Iannetta started the inning by lining out to left fielder Zeke Carrera. Shortstop Shawn O’Malley then stirred things up by dropping down a bunt and beating it out for a single despite a fine effort by Happ to make the play. Then Guillermo Heredia hit a ball between Travis and Encarnacion that was a pretty tough chance for a double play. Travis dove and skidded to make the play, jumped to his feet, thought of second, turned toward second, and let the ball slip out of his hand . . . once again. The out at first was a sure thing, and would have been the second out. In a typical “homer” scoring decision, Heredia was given a hit.

Then with two fast base-runners, the usually staid Mariners pulled off a double steal while Happ was fanning Gutierrez, for what should have been the third out. But now we had Robinson Cano at the plate with ducks on the pond. Cano hit a hard grounder—oh no—to Travis’ left, a more difficult ball than Heredia’s. He got to it with a slide, and got his glove down, only to have it ricochet—hard—off his knee, and shoot down into the right-field corner. By the time the dust had settled, Cano was on third with a triple (can’t argue with the scorer on this one) and two runs were in. If Travis had just managed to keep the ball in front of or even close to him, he might have thrown Cano out, or at worst he would have had an infield single and one RBI, and not a triple and two RBIs. No doubt a bit rattled, but probably very wisely, Happ walked Nelson Cruz with the runner on third, and then fanned Kyle Seager, who has had a terrible series at the plate so far, for the third out.

The final assessment of the Mariners’ third inning evokes the anomaly that there were no errors charged, but it was plainly in sight for all to see that the Mariners had a two-run lead because Devon Travis failed to make two plays, difficult plays to be sure, but plays that a pennant-winning team has to make. Ominously, Happ, who had only thrown 26 pitches in the first two innings, took 30 more to extricate himself from the mess he didn’t create.

But then the Blue Jays batted in the fourth and all was gloriously, joyfully, forgotten in the delirium of the biggest inning of the year.

But before I get to all the heroics, I need to address a glaring omission in my last post, about Marco Estrada’s fine performance last night. Now in this day and age of wondrous publishing capability, I could just use the magical capabilities of Word Press to go back and add an appropriate paragraph to that post to cover my fault, but that’s just not me.

Would all the amazing Toronto fans who made a sea of blue in Seattle’s home park please accept my deepest mea culpa for not mentioning the hordes of Canadian fans who travelled down from Vancouver and, really, all parts of Canada, to flood every section of the stadium with their team gear, signs, parrots, raincoats, Superman capes, and all the other paraphernalia that make up a typical Toronto home crowd? Even the guy in the full-body parrot costume was there, thankful for the cool Pacific air, no doubt. The views of the Toronto fans swarming the gates and filling the aisles on the way to their seats were astonishing, as was the noise level, and the total audibility of all of the typical Jays’ chants and cheers.

Though the TV broadcasters constantly stressed how packed the place was with Jays’ fans, they missed one of the biggest stories of the series. While they were talking on, as the do, the camera panned over the stadium, showing the progress of a very solid “wave” of blue-shirted fans going around the stadium, and starting over, and not stopping, all the while the cameras followed it. Now, I’ve never been a fan of the wave—I find it kind of sophomorish, and not at all in keeping with the dignity of the game—but this was stunning. Who could ever imagine there being enough fans to sustain a wave at a road game in an away ball park?

Finally, most unforgiveable on my part was failing to mention the amazing standing ovation received by Marco Estrada last night as he left the mound after his excellent outing. Even Estrada himself was shocked by the strength of the crowd’s support for the Toronto team. These games have become such a fun thing that I predict that the Jays’ series in Seattle next year will be sold out, and pretty quickly, too.

I mention this phenomenon now in order to expiate my fault for omitting it last night, but also because this is the right place to mention it. If a crowd can ever be said to be the “tenth man” in the team’s batting order, this crowd was absolutely a contributor to the crazy outpouring of runs by the Jays in the fourth inning. The sound in the park rose to crescendo after crescendo as successive Blue Jay hitters contributed to the all-in assault on the Mariners’ pitchers. Our boys had to be inspired by the support they received in Seattle, and at no time more so than in tonight’s fourth inning.

The inning started innocuously enough when Edwin struck out on a foul tip caught by the catcher, Chris Iannetta. Then it looked like another desultory effort as Iannetta went back to the screen for a foul pop up off the bat of Jose Bautista. Until Iannetta realized he had overrun the ball, tried to back pedal to it, and then had the ball fall to the ground for an error, giving Bautista a new lease on life at the plate. Which he used to hit a soft flare to right for a base hit on the ninth pitch of a full count. This brought Russell Martin to the plate bringing imminent danger for the M’s pitcher.

Iwakuma made the mistake of going 2-0 on Martin, and then trying to get a not-great slider over the plate. Martin rifled it into the stands in left, and the game was tied. The pitcher quickly got two strikes on Tulo, but Tulo lined a single into left on the third pitch. Iwakuma fell behind again on Michael Saunders and got burned again, this time to right field, and the Jays had a two-run lead. That was four hits in a row.

Kevin Pillar came up smelling blood, and quickly fell behind 0-2 on a foul and a swing and miss, before he measured one and doubled inside the bag to left. Zeke Carrera worked the count to 2-2 and five pitches, then hit another little flare to right on the sixth pitch, Pillar got a good read that it was a hit, and it was 5-2. Manager Scott Servais had seen enough, and called for Nick Vincent from the bullpen to stop the bleeding.

There followed one of the craziest and most audacious plays you will ever see. On a 1-2 pitch from Vincent, Travis lofted a popup down the line to short right field. Carrera, running from first, instinctively gambled that the ball would fall in for a hit, and took off hell bent for leather and third base. The ball dropped, tantalizingly, right on the foul line, between the frantically charging Robinson Cano coming from second, and right fielder Franklin Gutierrez. Carrera never broke stride, even as he rounded third, and began to track the play in right field as he raced for the plate. The throw was good, and received by the catcher in front of the plate before Zeke arrived. Watching all the way, the daredevil launched himself in foul territory, out of the reach of the catcher, swiped his hand across the plate before being tagged, and ended in a somersault with his feet up in the air. There was no video review. Only a run, but what a run! By the way, that was the seventh consecutive batter to reach base with a hit in the inning.

Vincent walked Donaldson; this brought Edwin Encarnacion to the plate, looking for a chance to shed the embarrassment of having started this inning by striking out (remember that?) Edwin reached out and stroked an outside pitch into the alley in right centre, scoring Travis and Donaldson, for the eighth consecutive hit from nine batters, and Edwin’s pride was restored. Scott Servais went to the bullpen again for Cody Martin, and he had the key to ending the mess (if you’re a Seattle fan, that is),

getting Bautista to fly out to centre, and Martin to line out hard to right.

Jay Happ’s unfortunate 2-0 deficit was now an 8-2 lead, and it was up to him to shut down the Mariners. I guess he did. Recall that the Mariner’s lucky third inning had ended with the strikeout of Kyle Seager. Now the big left-hander came back out after nearly 40 minutes of mostly pleasant delay and proceeded to strike out the side, with a variety of means. Dae-Ho Lee went down swinging, Leonys Martin on a foul tip controlled by Russell Martin, and Chris Iannetta was caught looking.

Happ picked up one more strikeout to lead off the top of the fifth, as Martin corralled a two-strike foul tip by Shawn O’Malley for Happ’s fifth consecutive punchout. But the pitch total, extended in the Mariners’ third, was mounting, and Happ was losing his mastery. He gave up a single to Heredia, retired Gutierrez on a pop to the shortstop, and yielded another single to Cano. Happ finished off holding his breath, along with the rest of us, as Nelson Cruz scalded a 2-2 four-seam fastball to left, but lined it right at Zeke Carrera for the third out, and the end of Happ’s day, after five innings, two runs, earned supposedly, six hits, one walk, eight strikeouts, and 99 pitches. It would be up to the Toronto bullpen to bring home Happ’s historic twentieth win.

This was a serious assignment, and with such a lead calling for the use of anyone but BenGriNa, Aaron Loup, Ryan Tepera, Brett Cecil and Scott Feldman were basically perfect, pitching one inning apiece. Loup gave up a double to Lee in the sixth, Tepera hit Heredia with a pitch in the seventh, and Heredia stole second, the only advance to second by the Mariners after Happ’s exit, Feldman walked pinch-hitter Daniel Vogelbach in the ninth, and that was it for the Mariners.

As for the Blue Jays, Josh Donaldson made a distinct statement that he was coming out of his slump by hitting a homer to left off Cody Martin, the only run Martin gave up in three and two thirds innings of relief of Iwakuma, leading off the sixth. It was Donaldson’s thirty-sixth of the year. Then, in the eighth, Edwin put his own stamp on the game by hitting number forty-two off David Rollins, to complete the scoring at 10-2.

What more could you ask, as a Jays’ fan, than winning the first two of the three-game series in Seattle, and winning it in such an emphatic fashion, combining eight innings of shutout pitching and a riotously exuberant big inning to shut down the Mariners, who are losing their momentum in their chase for a wild card slot.

Tomorrow afternoon the Jays go for the sweep and a five-two road trip behind Aaron Sanchez, saved specifically for this start, and the Mariners hope that King Felix Hernandez will be able to save them from the Blue Jay brooms. Should be a doozy!

On the fourteenth of September, Marco Estrada had a rather strange outing against the Tampa Bay Rays.

Ever since before the All Star Game, for which he was named but could not participate, there have been issues with his back. This would explain why the quality of his starts had deteriorated somewhat since the break. His location was not as precise, a crucial problem for a pitcher who relies totally on location and spin to be effective. Because of control issues, he was falling behind batters, his walks were up, and his pitch count was up. The results were not great: he was pitching less effectively, and not going as deep into games.

Even so, the start against the Rays was most puzzling. For three innings he was perfect, and I am not using hyperbole here. Literally, he was perfect. Nine up, nine down, on 46 pitches. Five strikeouts on the first six batters for a Blue Jays’ record. In all, six strikeouts on nine batters.

But in the fourth something clicked over. He gave up a leadoff single to Logan Forsythe and a home run to Kevin Kiermaier. After getting the second out, he gave up a single, stolen base, and single for a third run. In the fifth he walked two batters, but kept the Rays off the board. In the sixth he gave up a leadoff single and was pulled from the game after 101 pitches—46 over three, then 55 over two and a third and a batter. The base-runner in the sixth scored, so he ended up giving up four earned runs in total.

The next day Manager John Gibbons finally confirmed that the back issue Estrada had been dealing with the entire season, ever since he famously tweaked his back trying a Bruce Lee exercise in spring training, was a herniated disk. His back was still bothering him when he joined the rotation on April tenth, throwing seven shutout innings against Boston on five hits. His back was still bothering him when he set a major league record this year with a string of twelve consecutive starts of six innings or more while allowing five hits or less. (I don’t know who makes up the categories for major league records, or if the creation of records follows the achievement of something remarkable, but it seems that this particular record marks the work of one damn fine starting pitcher.)

And his back was still bothering him when he took the mound tonight in Seattle, with the heavy weight of needing to stop the team’s bleeding after two awful losses in Los Angeles pressing down on his already-vulnerable spine.

Now you and I, ladies and gentlemen, if we were suffering from a herniated disk, would drag ourselves through our boring daily routines, gingerly changing position always with an eye toward not causing another painful twinge. We would awaken in the morning and spend a moment planning how we would get out of bed without the pain taking us back to the mattress. We would stuff ourselves with pain-killers and hope to accomplish half of what we would normally do in a day.

Here is what Marco Estrada accomplished today while suffering from his herniated disk: he pitched seven runless innings, gave up one hit, walked three, and struck out eight, on 97 pitches. As we say in Blue-Jay Land, he was re-Marco-able!

Of course, Estrada has access to the finest orthopaedic doctors and physiotherapists that big baseball bucks can buy, but still, how can you adequately assess a performance like that, on a day when the whole season appeared to be hanging in the balance for Estrada and his team-mates?

Beyond the pitching line itself was the manner of its execution. Once again he started the game with a perfect run, this time of eleven straight batters retired. When he stumbled in the fourth inning, issuing two walks after two were out, he received a truly supportive gift from Kevin Pillar in centre. With Robinson Cano on second and Nelson Cruz on first, Kyle Seager hit a low line drive to centre that bid fair to become a very damaging first base hit against Estrada. But Pillar raced in, slid, and plucked the ball cleanly just before it was to touch down in front of him. Estrada returned to perfection for the fifth and sixth innings, and then, on a 2-1 pitch to Robinson Cano, leading off against Estrada in the seventh, Cano grounded a single cleanly up the middle to end yet another no-hit bid for the Toronto pitching master. After the Cano hit, Estrada closed out the inning with three soft-contact balls in the air, then led off the eighth by walking Leonys Martin, and his night was done.

This is what Marco Estrada did with a herniated disk in his back. What did you do with your bad back today?

After Estrada’s remarkable outing was finished, Jason Grilli and Roberto Osuna managed—barely—to preserve the win for him, creating more tense moments in one and two thirds innings than Estrada had in his whole start.

Estrada’s starting the eighth was helpful to manager John Gibbons, because it gave him the chance to get both Grilli and Osuna ready. It’s a good thing he did. Coming in with a man on and nobody out, Grilli walked pinch hitter Ben Gamel, hitting for catcher Mike Zunino. Grilli then got the next two outs, fanning Ketel Marte and retiring Norichika Aoki on a liner to right. Martin advanced to third on the catch. Grilli now faced left-handed-hitting right fielder Seth Smith, and it’s a bit of a puzzle why Gibbie didn’t bring in Brett Cecil to pitch to Smith. In any case, you had the sense that Smith would be Grilli’s last shot. He walked him, and it was his last shot. Roberto Osuna, ready early, came in to face Cano with the bases loaded and the game seriously on the line. And did we hold our breath when Cano drilled one to right that Zeke Carrera, playing deep, scrambled back and just managed to run down. On second thought, maybe it wasn’t all that great that Osuna was ready . . .

The drama wasn’t over yet, either. Osuna still had to navigate Nelson Cruz and Kyle Seager to get the save, and he almost didn’t get past Cruz, who crushed one, but luckily to dead centre, where Pillar tracked it down for the first out. Seager popped out to third for the second out, and we started to breathe a little easier, but not for long. Adam Lind hit a little flare single to right centre. Seattle’s manager Scott Servais sent Shawn O’Malley in to pinch run for Lind. Leonys Martin rendered the pinch-runner irrelevant by jacking one out to right on Osuna, and the lead was one. Osuna closed it off by fanning Ben Gamel for his very exciting 34^th save in 37 opportunities.

Big right-hander Taijuan Walker started for Seattle. Walker’s won/loss record (but who cares, it’s “meaningless”, right?) was a mediocre 6-10 coming in to this game, but his ERA was an okay 4.28. Moreover, he had recently undergone major reconstructive work on his delivery, and his last couple of starts had been very solid. On the eighth against Texas he went 5 innings, gave up 7 hits and 3 runs, but on the thirteenth against the Angels he pitched the game that stands out, a complete-game, three-hit shutout, with no walks and eleven strikeouts. Who even pitches a complete-game shutout any more?

His start was solid tonight, too, despite the fact that Edwin Encarnacion tried his best to take him out of the game in the first inning. He started his day by striking out both Devon Travis and Josh Donaldson. But Edwin lashed one back through the box that deflected, hard, off Walker’s leg and into centre for a single. After attention from the trainer, he decided he could carry on, and walked Jose Bautista before retiring Russell Martin on a fly ball to centre.

Maybe inspired by Estrada’s work, Edwin’s single was the only base-runner Walker allowed in his first two innings. Meanwhile, he struck out four of six. He eventually had to get around to Edwin again, and it came sooner than he wanted, in the third. Kevin Pillar led off with an infield single. He promptly stole second, but looked to die there when Devon Travis struck out, and then Kyle Seager robbed Josh Donaldson of an RBI single with a diving stop and throw across for the out. But Edwin seemed to find Walker’s offerings rather tasty on this night, and pounded an 0-1 pitch into the seats in left for a 2-0 lead, his forty-first of the year.

Pillar was in the middle of some action in the next inning that resulted in the last run off Walker, that would prove to be the winner. This was another of those rare occasions when the Jays did the right thing and made sure of the one run on offer. Troy Tulowitzki led off with a double to left. Zeke Carrera promptly laid down a sacrifice bunt moving Tulo to third. After Walker caught Melvin Upton looking, Pillar cut his swing down on an 0-2 pitch and poked a base hit into right to score Tulo with the third Toronto run. Pillar, having a field day on both ends of the ball, promptly stole second, but was stranded there when Travis grounded out to third.

The normally cautious Jays must have figured out something about Walker’s delivery, because besides Pillar’s two, Jose Bautista had also easily stolen second after he walked after Edwin’s homer. But maybe it wasn’t Walker, because Travis also stole a base in the seventh off Evan Scribner. Whatever it was, I hope the Jays retrieved second base from the diamond for their memory box!

Walker stumbled twice on fielding plays, and by his demeanour it was hard to tell how much discomfort he was feeling from a possible injury to his foot/leg. In any case, he finished up reasonably well, pitching into the sixth, with a line of five and a third innings, three runs, five hits, four walks, and six strikeouts over 93 pitches.

That was it for the Jays, who didn’t need any more with Estrada in command, and Grilli and Osuna squeaking through. Drew Storen, the Jays’ big hope from Washington, who provided valuable capital to acquire Joaquin Benoit, which turned out to be quite the upgrade for the Jays’ bullpen, was brought in when Walker, with one out in the fifth, walked his second batter of the inning.

Storen showed what he never did in Toronto: the ability to overpower. With two on, he fanned Upton and Pillar on nine pitches to close out the sixth. He started the seventh by giving up an infield hit to Travis. Then he struck out Donaldson on a called third strike, and all hell broke loose between Donaldson and home plate umpire Chris Conroy. Josh had been incensed on the 1-1 pitch when Conroy called him for a swing and wouldn’t check with the base umpire. Then, after a ball in the dirt, he took another pitch nearly in the dirt, and was utterly apoplectic when he was called out on strikes. It didn’t take Conroy too long to toss him from the game, as the manager, and coaches failed to pull him away in time. Darwin Barney came in to finish up at third, and luckily Josh’s potential at the plate was not further needed in the game.

Scott Servais didn’t like the Storen-Edwin matchup, and so brought on Evan Scribner to finish up the seventh. Storen went out after an inning, with a hit and three strikeouts under his belt. Scribner came on and stifled a further threat. He struck out Edwin as hoped, but Travis stole second, and then Scribner walked Jose Bautista before also fanning Russell Martin to end a long but fruitless inning for the Jays.

Scribner had a quick eighth inning, and then Servais brought in Dan Altavilla in the ninth. Altavilla wavered a bit, giving up singles to Pillar, his third hit on the day, and Travis, though Pillar, trying for his third theft to match his three hits, was thrown out at second by catcher Chris Iannetta before Travis’ base hit. Altavilla then retired Michael Saunders and Edwin to finish the Jays’ night without scoring again, though thanks to the work of Estrada and company they already had enough money in the bank.

For a long time everyone has been saying that there’s lots of games left, it’s not time to worry too much yet, and such like, but that point has now been passed. If there was a crucial game that seemed like it had to be won, this was it for the Blue Jays. After the two demoralizing losses to saw off the series with the Angels, with Seattle playing strongly to try to get into contention for a Wild Card slot, if the Jays couldn’t declare their right to be in the mix right here, right now, it just might begin to slip away.

John Gibbons sent out Marco Estrada, bad back and all, to pitch this crucial game, and despite his recent struggles, he came through brilliantly, giving the Jays just what they needed, a courageous and effective performance that called out the best his team-mates had to offer. They responded with good defence, good relief pitching, and just enough timely hitting to save the day.

Thanks to Marco Estrada, the outlook for the Blue Jays tonight is much brighter than it was last night. It was only one game, to be sure, but it was a game we had to win. We look forward to seeing if the good vibes from tonight will carry forward. Are the Toronto Blue Jays a thing, or not?

Inspired by the disappointing results of the last two games, though haunted would be the better word, maybe we should talk turkey about the playoff setup up, how that setup would affect the Blue Jays, and what we need to understand about their present circumstances.

First of all, let’s look at how it works, who plays whom and where.

Obviously the setup is the same for both leagues, but I’ll refer to the American League, and the teams that are currently in the mix in the AL. Five teams “make” the playoffs, but only the division winners are guaranteed a full series of games, in one of the two American League Division Series (ALDS), which are best of five series. The winners of the two ALDS play a best of seven American League Championship Series (ALCS), the winner of which is the league’s champion and representative in the World Series.

So how do the two non-division winners with the next-best records, the “Wild Card” teams, fit into this picture? Well, the first Wild Card position was created to provide four teams for the ALDS when baseball went to the three divisions in each league. The original Wild Card team was in the happy position of being in a full ALDS. The second one was created to provide added “interest” and “excitement” to the late season proceedings. We can read this as simply a money-maker for the teams involved and the league, as attendance remains high for all teams in contention for a Wild Card spot. For the teams who “win” these spots, it’s not such a great deal, because the two teams play a single sudden-death play-in game, hosted by the team with the better record. So you make the playoffs and are finished after one game, as happened to the Yankees and the Pirates, who had the second-best regular-season record in all of baseball last year.

Once the Wild Card winner has been determined, the pairings for the ALDS are the number one seed, the team with the best record, playing the Wild Card winner, and the second and third seeds, the other two division winners, playing against one another. Home team advantage is held by the first and second seeds.

As it stands right now, with Toronto and Baltimore tied for the two Wild Card spots, they would play in the stadium of the team that won the season series, which at this moment stands in favour of Toronto by 9-7, with next week’s three game series in Toronto yet to be played. If the Blue Jays won the Wild Card game, they would face Texas in one ALDS, with Texas holding the home team advantage, and Boston would play Cleveland, with the home team up in the air at this point.

It’s obvious that winning the division is a huge advantage. At this stage, with the Jays four games behind Boston with thirteen games to go, is it a foregone conclusion that Boston wins the division? Not necessarily. First, Boston has a full series left in Baltimore, and the Blue Jays still finish the season with three at Fenway. Based on how they’re playing right now, it’s a tough road, but if the Sox slow down and the Jays brace up, it’s doable.

But if it’s not doable, then, assuming that Toronto doesn’t fall out of the playoff picture altogether, which I don’t see happening, then we face the crap shoot of the Wild Card game. And, if you’ll forgive me, that’s just one game away from seeing the whole season going into the crapper.

Just a final reflection here on last year’s playoff run, and the end of the season shenanigans indulged in by Jays’ manager John Gibbons. It’s probably been noted that yer humble scribe has more than a little antipathy to our folksy, long-suffering peerless leader, and I freely admit it. More than a little of that antipathy stems from Gibbie’s decisions regarding lineups and resting players after we clinched the division last year. Until the final weekend, we were in contention with the Royals for the top seed in the league. Securing that would have given us two advantages in the playoffs, home field advantage all the way through, and a first-round matchup with Houston, the Wild Card winner, rather than the ding-dong brawl of a series we had with Texas. Even if we had tied with the Royals we would have had the first seed because we had earlier closed out the season series in our favour against them.

To me it was ridiculous for big league players making big league salaries to all sit the second game of the doubleheader after we clinched in the first game, and then to sit the final regular season game. In both of these games, Gibbie basically fielded the Buffalo Bisons’ starters instead of the Blue Jays. We lost both games, naturally, and the Royals took the first seed. In “real life” I’m the least likely person to wink at the mistreatment of workers by their bosses, but ball players aren’t workers, and as much as I love it, baseball ain’t “real life”. Rest the players that need resting judiciously and in ones or twos over a week, but two wholesale sitdowns with significant results at stake? No way.

By the same token, I’m not prepared to hear any downscaling of aspirations coming out of Gibbie over the next week or so, none of his “that’s okay, we can do it”. Until we’re mathematically eliminated from the division, every game is crucial, including last night’s stinker, and this afternoon’s dozy shutout loss to the Halos.

The pitching matchup for today’s closing game of the Jays-Angels series in Anaheim was so unbalanced, yet so eerily similar to a number of the matchups we’ve seen in the last few weeks, that though it gave rise to at least some optimism that we had the advantage, it also inspired a bit of dread lurking just below the surface, dread that it was going to happen again.

It, in this case, is the phenomenon of the contending team throwing its set rotation against a team that’s basically playing out the string. Though these games in September take on supreme importance to a team like Toronto, struggling to secure not only a spot in the playoffs, but a coveted division title, their value is seen in a different light by opponents languishing deep in the standings. Such teams are in essence already preparing for next year, and one of the things that they want to do is audition players who have been moving up in their system in order to see which ones might be able to contribute in 2017.

Marcus Stroman took the hill for the Blue Jays today. Stroman has been gradually trying to rebuild his confidence in his approach after a disastrous mid-season swoon, and he’s been meeting with some game-to-game success, which has resulted in several quality starts, though not much success in the win column. If the Jays do indeed make a full playoff series, there is no question that Stroman will receive regular starting assignments, so not only is it important for him to keep his team in these crucial games, and give it a chance to win, but it’s also important for him to feel that he is returning to the peak form we saw from him last fall.

Alex Meyer, on the other hand, a long, skinny drink of water with a nice easy motion, has taken quite a while to get to the position where he could be ready to play a role for the Angels next year. Drafted in 2012 out of the University of Kentucky, he had a couple not very successful appearances in relief for the Twins in 2015, and one so-so start for them last spring, after which he spent the entire season in Triple A as a starter. Traded to the Angels along with last night’s starter Ricky Nolasco from the Twins on August first this year, this would be his third start for the Angels. His combined Twins/Angels record going into today’s game was 0-3 with an ERA of 8.18.

So when Meyer walked Devon Travis to lead off the game, it looked like a good thing. But it didn’t look so good when he struck out the next four batters in a row, and threw in a fifth strikeout to end the second inning to count five punchouts on his first six outs of the game.

Helped by a couple of examples of both Toronto’s hitting blues and their base-running misadventures, which I hope are not spreading, Meyer continued to stifle the Jays through five effective innings. In the third the Jays saw some promise snuffed out by the dreaded double play. With one out, Meyer walked Kevin Pillar on four pitches and then was started for second as Devon Travis hit a little flare to right that served as an effective hit and run. But Josh Donaldson hit a hard grounder to third and the Angels turned two.

In the fourth Edwin Encarnacion led off with a ringing double to left, and then wisely held second when Jose Bautista grounded out to the shortstop. Not. Edwin must have been sitting next to Devon Travis on the bench and gotten some of Travis’ je ne sais quoi rubbed off on him, because he exuberantly broke for third with the hit, and was DOA. Is there a season statistic for wasting leadoff doubles by running into the first out at third? By now we must lead the league. After that, they went quietly.

In the fifth Meyer pitched around a walk to Michael Saunders to finish an effective five innings of shutout ball, on two hits, three walks, seven strikeouts, and 79 pitches. Oh, did I say seven strikeouts?

After Meyer, the Angels bullpen kept the barn door firmly closed with the horses still whinnying inside. Jose Valdez struck out the side in the sixth. Deolis Guerra, helped by a nice diving stop by Yunel Escobar at third that robbed Troy Tulowitzki, stranded a Dioner Navarro single in the seventh. In the eighth J.C. Ramirez erased his walk to Travis with a double-play ball from Edwin, and in the ninth the Jays wasted another leadoff double, this time by Jose Bautista. I know that they needed more than a small-ball run at that point, but how frustrating is it that two smart hitters like Russell Martin and Tulo both ground out to the shortstop after a leadoff double? Maybe they were just testing Bautista’s base-running smarts, to see if he would break for third.

Though he still had trouble throwing strikes, Marcus Stroman’s start was certainly strong enough to be rewarded with a win, if he weren’t backed up, that is, by an offence that is taking its lumber to the plate in the form of kleenexes from the tissue box, rather than bats from the bat rack. With a line of 2 runs, seven hits, two walks, three strikeouts, and 105 pitches over six innings, he chalked up another quality start, though the way Toronto’s been hitting, that and a loony will only get you a really bad cup of coffee.

Stroman was victimized by home plate umpire CB Bucknor and his own catcher in the second to allow the Angels to chalk up their first run. Albert Pujols walked when Bucknor called three consecutive pitches up in the zone balls, all in almost the exact location where he had called strike one. C.J. Cron singled to centre, Pujols going to third. Rafael Ortega reached on catcher’s interference on a foul tip of a 1-1 pitch, perhaps prolonging the inning. Rookie catcher Juan Gaterol, who maybe shouldn’t have gotten to the plate with only one out, grounded into a fielder’s choice to score Pujols, who maybe shouldn’t have reached base to begin with.

At any rate, Stroman left after six down only two-nothing, the Angels having scored a perfectly acceptable run in the fifth when Pujols singled home Mike Trout, who had doubled. Brett Cecil started the seventh and won the lefty matchup, striking out Kole Calhoun. The usually dependable Joe Biagini came in next, tasked with keeping the game close against the heart of the order.

But Biagini, who might be getting a little ragged around the edges, saw the lead extended, not controlled, albeit with more than a little help from an uncharacteristically befuddled Bautista in right, though this is not reflected in the box score, as the Angels’ scorer appears never to have seen an error that he didn’t want to turn into a hit. I appreciate the kindness of not wanting to score errors, but come on, this guy (gal?) wouldn’t give an error to a fan who fumbles a bag of peanuts when the peanut vendor makes a perfect toss.

Biagini didn’t help himself by walking Trout and giving up a single to Pujols, which of course sent Trout to third. He didn’t throw a strike to Trout, which raises suspicions of pitching “carefully” but walking him with one out to get to the skilled but ponderous Pujols isn’t such a bad idea any time . That left Biagini a double play away from ending the inning, and how many times has he done that this year? He didn’t get the ground ball, but he got the next best thing. The Angels started Pujols from first, like they like to do, and C.J.Cron lofted a lazy fly ball to short right. Pujols was slow to pick up what happened, and slow to react. Bautista had a real chance to double him off first and end the inning before Trout scored on the sac fly. But from only third-base distance away from first, he airmailed the ball over Edwin’s head, Pujols got back safely, and Trout scored.

Note on rules: I double-checked the rules, and my narrative is correct. Attempting to double a runner off base after a caught ball is a “time play”, and when the out is recorded is germane to whether the run counts. If Encarnacion had the ball in his glove before Trout crossed the plate, the run would not count. Unfortunately, it wasn’t in his glove, but sailing over his head!

With the inning extended, Biagini walked Andrelton Simmons and gave up a bloop single to Rafael Ortega, which scored Pujols. Instead of escaping with the lead still at two, it was now four, and the hill had become a mountain for the Jays to climb.

Aaron Loup and Bo Schultz managed the eighth, but it hardly mattered, because the Blue Jays weren’t able to dent the Angels’ relievers anyway.

In other circumstances this game would have been a turn-the-page, maybe we’ll hit better tomorrow type of outcome. But in the context of the ongoing hitting slump, and the tightening noose around the Blue Jays’ championship hopes, it became much, much more than that. Now we have to take two out of three in Seattle to salvage a winning record on the road trip; pretty daunting, you might say. Nail-biting time, fer sure!

Man, when we played good ball to win the first two game of this series, I thought all the bad vibes and noxious fumes emenating from the last two home series had been dissipated across the continent along with the jet contrails as the team flew west Wednesday afternoon.

But two good games do not a season make. Nor do they put a definitive end to a bad smell. Just look at what we had in front of us this evening, when the Angels of wherever embarrassed the boys in blue 6-1. Check that sentence: rather, when the boys in blue embarrassed themselves in a 6-1 giveaway to the lowly LA Angels.

We had another good pitching performance wasted. Francisco Liriano is going head to head with R.A. Dickey to be named for the one or two starts left for a number five in the remaining games, and, we should be so fortunate, inclusion on the post-season roster. To keep his claim relevant, he needed a second straight good start following his terrific no decision outing against the Rays in Toronto on the twelfth, a game the Jays eventually won 3-2 on Zeke Carrera’s game-winning pinch-hit homer in the bottom of the eighth. And he certainly filled the bill tonight, matching Dickey’s solid start last night. He went six innings on 94 pitches and gave up four runs, only two of them earned, on six hits, with two walks and four strikeouts. What’s that, you say? Only two of the four runs were earned? What was that all about? Yeah, that’s right, it’s not a typo. Just wait, we’ll get to all the messy details.

Yet again we failed to capitalize on numerous chances against a very mediocre Ricky Nolasco. We’ve heard this before, haven’t we? Maybe we should have a template to report games like this, with blanks, like the “write your own adventure” books for kids. Yeah, that’d be good: Tonight we wasted another fine outing by ___________. Tonight we had base-runners up the ying-yang against some random guy named ___________. Tonight ____________ made a crucial mental error on the bases that killed a promising threat by the Jays’ offence. And so on. Ad nauseum.

Wasted hits, wasted base-runners? Try this on for size: in the first, second, third, sixth, seventh, and eighth, we had a leadoff single aboard. In the fifth it was a leadoff double, but that was by Devon Travis, and for the second time in a week he took off for third on a grounder to short and made the first out at third. Only in the fourth did they make two outs before Justin Smoak drew a walk, but Troy Tulowitzki led off the inning with a blast to the centre-field wall that in 90% of the parks is a home run, but at Angels Stadium it was just an impressive out. And in the ninth, when the game was already sewn up by the Angels, Edwin Encarnacion singled with two outs. So, seven innings out of nine the leadoff hitter had a base hit, and they had at least one base-runner in every inning. And it took them until the bottom of the eighth to score a run, on a sac fly with the bases loaded. A record of some sort for futility?

And it wasn’t as if they were up against Rick Porcello or somebody. Sure, Nolasco had good numbers, six innings, no runs, five hits, two walks, seven strikeouts, but he threw 102 pitches, and there’s the key. He laboured all the way. He had base-runners on in every inning. You can look at that both ways. He was bad because he was sloppy, or he was good because he was pitching out of a jam all night. And watching him work, inning by inning, your feelings were ambivalent, too. This guy’s on the ropes, you thought, he couldn’t last. But then you thought, no he’s not. We couldn’t cash a base-runner to save our butts the way we’re hitting. The gloomy bird on my right shoulder won the day. Nolasco wasn’t on the ropes, and we couldn’t put him away.

Yet again we slopped it up in the field, to the extent that only two (two!) of the six runs off the Jays’ pitchers were earned. And another one, the second run off Liriano, was hardly “earned” by the Angels. They scored in the fifth inning on just a hit and a walk, but Andrelton Simmons, the beneficiary of the leadoff walk, was able to go all the way to third on a wild pitch that Russell Martin couldn’t find, so he was in position to score on a Shane Robinson single, yet without the wild pitch Simmons would have just been on first when Robinson singled, and they both would have died at first and second when Yunel Escobar struck out to end the inning.

In fact, the only legitimate run off Liriano or the bullpen was Albert Pujols’ historic solo homer. He led off the second inning with a short sweet stroke that jumped the ball over the fence in left on a line. Full credit to the illustrious career of Pujols. This was his thirtieth homer of the season. He is only the fourth major league hitter in history to have had fourteen, that’s right, fourteen seasons in which he has hit thirty or more homers. My hat goes off to him, but I wish he’d do it against somebody else!

As for the rest of the legally-credited unearned runs, what a dreary list of sad stories it is.

In the Angels’ sixth, Liriano was still on the hill and the game was still close, the teams separated by the Pujols’ homer and the wild-pitch-assisted run in the fifth. Kole Calhoun led off with a single. Mike Trout hit a slow bouncer right at the usually impeccable-fielding Justin Smoak at first, but Smoak couldn’t come up with it, and it ticked off his glove for an error, allowing Calhoun to reach second with Trout safe at first. Pujols then flied out to right, and Calhoun moved up on the catch. He scored on a ground-out to second by Jefry Marte, which should have been the third out, but was only the second, and Trout moved into scoring position. After stealing third, he easily scored on a soft single to centre that Simmons hit on a pitch that totally handcuffed him. Two runs unearned because Smoak had to get an out on the grounder he missed, but he didn’t.

With Liriano finished, Ryan Tepera came in to pitch the seventh, and saw the Angels’ score two more unearned runs, all for the lack of Josh Donaldson making the easy throw to first with two outs already in the books. On what shoud have been the third out, Donaldson picked up an easy one hopper and fired way wide of first. The ball went out of play, so not only was Escobar safe on the error but he ended up at second. He scored on a double by Calhoun, and Trout scored him with a single to centre.

If the Jays had played decent major-league defence on this night, this game could still be going on, a one-one tie.

So there you have it. A good start wasted. A mediocre starter allowed to get away with it. Uncashed base-runners galore. A defensive mess. All the classic ingredients were there tonight to contribute to what we might refer to as the Blue Jays having been “Tampa-ed” again.

After Nolasco was taken out, Manager Mike Scioscia played match-a-pitcher-to-a-hitter with his huge post-callup bullpen, and the Jays treated them as junior Houdinis in training. He ran through six of them in three innings, which may explain why my bed-time tonight is pushed back even a good bit more than usual for a west coast game.

Oh yes, the Jays did score a run in the eighth, after some strange base-running killed a potentially much bigger rally, on a sacrifice fly by Melvin Upton. The die was already long cast, though, and it was past time for the players to head out and the groundskeepers to start tidying up the messy dugouts for Sunday’s game.

Which we hope will look a little more like professional baseball, on Toronto’s part, anyway.

The collective groan you heard last week from the heart of Blue-Jay land was the response of the Yahoo Faction of the Toronto Fan Club as they reacted to the news that R.A. Dickey would receive a start in the Jays’ current series with the Angels in Los Angeles.

No doubt the groans intensified last night when, in the midst of all the delirium after the team’s effective opening-game win of the series behind the redoubtable Jay Hqpp

the realization set in that yes, indeed, the planned Dickey start was upon us. Oh, they cried, look, look (somehow I imagine the Yahoo Faction conversing very much in the manner of Dick, Jane, and Sally in the primary readers), now that naughty Dickey will spoil our playground games again!

But, you know what? R.A. Dickey is a seasoned pro, a veteran who came up the (really) hard way to make his mark in the majors. Since he has been in Toronto he has eaten an incredible number of innings without any of the naysayers acknowledging it, and has all the while served as a calming and steadying influence in the clubhouse and in the dugout. If there were a coaching position for Team Philosopher or Team Soother, the position would be tailor-made for Dickey. In short, people, he’s here, Noah Syndergaard is in New York. He has a role to play, he knows how to play it, and for the most part plays it very well.

So with Dickey taking the hill tonight, you had to expect a few of his butterflies to escape, you had to hope he didn’t have a flat inning and give up a couple of runs at some point, but you should have also expected that he would grit it out, regardless. You also had to hope that his mates would take their inspiration from him, and let him set the tone for their effort. You also had to expect that at times it would be exciting as hell.

Like the first inning, when he wriggled out of a bases-loaded jam by getting Andrelton Simmons to pop out to Edwin Encarnacion in foul territory. Kole Calhoun had flown out to centre to lead off, but Mike Trout singled to left. Albert Pujols doubled to left, breaking the hex Dickey has held over him for most of his career. Trout stopped at third on the double. C.J. Cron struck out. Jefry Marte fouled off the first knuckler from Dickey, then looked at four in a row outside the strike zone, loading the bases behind Trout and Pujols. That set up the confrontation with Simmons which Dickey won to keep the Angels off the scoreboard. Little could anyone imagine that they never would score, off Dickey or his successors.

One thing about R.A. Dickey is that if you don’t get to him early, sometimes you don’t get to him at all. The other thing about him is that he’s not bothered too much by base-runners. Sometimes it seems as though he feels that, like imminent death, they “sharpen the mind”.

In the second inning, Nick Buss led off with a single to left, and then stole second. So Dickey struck out Carlos Perez. He struck out Kaleb Cowart. He got Kole Calhoun to end the inning by flying out to left. In the third inning, after striking out Mike Trout (Yes!) he gave up a single to Albert Pujols, then got C.J. Cron on a popup to short, and Jefry Marte on a fly ball to right. His fourth inning was a showcase of soft contact, and he decided to dispense with the silly base-runners. Andrelton Simmons hit a soft little liner to Devon Travis at second, Buss bounced one back to him, and Perez popped out to Edwin Encarnation at first. Nine pitches. Ho hum.

In the fifth Cowart grounded out to Edwin at first, Cowart hit a short fly to Melvin Upton in left, Trout hit a soft little single to left, but Pujols went down swinging. Nine pitches. Ho hum.

So Dickey goes out for the sixth at 64 pitches, no runs, five hits, one walk, and five strikeouts. And gives up a soft single to left by Cron and a harder hit single to Marty. And out came Gibbie with the hook. Normally, I’d be incensed at this, and in fact I was. But by the same token, it all worked out, so who could argue in retrospect?

I guess the operative factor would have been that as good as Dickey had been, he was protecting just a 2-0 lead, on the strength of Troy Tulowitzki’s two-run homer in the fourth, that had plated Jose Bautista, on with a walk leading off. And at this point he was facing not the tying run, but the lead run at the plate, in the person of Simmons, who had disturbed Jay Happ’s pleasant run the night before with a three-run dinger.

So in came Joe Biagini, the big rally-killer disguised as a sheepish rookie with a quirky sense of humour. Except when he’s in a jam. The first and maybe smartest thing Biagini did, after getting a swinging strike on Simmons, was to throw four straight in the dirt to put him on, and yes, thank god, Russell Martin blocked them all! That brought up Nick Buss. He fanned Buss on three pitches for the first out.

Then came the pivotal at bat of the game. Angels Manager Mike Scioscia sent Yunel Escobar up to hit for the catcher Perez. Yes, that Yunel Escobar. The guy that made so many lazy, soft-contact outs with runners in scoring position and tore the cover off the ball when the bases were empty when he was with the Blue Jays. Also the guy who got in gobs of trouble here for writing a rude expression in Spanish on his cheeks with the charcoal they use for glare. The guy whose back end we were glad to see when he went to the Marlins in the trade for Jose Reyes and Mark Buehrle et al.

In typical free-swinging Escobar style, he swung and missed for strike one, fouled one off for strike two, took one out of the zone (surprise!), and then bounced a one-hopper to Biagini, who cooly threw home to get the force on Cron, leaving the bases loaded, but now with two outs. Kaleb Cowart then flied out to Kevin Pillar on an 0-1 pitch for the third out, and Biagini had effected the amazing escape of the month, if not the season.

The last time the Blue Jays faced Jared Weaver they had been befuddled by his mixture of soft and softer. Think Dickey or Marco Estrada, only a lot bigger and with a lot more hair. They didn’t fare much better against him this time. After Devon Travis led off the game with a bloop single to centre, he zoned in and caught Donaldson looking, fanned Edwin, and retired Bautista on a popup to second. Here we go again, thought yer humble scribe. Three ground balls on nine pitches in the second reinforced the sense of impending doom, and the fact that he extricated himself from a two-on, two-out situation in the third with the help of some feckless hitting/running by the Jays made it even worse.

Darwin Barney led off with a solid single to centre. Then Josh Thole, in to catch Dickey as always, dribbled one up the first-base line, and the first baseman Cron let it roll, expecting it to go foul. By the time he realized it was going to stay fair, the semi-speedy Thole had passed him, and it was too late to pick it up and tag him out. With Travis at the plate, runners on first and second and nobody out, it finally dawned on Manager John Gibbons that it might be a good time to bunt. Good luck with that, and maybe we see why the Toronto manager eschews the bunt. As Barney broke a bit early for third, Travis bunted through the ball and catcher Carlos Perez had Barney dead to rights with a good throw at second. There was a scary moment when Barney’s head, helmet flying off, made solid contact with Simmon’s knee while trying to dive back into the bag. He received a thorough examination on the bench and in the clubhouse, and was deemed all right to continue, luckily.

After Weaver caught Travis looking for the second out, he walked Donaldson, setting up the force when Edwin hit a grounder to the shortstop to end the inning.

Just when it looked like Toronto’s futility was carved in stone, they made a breakthrough in the fourth inning, thanks to Troy Tulowitzki. With Bautista on first courtesy of a leadoff walk, Tulo turned on a 1-2 changeup and hit it out for a sudden two-nothing lead. Weaver quickly restored order by retiring the side, but the damage was done though it was hard to credit that Tulo’s shot would be all the Jays needed.

Dr. Biagini having performed his successful extraction, mound duties for the last three innings were parcelled out as usual to BenGriNa. Though they were a bit ragged around the edges this time, possibly because they’d seen a lot of work in the last few games, they managed to maneuver through the Angels and keep them off the board.

Kole Calhoun led off the seventh with a single to right, and Mike Trout followed with a hard smash to deep right on which Jose Bautista was able to get back and make a nice jumping catch against the wall. Once the cracks of the bat rendered him fully awake, Benoit settled to it and struck out both Pujols and Cron to finish his seventh.

Jason Grilli came in wild in the eighth, almost worked his way out of it, but then issued a second walk, causing Gibbie to call in Roberto Osuna for the relatively rare 4-out save. Grilli walked the first man he faced, Jefry Marte, on a 3-2 pitch, then immediately wild-pitched him to second, removing the double-play possibility. The dangerous Simmons grounded out to short, forcing Marte to stay at second (unlike certain other ballplayers who like to try to advance to third on a grounder to short . . .). With Nick Buss at the plate, Grilli got a called strike on a four-seamer (his four-seamers clock at about mid-92 range), a foul on a slider, threw off with a four-seamer, then came back with a third four-seamer that Buss watched go by for strike three and two outs. Almost out of the woods, though, the crumb trail stopped for Grilli. He walked Rafael Ortega, hitting for the rookie catcher Juan Gaterol, and out came Gibbie from the dugout like a shot, and Osuna was in the game. And in the dugout four pitches later, having induced a fly ball to left off the bat of Kaleb Cowhart on a 1-2 pitch.

After Tulo’s homer, Toronto had a few base-runners against Weaver and relievers Cody Ege and J.C. Ramirez, but never really mounted a threat. Weaver gave up two base hits in the fifth, but Edwin grounded into a double play. In the sixth, he got a couple of harmless fly ball outs to strand runners at first and second, an infield hit by Bautista and a walk to Kevin Pillar. That was it for Weaver, who once again pitched well for Los Angeles against the Blue Jays, giving up two runs, seven hits, three walks, and four strikeouts on 101 pitches over six innings.

Ege retired the first two batters he faced in the seventh, and then yielded to Ramirez, who walked Donaldson before getting Edwin to ground out to second. Ramirez, who throws hard but sometimes isn’t sure where the plate is, walked two more in the eighth, but retired the Jays on two ground outs and a left-side popup in foul territory.

This brings us to the ninth inning, and Scioscia’s choice to keep the Angels close until their last bats was right-hander Andrew Bailey. For once, it was Toronto’s turn to do a little piling on and make a ninth-inning comeback unlikely. Russell Martin, who had fanned in the seventh, hitting for Josh Thole in the number nine spot, led off with a booming drive to the wall in right centre for a double. He advanced to third on a single to centre by Travis, and scored on a deep sacrifice fly to centre by Donaldson that also allowed Travis to advance to second. It didn’t really matter where Travis was when Edwin belted his fortieth home run of the season, which landed somewhere in the rocky foothills north of Anaheim. What’s that you say? That’s a water feature? In the ball park? Edwin’s homer was enough of Bailey for the Angels’ manager, and Deolis Guerra came in to finish up. He walked Bautista, but Tulo grounded into a double play. Nonetheless, the Jays had added three runs, even though it turned out that they weren’t needed.

Osuna, who had secured save 33 out of 36 by coming in to protect a two-run lead, in the eighth, finished up, providing a tense moment by walking Calhoun to lead off, so that both Trout and Pujols would come to the plate with a runner on. But Osuna was equal to the task. Trout flew out to centre, Pujols grounded out to short, and the closer blew away C.J. Cron to finish off in fine fashion.

So this is what a complete-game shutout looks like, in 2016. We can call it a complete game because it was, well, complete, but there aren’t too many opportunities for a starter, in the American League at least, to pitch a complete game, so the new normal is shutout by committee. And, unlike most committees, this one convened, did its work, and disbanded, a job well done.

One of the odder things about being a baseball writer “of a certain age”, to use the elegant French phrase, is that sometimes I am brought up short by the realization of exactly how much water has passed under the bridge.

My perception of the Los Angeles Angels, the California Angels, or the Los Angeles Angels of Anaheim, or whatever iteration of their name might be just down the road, will probably always be that it is an expansion franchise. So as the camera panned around Angel Stadium last night during the pre-game, as Buck and Pat, or Puck and Bat (better names for sports broadcasters, no?) blathered on about this and that, I suddenly noticed that they were highlighting the big logos around the stadium with the number 50 emblazoned on them. The reason for the 50 on the logos, so I learned (the twin hairdos are occasionally informative, I admit) is that this year the Angels’ franchise is celebrating the fiftieth year of its stadium, which opened for the 1966 season.

This puts Angels Stadium in the top tier of senior citizens among stadia currently in operation in the big leagues. Not only is it a shock that the franchise is 55 years old and the stadium 50, it’s also a shock that they haven’t torn down and replaced their ball park with something new and glitzy, more suitable to the Hollowood vibe that inevitably hovers over any team playing in the L.A. area. That being said, it should also be noted that when the Disney people took over the franchise, they completed a significant renovation of the park in 1997, so in that regard it’s more up-to-date than our concrete canyon on the lake.

It also made me pause to reflect on the creation of the Angels franchise, which was very much rooted in the desire of the American League owners to access the cash bonanza of the California market for baseball that had first been breeched by the more adventurous ownership of the Dodgers and Giants franchises of the National League. There were franchise moves prior to the two New York teams moving west; it’s not like they were the first. The Boston Braves had already moved to Milwaukee, the St. Louis Browns to Baltimore, and the Philadelphia A’s to Kansas City in the early fifties. But those were all nearly moribund franchises, second clubs in cities where the other franchise had become dominant. In the case of the Braves, the Brownies, as they were affectionately known, and the A’s, it was simple: move, or fold. Sadly, the whole peripatetic franchise thing erased one of the pillars of the eternal stability of baseball as it once was. And, as you are aware, only the Browns remained in Baltimore, while the Braves and A’s also fled their second homes for newer, more lucrative surroundings. If nothing else, the baseball fan of the modern age is sure to be more cynical by a large margin than the fans of those earlier, more innocent days.

But after that first wave of moves, necessary for franchise survival, the moves of the Dodgers and the Giants in 1958 were very different propositions indeed, as the two franchises both sought a wider fan base and new stadia in order to improve an already good financial situation. The general distaste among traditional baseball fans on the East Coast to the hijacking of the beloved Dodgers and Giants was to put quite a damper on the notion of moving successful franchises. From this point on, groups hoping to see a major league baseball franchise in their city would pursue the route of trying to acquire an expansion franchise. One of the first and most successful of such ventures was the pursuit by famous cowboy singer/songwriter Gene Autry of an American League franchise for Los Angeles, which resulted in the birth of the Angels in 1961, with Autry as their owner and chief executive.

Thus we have the Angels of today, one of the oldest of the “new” teams in the big leagues.

The good news that greeted the Blue Jays as they reported to the ball park in Los Angeles was that the MRI on Josh Donaldson’s hip was negative. The better news was that he was back in the lineup as the designated hitter. The best news of all was that not only did he break out of his horrendous 0 for 23 slump, but he did so with a vengeance, hitting two doubles and a single with two walks in five plate appearances.

Not coincidentally, Toronto played a very solid game on both sides of the ball to support the oh-so-reliable Jay Happ as he pitched six innings of one-run, three-hit ball to earn his nineteenth win of the season.

It was a win the Jays badly needed after their terrible showing against the Tampa Bay Rays in Toronto this week. More so, it was a modest offensive breakout that was even more badly needed after the utter hopelessness they have displayed at the plate since the beginning of September. It’s amazing how a few well-placed base hits and the odd RBI can do so much to dispel the gloom hanging over a slumping team.

Despite being twenty games below .500 after tonight’s loss to the Jays, the Angels represent a difficult and at times dangerous challenge. First off, you should score some runs off their pitching. They have had a horrendous string of injuries to their pitching staff, and have lost most of their pencilled-in rotation from the beginning of the year to season-ending injuries. They’ve lost their closer, Huston Street, for the year. It seems like almost every game they trot out a starter who’s just been signed, or activated, or acquired at the trade deadline.

However, that is not to say that the Angels are incapable of finding a starter who can throw together a decent performance against a team in the throes of an extended team-wide batting slump. And we know just which team we’re talking about here.

So there’s still a premium on getting a very good performance out of Toronto’s starter, because all of their other woes aside, the Halos still have one of the most fearsome 2-3 or 3-4, as the case may be, combinations in all of baseball, in Mike Trout and Albert Pujols. The key to beating the Angels absolutely lies in not letting these two hurt you, and especially not letting them come to the plate with base-runners already on.

Over six innings plus a couple of batters Jay Happ allowed only one earned run on three hits. He was only touched up in the seventh by a homer to left off the bat of shortstop Andrelton Simmons, which unfortunately followed an error by Darwin Barney at third on a hard-hit ball off his glove by Jefry Marte. By then, as we’ll see, Happ was working with a five-nothing cushion, courtesy of two runs scored off Angels’ starter Daniel Wright in the fourth, and a three-run Russell Martin homer off reliever Jose Valdez in the sixth that cashed Donaldson, walked by Wright as the last batter he faced, and Bautista, walked by Valdez.

The fact that Happ carried a shutout into the seventh on a night when he didn’t have his best stuff, witnessed by three walks and only three strikeouts, can be attributed largely to the fact that he managed to keep Trout and Pujols from hurting him. Trout went 0 for 1 with two walks against Happ, and Pujols got two hits, both singles, neither with runners on base at all, let alone in scoring position. It wasn’t for lack of trying on Trout’s part, mind you. In the third he drove Jose Bautista to the wall in right where Bautista made a nice running catch. In the eighth, with Grilli in the game, he hit one even harder, and Bautista had to leap at the wall to haul it down. It’s a measure of Bautista’s struggles this season that he allowed himself a shrug and a sheepish grin after the second catch, I think in honour of the fact that he had shown that he could still contribute defensively.

BenGriNa did a good job following Happ, though both Joaquin Benoit (pinch-hit single by former Jay Cliff Pennington) and Grilli (sawed-off—seriously sawed off—bloop single by Pujols followed by a solid single by C.J. Cron) were touched up a bit. Osuna breezed in the ninth with a strikeout and a couple of easy grounders on eleven pitches, which is fine, but once again why was he out there in a non-save? (Since the Jays had scored two more in the top of the ninth to extend the lead to 7-2.) In the first game of a four-game series?

As for the Jays’ hitters, it sure looked like another round of being stifled by the unknown pitcher tonight. Daniel Wright was making only his second start for the Angels after being traded from Cincinnati, where he’d also made two starts in his rookie year. He came into the game with a record with the Angels of no wins and two losses, and an ERA of 7.50. That’s right, 7.50. Now, how did he do?

Well, not bad at all. In the first three innings, he walked two and gave up one hit, a single to Jose Bautista in the second. Bautista was erased on a caught stealing. Before you have a stroke, let me say that it was a botched hit and run with Russell Martin at the plate, as Manager John Gibbons tried to “stir things up”. The first walk was erased by a double play, so he only faced one batter over the minimum through three. Happ, by the way, also walked two and gave up a hit in the first three, on seven pitches more than the Angels’ hurler. So we had an incipient pitchers’ duel between Jay Happ and Daniel Wright (huh?)

The Jays finally broke through against Wright in the fourth, and for once they did it without leaving the yard.

Josh Donaldson lashed a double to left centre, his first of three hits, to lead off. Edwin Encarnacion moved him to third with a single to left, as Donaldson had to contain his usual aggressiveness on the bases because of the hip issue. Jose Bautista singled to right opposite the shift to score Donaldson and send Edwin to third. Russell Martin cashed Edwin with a sac fly to right. Going with the pitch. Situational hitting. Not wasting the leadoff double. Didn’t somebody just write about all this recently?

Still following Wright, he retired the side in order in the fifth, and came to the sixth inning, which would be his last, down only 2-0, but about to have his good start messed up by the Angels’ suspect bullpen. Manager Mike Scioscia pulled Wright immediately after he walked Donaldson to lead off the sixth. He went out with a line of 3 runs (Donaldson would score on Martin’s home run), 4 hits, 3 walks, 3 strikeouts, and 79 pitches. Jose Valdez came in and had to retire Edwin twice. First he popped him up to the catcher but Jett Bandy misjudged the ball behind the plate, got to it too late, and muffed it. So Valdez took matters into his own hands and retired Edwin on a called third strike. Then he went a little hairy, and let the game get out of control. He wild-pitched Donaldson to second, walked Bautista, and grooved his first pitch to Martin, who gleefully tomahawked a no-doubt line drive out of the park for three runs, watching it with admiration as soon as he hit it. Valdez walked one more then closed out the inning, but the horse was gone.

Happ retired Kole Calhoun leading off the Angels’ sixth on a great play that was totally unconscious. Calhoun hit a hard one-hopper back to the mound, on the first base side. Happ, falling off toward third, and seeing the ball hit to the other side, continued to turn until his back was to the plate and his glove dangling open. He glanced back at the ball just as it slapped into his glove for an easy pitcher-to-first groundout. A definite improvement over his having to feel like a bumper pad in a pinball game. Happ would walk Mike Trout following, in this case a good move as he was able to retire Pujols and cleanup hitter C.J. Cron after.

After reliever Mike Morin stranded Donaldson’s second double, a two-out shot to right centre, Happ faced his last two batters, retired neither of them, and yielded to Benoit with the lead down to 5-2, but it wasn’t all on him. The first hitter, Jefry Marte, hit a hard grounder right at Darwin Barney at third, but Barney booted it, in what was later ruled an error after the scorer had originally given Marte a hit. Andrelton Simmons promptly lined one out to left field for two runs, and Happ was finished, having given up one earned run, on 3 hits, 3 walks, 3 strikeouts, throwing 92 pitches. A tidy performance worthy of win number 19 for the season by Happ.

Benoit, Jason Grilli, and Roberto Osuna finished up on the hill for Toronto, as described earlier, with Osuna’s save opportunity already off the table when the Blue Jays added two more runs in the ninth off Deolis Guerra before A.J. Achter came in to bail him out. Once again the runs were counted without benefit of the long ball.

With one out Kevin Pillar hit a ground-rule double to right. Barney moved him to third with a hard single to centre, then advanced on a Guerra wild pitch. The Angels played their infield in for Devon Travis, who bounced one through the left side to drive in both runners and extend the lead to 7-2. Guerra gave up Donaldson’s third hit, a single, and walked Edwin to load the bases before Achter came in to induce Bautista to ground into a double play.

Nothing like an opponent having a bad year, a little California sunshine, and a little time away from the packed pressure cooker of their home park to give Toronto’s struggling heroes a new lease on life.

R.A. Dickey will have to be good tomorrow night to keep the good vibes good.

They have to do something! Incantations? Ritual sacrifice? Voodoo? Sprinkle pixie dust on the bat rack? Have the pitching coaches and the batting coaches swap jobs? Lock the manager in the john before the game? Who cares? Just do something, anything to rid this team of its accursed batting slump and get it back on track! One idea I had was to sacrifice a pure white chicken and pour its fresh blood over the barrels of all the “gamer” bats belonging to the team’s stars. But then, you might have trouble with PETA, right? Besides, I hate it when the blood stains rub off on the baseballs . . .

The trouble with modern-day baseball management is that its leading lights may have all the smarts in the world, but they utterly lack imagination. Where is Bill Veeck when you need him? Now there was a guy with imagination!

If you know anything about the legendary owner Bill Veeck at all, you probably know that he was this wacky guy who once sent a midget up to bat in a major league game. (Eddie Gaedel, who wore the numer 1/8 on his uniform, walked on four pitches and was lifted for a pinch runner.) Or the guy who in the mid-seventies, near the end of his riotous career, sponsored a Disco Demolition Night promotion at Comiskey Park in Chicago that resulted in a full-blown riot and caused the White Sox to forfeit that night’s game.

But Bill Veeck was a pretty smart guy who was responsible for a lot of innovations in major league baseball. It was his idea to plant the ivy along the wall at Wrigley Field. He was the first owner to have the players’ names put on the backs of their uniforms. He integrated the American League in July of 1948 by signing Larry Doby, and in fact was apparently thwarted by the commissioner of baseball in 1943 when he let his intention be known that when he took over the Philadelphia Phillies, a team he was going to buy on a fire-sale basis, he was going to stock the team with stars from the negro leagues and forcibly integrate baseball. The story goes that the commissioner, Judge Kenesaw Mountain Landis (I’m not making this up) an old-school segregationist, had the league take over the franchise from its previous owners so another buyer could be found who would keep the team in Philadelphia, and keep baseball white.

One of his more memorable ideas might have a certain attraction for Blue Jays’ fans, especially in the throes of the current slump. In St. Louis he sponsored Grandstand Managers’ Day: placards for voting were handed out to the fans as they entered the stadium and the stadium announcer offered them the opportunity to vote on various decisions that arose in the course of the game, such as whether or not to bunt. Relevance to Jays’ fans? First, it would give them a chance to have their say on the spot about some of Gibbie’s stranger decisions. More importantly, the Brownies won that day, 5-3, to break a four-game losing streak.

If we could just figure out how to summon the spirit of Bill Veeck, I’m sure he would come up with some ideas for solving the current mess the Jays are in.

As you can see from my title, I’ve decided to write about the second and third games of the just-completed series in Toronto with the Tampa Bay Rays in a single piece. There is a practical reason for doing this, in that I won’t have to spend quite as much time wallowing in the dismal reality of the last two days (sometimes, folks, this is hard, really hard. Sometimes I feel like I’d rather write about what a sweet guy Roughneck, er, Roughned, Odor is than write about yet another in the recent string of dispiriting Blue Jays’ losses.) The second reason for lumping the games together (and lumping is just the word, isn’t it?) is thematic, in that the two games were so similar, like baseball peas in a pod.

In both games, the Blue Jays’ starter looked up to throwing a shutout from the first inning. In both games, a shockingly sudden lightning strike by Tampa Bay’s offence jumped them into a quick, unexpected lead. In both games, the Jays’ hitters utterly failed to put up any meaningful threat, and in both cases, deprived of their ability to turn to their high-leverage relievers, the rest of the Toronto bullpen allowed the Rays to tack on runs until the game was out of reach. Both games, especially in the context of Toronto’s recent batting woes, were, in short, frustrating, despressing, and all too predictable.

Marcus Stroman wasn’t perfect through the first four innings last night, giving up three walks and a base hit, but he was supported by three double plays. Two were of the conventional variety, as Stroman benefitted from his ability to keep the ball on the ground, while the third resulted from a base-running gaffe by Kevin Kiermaier that was capitalized on by an alert Zeke Carrera, who threw behind him to first after a not very difficult catch to double him off the bag. Of the four base-runners allowed by Stroman, only one ended up being stranded, as a consequence of the double plays. Not pretty, necessarily, but this is how you win, with pitching that plays into your defensive strength.

In the fifth, though, the Rays started measuring Stroman’s offerings, and when they did his fourth walk of the game added to his problems. Nick Franklin led off with a liner toward the left-field corner on which Melvin Upton moved quickly to his right, dove, and made a nice catch. The left-handed Corey Dickinson then took advantage of the shift and poked one into left field that went for a double. Stephen Souza walked on a three-two pitch, bringing the number eight hitter, utility shortstop Alexei Ramirez, to the plate. On an 0-2 pitch, instead of wasting one, Stroman was too good with a two-seamer and Ramirez drove it over the left-field fence. To be fair to Ramirez, who’s just signed with Tampa, this may have been only his sixth homer this year, but he does have 115 in his career. Suddenly, Stroman’s one-hitter was a 3-0 deficit, one run contributed by his fourth walk, and the Jays were once again looking up from under.

Meanwhile, facing a workmanlike left-handed Drew Smyly, the Blue Jays displayed at least one each of their typical slump-prolonging behaviours. These include the lead-off hitter making an out, usually on soft contact, a double play immediately following a leadoff walk or base hit, or a two-out double being wasted. There wasn’t even an opportunity for the classic two-out strikeout with a runner in scoring position. After the Ramirez home run, in the home half of the fifth Melvin Upton led off with a single, Kevin Pillar grounded into a double play, Zeke Carrera, he of the pinch-hit heroics on Monday night, doubled to right, and Darwin Barney flied out to end the inning.

To his credit, Marcus Stroman finished well in the sixth, and qualified for a quality start, giving up three runs on only four hits, though the four walks were telling. He struck out Kiermaier swinging, retired Evan Longoria on a grounder to third, and then pitched over an infield single by Brad Miller by getting Nick Franklin to fly out to centre. He finished with only 92 pitches, and I imagine we would have seen him in the seventh if he had been pitching with the lead.

Very few games are without at least a glimmer of hope, and Toronto’s moment came in the bottom of the sixth, when they finally broke through against Smyly, forcing Manager Kevin Cash to remove him from the game, and closing the Tampa lead to 3-2. With one out, Smyly walked Jose Bautista, then got Edwin Encarnacion to fly out to right, bringing Russell Martin to the plate in yet another two-out, man-on-first situation. This time, though, it was different. Martin launched a high, booming drive to left that reached the 200 level and finally brought the fans out of their stupor. Cash brought in impressive callup Ryan Garton, who gave up a single by Troy Tulowitzki to right, before Melvin Upton grounded into a fielder’s choice for the third out.

Manager Gibbie is very predictable in his use of the bullpen, and his trust is hard-earned. With a lead or barely trailing, if his starter goes six innings, it’s a no-brainer, BenGriNa has been great. But tonight Joaquin Benoit was not available, having pitched in three games in a row for the first time this year. So next up was Joe Biagini, who has developed beautifully, and is clearly one of Gibbie’s main men in the pen. This time, though, with the Rays painfully close in our headlights, he didn’t do it. After finally giving up his first home run of the season in his last outing, Stephen Souza hit the second off him with one out. Biagini escaped the inning without further damage, but the disheartening extra run had negated half of Martin’s blast. It almost seems as though the Jays are tempting the fates when they start to rally, and the fates delight in smashing them back down.

The Jays had one last gasp in the bottom of the seventh. Kevin Pillar led off with a single against Garton, which brought lefty Dana Eveland in to face—and fan—Zeke Carrera, after which Danny Farquhar came in to face the pinch-hitting Dioner Navarro who popped out to short left. Then, as so often, things stirred further after the second out. Travis singled. Farquhar walked Bautista, bringing Edwin to the plate, two outs, bases loaded, down by two. Big inhale. Edwin takes a hittable strike one. Edwin swings over a breaking ball in the dirt. Edwin takes two balls out of the zone. Edwin fans on a high hard one. Big exhale.

And that was it for Toronto on this night. One more base-runner, Tulo with a single in the eighth, erased on a double play. Seven up, six down.

Meanwhile, down by two, Gibbie finished up with Brett Cecil pitching the eighth. Cecil escaped without damage, despite giving up a bloop single to the left-handed Kevin Kiermaier, the one guy he was supposed to get. In the ninth, he went through Matt Dermody, whose lefty-lefty faceoff with Corey Dickinson resulted in an infield single, Scott Feldman, who walked a couple, yielded a sac bunt, and a run on a fielder’s choice, and Aaron Loup, who wild-pitched a second run home before Ryan Tepera came in to get the last out. The Rays picked up two insurance runs on an infield hit, two walks, a wild pitch, a hit batsman, and two stolen bases.

Such is the fate of the blue Blue Jays these days.

Today’s rubber match of the Toronto-Tampa Bay series in Toronto opened with the most exquisite first inning a lover of good baseball would want, if that lover were also a Blue Jays’ fan.

After a number of starts in which he has been less than his best, the real Marco Estrada opened the game by mesmerizing the Rays’ tough top three hitters. Knowing that teams, especially the Rays, had been keying on his changeup, catcher Dioner Navarro wisely switched to Estrada’s oft-maligned 88-mph fast ball as the go-to pitch, and he fanned both Logan Forsythe and Kevin Kiermaier before catching Evan Longoria looking at a called third strike. It was as precise a demonstration of pinpoint command and the ability to throw the hitters off balance as you would ever hope to see.

Then the Blue Jays came to the plate, and the magic of perfect baseball continued. Alex Cobb, who had settled down to pitch a solid five innings for the Rays against the Jays in Tampa in his first appearance since 2014 following Tommy John surgery, was on the hill, and threw a first pitch strike to Devon Travis who hit a solid line drive to right centre field on the second pitch. Stephen Souza in right, who, along with the entire Tampa outfield had been playing Travis extremely shallowly, finally got burned as the ball got past him and Travis hustled into second. On the first pitch to him, Michael Saunders laid down a perfect, and perfectly unexpected, sacrifice bunt toward third that moved Travis to third with one out. On the first pitch to him, Edwin Encarnacion hit a solid line drive to Kevin Kiermaier in medium centre, on which Travis easily scored.

Four pitches, one hit, two pieces of exquisite situational hitting, and the Blue Jays had a 1-0 lead crafted on perfect baseball. It mattered not a bit that Troy Tulowitzki flied out to centre to strand Jose Bautista, whom Cobb had walked after Edwin’s sac fly. This one was going to be different!

Oh, if they had only just awarded the game to the Blue Jays on the basis of the first inning! Unfortunately, they had to play out the rest of the game, and that did not work out very well at all for the struggling Torontos.

Here is what the woeful (have I used that word already in this piece? This week? This month? Doesn’t matter. It applies) Blue Jays’ offence produced for the rest of the game: zilch. Nada. De rien. Oh, sorry, Dioner Navarro hit a one-out single in the seventh. Here is what the Jays’ offence produced today against the combined efforts of Cobb (six and a third innings) and relievers Ryan Garton (one and a third innings) and Steve Geltz (one inning): one run, two hits, four walks, six strikeouts, and eleven runners left on base. Travis had the only (!) extra-base hit, and Edwin had the only RBI.

So, could the Jays still have won today’s game? Sure, if Estrada and/or Estrada and relievers pitched a complete-game shutout. And for the first three innings, not only did he throw a shutout, he threw a perfect nine outs. He also set a franchise record when he struck out the first two batters in the second inning, giving him five consecutive strikeouts at the start of a game. In all, he struck out six of the nine batters he faced.

Unfortunately, though, major league baseball for some unfathomable reason has declared that ball games are nine innings long, and that above all the fourth inning must be played. So Marco Estrada returned to the hill in an effort to extend his perfect string.

But it stopped right there, because the second time through the order it was a very different story for Mr. Estrada and his adversaries. If we go by the pitch tracker, Estrada’s catcher Dioner Navarro, hadn’t relied very much on the changeup to chalk up the nine outs in a row. In the first inning, for example, when he struck out the side, he threw 20 pitches, but only four changeups, and none of them were strikeout pitches. Presumably the changeup was avoided because Tampa had been waiting on it in his last start; the switch to well-placed fast balls was very effective in the first three innings. (I refer to Navarro as the one making all the pitch decisions because Estrada has told reporters that he always throws what the catcher calls for, whether it’s Navarro or Russell Martin.) In any case, Navarro started going with the changeup for the knockout pitch, and it would seem that the Tampa hitters anticipated the change over to the changeup. (Are you following this?)

So Estrada started Logan Forsythe with a curve ball outside the zone, then got a swing and miss and a foul on two fastballs. Navarro called for the changeup to put him away: line drive single to left. Then he tried to start Kevin Kiermaier with a change, and it was promptly looped over the right-field fence for a short but shocking homer and a sudden two-run Tampa lead. Unfortunately for Estrada, who had to rely on the anemic bats of his team-mates to bring him back to square one, he proceeded to give up a third run, which might have been the nail in the coffin for this day.

After the home run, Evan Longoria flied out to centre, but Brad Miller walked. Nick Franklin managed to hit behind the runner, grounding out to Edwin Encarnacion unassisted while Miller moved up to second. Then in what might have been the key at bat of the game, Corey Dickinson swatted a 1-2 curve ball up the middle on the ground to score Miller with the third Tampa run.

Estrada’s pitch count had been a middling 63 after four innings, but he laboured in the fifth, while not being hit, walking two and allowing the count to rise to 89. In the sixth it took him six pitches to get Brad Miller to ground out to second, and Nick Franklin worked him for six more, singling to right on the sixth. That was it, at 101 pitches, and Manager John Gibbons was out to take him out. Strangely, for a pennant race, down 3-0 in the top of the sixth, he chose to bring in his rookie left-handed callup, Matt Dermody to match up with Corey Dickerson. I’m not sure what he was saving Brett Cecil for, but this was definitely not a move of genius. Dermody’s first pitch to Dickerson was a slider for a called strike. That worked, so they tried another one, but it disappeared over the centre field fence and the Rays lead, if it loomed large at 3-1 over the punchless Jays, became a mountain at 5-1. Dermody’s night was quickly done, and it was Danny Barnes’ turn. I can’t quibble with going to another callup here; at this point the issue was damage control, and by that I mean damage control to the bullpen arms, not to this ball game. Well, Barnes got out of the inning, but not before conceding run number six. He gave up singles to Stephen Souza and Bobbie Wilson, and then an infield hit to good ol’ Logan Forsythe, to score Souza from third.

The Forsythe RBI dribbler was the epitome of this entire two-game sequence for the Jays. He topped the ball, and it rolled up the cutout between the third-base line and the turf. Darwin Barney, still playing third because of Josh Donaldson’s hip issue, had no choice but to let it go. It came agonizingly close to the edge of the turf, which would have ticked it into foul territory, but never touched it, and it rolled, and it rolled, and it rolled until it stopped dead when it rolled right into the bag at third. This was like watching the entire month of September so far for the Blue Jays, condensed into five seconds. By the time the ball hit the base, Wilson had scored, high-fived, danced in the dugout, and started to don his catcher’s gear.

When Cobb exited the game with two gone in the bottom of the seventh, he left Dioner Navarro at second after his lonely single, and Kevin Pillar, whom he had walked, at first, with two outs. I’d give you Cobb’s impressive pitching line against Toronto, but really, it was no great shakes. The Jays’ sixty-year-old batting practice pitcher could have done as well against these guys the way they’re hitting. Gibbie sent Justin Smoak up to hit for Ryan Goins under the faint hope clause, but Ryan Garton popped him up to end that foolishness.

It hardly mattered that Tampa Bay scored two more “insurance” runs in the ninth off Bo Schultz and Ryan Tepera. The Rays employed three singles, a sacrifice fly and an RBI to plate two more, just to add insult to injury.

After going down meekly and mildly in the bottom of the ninth, despite a leadoff walk to Troy Tulowitzki, the Jays had to be happy that they were looking at the back ends of the Tampa Bay Rays for the last time this year.

They had to be equally happy that they were getting out of town too, heading for the coast, lighting out for the territories, where they wouldn’t have to hear all of the weeping and wailing and gnashing of teeth they left behind in Toronto.

Postscript: You’re right, it’s not fair that I am so strongly critical of the Jays’ offence without at least offering an analysis of what’s wrong. They’re over-swinging, trying to fix the problem with one blast. Cut down on the swing. They’re swinging at marginal first-pitch strikes, making soft contact, and taking ones right down Broadway. They’re begging for walks, more upset about the fact that the umps don’t see things their way, than that they’ve fanned with runners on in scoring position. Jose, are you listening here? There’s no change in approach when the situation changes. Seasoned professionals should not fan going for the downs with a runner on third and less than two outs. When you’re hitting second behind a leadoff hitter who’s gotten on base, it’s not the same as if you were leading off. Don’t perform like it is. This is all easy, elementary, and obvious. Easy to fix? Not so much.

It’s the bottom of the eighth, tied 2-2, your team’s still in an incredible hitting slump, you’ve got your super-utility infielder, right-handed hitting Darwin Barney leading off against righty reliever Brad Boxberger for the Tampa Bay Rays, and you want a left-handed batter off the bench to try to inject a little life in the game. Who ya gonna call?

You’ve got three switch-hitters on the bench, two with serious pop and one with electrifying speed, who can be on third base in a New York minute if he beats out a little nubber at the plate. By the way, must google “New York minute”: what does that even mean? You’ve got an earnest but weak-hitting designated catcher. And, oh, yeah, there’s always good ol’ Ezequiel Carrera.

So, who ya gonna call? (Insert Batman theme) Zeke-man!

Going into tonight’s game one of a three-game set between Toronto and Tampa Bay at the TV Dome in Toronto, the Jays were mired in a serious offensive slump that coincides exactly with the start of the stretch-run month of September. Just to recall the tawdry details, in nine games the Jays had scored 8, 6, and 5 runs in losing causes, and 5 runs in one win. In the other five games, they scored only 3 runs four times, and were shut out once.

Tonight they were up against tough right-hander Jake Odorizzi, and things weren’t going much better for them, as he shut them out for five innings, giving up one hit and one walk, facing only two batters over the minimum. Amazingly, though Francisco Liriano, dropped back into the rotation tonight in place of R.A. Dickey, was having his best outing of the year since before mid-season with the Pirates, and was matching Odorizzi pitch for pitch, also having allowed just a hit and a walk over six innings.

Then, in the bottom of the sixth, Jose Bautista jolted the crowd out of its worried stupor by stroking a two-out homer to left field, which scored Devon Travis, on second with a leadoff double, just the second hit allowed by Odorizzi, the third being the home run by Bautista, of course.

Suddenly a new prospect opened up: going into the seventh, with the entire BenGriNa combo primed and ready to go, was it possible that our heroes might be able to offset the continuing batting struggle by winning a shutout, or a 2-1 squeaker?

Oh, sorry about that. We forgot it was the Rays we were playing. Nothing’s ever easy with the Rays. Only 67 pitches under his belt, Liriano must have felt great coming back out for the seventh with a brand spanking new two-run lead over the Rays. But in just three pitches, the game was tied, as Evan Longoria and Brad Miller hit back-to-back homers to lead off the inning. Two pitches later, after Edwin Encarnacion had made a nice back-to-the-infield grab of a foul popup by Nick Franklin, Liriano was out of the game, having given up only three hits and a walk over seven innings. Joaquin Benoit came in and allowed two more base-runners before extracting himself from the inning.

Liriano had no chance for a victory he richly deserved, and the Jays were yet again back at square one, all thoughts of winning a squeaker jettisoned. They would need to manufacture another run somehow from their largely dormant bats, off either Odorizzi or his successor(s).

It wouldn’t be off Odorizzi, though He finished his night’s work by breezing through Troy Tulowitzki, Kevin Pillar, and Melvin Upton in the seventh on only seven pitches to finish his night’s work.

After Jason Grilli made short work of the Rays in the top of the eighth, on two fly balls and a groundout, it was time for Gibbie’s momentous decision. Like many of Gibbie’s decisions, the reasoning for this one was a bit murky at the time, and he certainly didn’t say anything to clarify it in his post-game scrum. (Does he ever?) All he did after the game was ramble through a list of all the ways that Carrera could contribute offensively to the team, even though some of them, like laying down a sacrifice bunt, don’t exactly conform to the position of leading off an inning.

Whatever his reasoning, whether his decision was tinged with brilliance or madness, Zeke Carrera it was, digging in to the plate to lead off the bottom of the eighth against Brad Boxberger. And there he was, swinging a bit late on an outside first pitch, and sending a classic slice toward left field. Though it started out not heading for the foul line, you could tell right off the bat that it had a lot of spin on it, and it was heading for the corner. The big questions were, would it be caught? Would it be fair or foul? I don’t think anyone in the park, save, perhaps, for Carrera who seems an eternal optimist, gave any thought to it going out. But it carried and sliced, sliced and carried, until left fielder Corey Dickinson ran out of room and had to watch it barely clear the fence, barely fair, for the improbable home run that would decide the game. He slumped against the wall in dejection, an abject image.

After Carrera’s heroics, Boxberger gave up an infield single to Travis, and watched him advance to third during the subsequent ground ball out and fly ball out to right, but stranded him there by fanning Jose Bautista on a 1-2 pitch. Not to denigrate Zeke Carrera, who has shown clutch power more than once since he’s been with the Blue Jays, but I imagine Brad Boxberger going into the visiting clubhouse and dunking his head in the toilet a few times.

Roberto Osuna came on in the top of the ninth to try to secure his 32^nd save, and managed to do it, but not before strangeness and some serious drama had taken place.

But of course two outs had to be recorded before things could get nail-bitey. Brad Miller bounced the first pitch right back to Osuna for the first out. Nick Franklin fouled one off on a strike-two count, and then flied out to Upton in left. Then Corey Dickinson hit a grounder up the middle for a base hit, bringing Stephen Sousa to the plate.

Sousa took the first two pitches, blazing four-seamers, and was down 0-2. Then he took a cutter that fell out of the strike zone for ball one. Then Osuna stopped messing with breaking balls and threw four more four-seamers to Sousa. He fouled the first one off. He swung mightily at the second one, and seemed to have tipped it into Martin’s glove for the strikeout. Osuna turned around to say his thank-you prayer too soon, and was the only person in the ball park who didn’t know that the ball had popped out of Martin’s glove, and Sousa was still alive.

Finally Osuna realized something wasn’t quite right, looked around, and realized that the game wasn’t over. After much embarrassed grinning and tapping himself on the chest in the “my bad” gesture, he had to settle in and try once more to retire Sousa, who took the third four-seamer for a ball. On the next one, he went for the downs, and the crack of the bat and jump of the ball gave you this sick feeling, that it was gone. And it almost was. But Kevin Pillar went all the way back to the wall, reached up, and pulled it down for the third out.

The stats geeks later reported that there have been ten similar balls hit to centre field in Toronto this year with the same range of exit velocity and angle of elevation off the bat, and all the others left the park. They can’t explain why this one didn’t, which suggests that their analyses can’t answer everything. But what do I know? I’m just an old guy who sure as hell thought he hit it out, and was just as glad that he didn’t.

The weirdness didn’t end with the end of the game. Both benches cleared as the Jays were coming off the field in celebration mode, apparently because of a misunderstanding that turned nothing into something. There was some kind of apparently comradely exchange between Souza and Russell Martin after the ball was caught, so they both said later, something to the effect of “Geez, I thought that was out!” “Geez, So did I!” Pretty profound stuff for cerebral ball players. But then Troy Tulowitzki, who I think is a bit tightly wound in his quiet way, came in and confronted Souza, about what he thought was a verbal attack on Martin. It was all clarified afterward, although comments by Souza suggested that he felt Tulo was being overly aggressive. What a bunch of kids in the sandbox, eh? What would Ty Cobb make of it all?

So Zeke Carrera was the unlikely hero, delivering a big W for his team and for Jason Grilli, Liriano and Odorizzi pitched very well but neither of them figured in the decision, and Roberto Osuna got to celebrate his 32^nd save in 35 opportunities twice, once by way of rehearsal, once for real.

Whatever will they think of next?

Weather recording stations across Canada recorded a wind surge at about 1:10 p.m. today. Veteran meteorologists were unable to come up with a scientific explanation for the huge gust of wind that swept across the entire country at that moment.

Obviously, the meteorologists aren’t baseball fans, because the explanation is readily at hand. At approximately that time, at the TV Dome in downtown T.O., Boston leadoff hitter Dustin Pedroia swatted an 0-1 pitch into the turf in front of home plate. It bounced directly into the glove of Jays’ starter Jay Happ, and Happ calmly threw Pedroia out at first.

At that precise moment, every sentient baseball fan north of the border let out a huge sigh of relief: Dustin Pedroia was indeed human, the Boston dismantling of another Toronto starter was not a foregone conclusion, and it was not out of the question that the Jays just might be able to even the series with Boston at a win apiece. And the “after-shock” surge of slightly lesser force reported by meteorologists at about 1:12 p.m. was simply another reaction from the Blue Jays’ hordes of fans, this time to the slap of Xander Bogaert’s hard-hit line drive into the glove of Troy Tulowitzki.

The difference between last night’s contest between Boston and Toronto and this afternoon’s was, well, the difference between night and day. The pitching held Boston in check, the Jays’ defenders gut-checked themselves into bracing up and acquitting themselves properly, and Melvin Upton dispatched his personal gremlins of Friday night with a two-run home run in the second that gave the Blue Jays a lead that on this changeable early fall day was never relinquished.

Besides the fact that Toronto’s pitchers actually held the fearsome Sox lineup to only four hits and two runs, thanks to a stellar start by Jay Happ and near-perfect relief work by the Bengrina (Benoit/Grilli/Osuna, if you haven’t read much of my work before) combine, the story of this game had to be the redemptive work of Upton, who had been singled out by the home crowd as the chief culprit in last night’s defensive collapse. Though, to be fair to the fans here, it was his dropped fly ball that seemed to be the harbinger of doom for the Jays, at a point at which the outcome of the game was still very much an open question.

Subsequent to his miscue, every play involving Upton elicited seldom-heard boos from the gathered multitude, whether in the field or at the plate. Derisive applause rained down on him when he caught subsequent flies hit to him. This was a strong reaction from a usually generous and forgiving crowd, and I’m not sure why it happened, though I have the sense that Upon has taken a good bit of abuse from the haters on social media since his arrival in Toronto. I have my own ideas about why Melvin Upton has not been particularly accepted by Blue Jays’ fans, but it’s a very sensitive topic, and I would reserve it for possible treatment in a side article, but I need to consider first whether it’s a topic I can raise.

In the second inning, when Boston starter Eduardo Rodriguez, after walking Russell Martin and retiring Troy Tulowitzki on a fly ball to left, served up a juicy one to Upton who promptly parked it in the left field seats, the Toronto fans being what they are (forgiving? or hypocritical?) were delirious with joy. The Jays jumped out into a two-nothing lead over the hated Sox, and last night was forgotten. It will be interesting to see how long the good will for Upton will last.

The pitching matchup today was a good news/bad news story for both sides. Jay Happ has been a rock the entire year. With Marco Estrada struggling a bit lately, R.A. Dickey fallen back into an on-again, off-again routine, and Marcus Stroman gradually recovering from his earlier struggles, Happ and Aaron Sanchez are clearly numbers one and two in the rotation, in whichever order you choose. You didn’t think it was a coincidence did you, that the assignments for the second and third games of this Boston series just happened to fall into the laps of Happ and Sanchez? Yet Happ has been labouring lately, trudging valiantly along from inning to inning, his starts a little shorter, his control fraying at the edges. We only need mention that today was his fourth attempt to go beyond the 17-win mark. He was ahead of Rick Porcello in wins all season, but Porcello reached 20 last night, and Happ was still looking for 18 today.

Eduardo Rodriguez had his worst outing of the season earlier against the Blue Jays, giving up four homers, the only four hits he allowed, in his only start against Toronto. He’s also recently spent time on the disabled list. However, looming large in the minds of the Toronto hitters, surely, were two facts. First, Rodriquez is a lefty, and for whatever reason, with all their right-handed firepower, the Jays haven’t fared well against lefties in the last while. Also, Rodriguez just happened to carry a no-hitter into the eighth inning in his last start at Oakland, finishing up with one hit allowed and eight innings of shutout ball.

As it turned out, the matchup was a good news story for both teams; both Happ and Rodriguez pitched well enough to win. In fact, their pitching lines were almost a perfect match for one another, which is surprising, because as you were watching the game you had the sense that Happ was much more effective. But see for yourselves: Happ went 6 innings plus 2 batters, gave up 2 runs, 4 hits, and a walk, and had 5 strikeouts on 95 pitches. Rodriguez went 6 innings, gave up 2 earned runs, 4 hits, 2 walks, and struck out 5 on 100 pitches. Both pitchers gave up a home run, Happ to Dustin Pedroia in the sixth inning , and Rodriguez to Melvin Upton in the second. The difference in the game came down to the fact that the additional walk issued by Rodriguez preceded Upton’s home run, and that Toronto’s winning run scored in the third inning was unearned, resulting from a rather tough error given to third baseman Aaron Hill on a bullet of a ground ball off the bat of Edwin Encarnacion.

This was in fact Jay Happ’s most effective start in some time. The Pedroia homer in the sixth was only the second hit he gave up. In four and a third innings the only base-runners he allowed were Mookie Betts with a walk and Chris Young with a hit-by-pitch in the second inning. Young broke up the string and the developing no-hitter with a one-out single in the fifth, but he ended up stranded at first base. In fact, in a rather strange play, Young chose to stay at first when Edwin Encarnacion made a nice stab of a grounder by Jackie Bradley just in front of the bag at first. Young wasn’t particularly quick off the bag, and as Encarnacion set up to throw to second for the force, he broke back to the bag. This upset Edwin’s concentration, he didn’t make the throw, reached to tag Young and missed, and then stepped on the bag to retire Bradley for the second out. Non-plussed, Happ struck out catcher Ryan Hannigan for the third out.

This base-running thing by Young seems to me to be an injection of a bit of anarchy into a game that is played in a certain way. There’s no rule that says that a runner has to proceed to the second base on a ground ball, unless the batter/runner reaches first safely. If two runners ended up “safe” on the same base, the bag belongs to the lead runner. But in this case as Young broke back to first there was no question that Edwin would get an out. Somewhere. If Bradley ran like a plow horse, there could be some rationale for the runner on first to maneuver to keep the bag, rather than being forced at second and yielding first to the batter. Yet it is called a “force play”, and obviously the batter has to be able to take first base. Do we need a “Chris Young rule” to go with the “Chase Headley” rule (aggressive slide into second base), and the “Buster Posey” rule (base-runner plowing the catcher)?

By the way, I’d like to add to the curious lexicon that may be used exclusively in Canadian amateur, i. e. kids’, baseball. I’d earlier noted the use of “back catcher” to identify the catcher, and “decker” to refer to the catcher’s mitt. When I referred above to Happ hitting Young (that guy again) with a pitch, I thought of the term “pinged off” to refer to being hit by a pitch. And just now I used the verb “plow” to denote a runner/catcher collision initiated by the runner when the catcher is blocking the plate.

Back to the game. After Pedroia’s home run in the sixth, Happ retired the side, and with a 3-1 lead and only 86 pitches under his belt, he looked pretty good to go at least seven innings. But leadoff singles by Ramirez and Hill brought Manager John Gibbons out with his famous hook, and Happ was finished for the day. Joaquin Benoit came on and took a good shot at keeping the runner on third, but with nobody out it’s pretty tough. He got Chris Young on a short foul fly to Jose Bautista in right, on which the Sox chose not to test Bautista’s arm. But then Jackie Bradley squared up a pitch and drove Bautista back to the wall and up against it for the catch, allowing Ramirez to score easily on the sacrifice fly.

If the pitching lines of the two starters were near mirror-images, so had been their first innings of work. Happ retired the Sox on 9 pitches, oh happy day, and Rodriguez retired the Jays on twelve, after Devon Travis reached on a soft looper into right. The Upton homer in the second and the run the Jays scratched out in the third allowed Happ to pitch on the lead for the rest of his outing.

The add-on run in the third started with a good play by Travis, as his hustle turned a leadoff hit to left centre into a double. Then it featured a really bad play by Travis who TOOBLANed himself right off the bases when Josh Donaldson hit a grounder to short. For absolutely no reason, Travis took off for third. Xander Bogaerts threw to Aaron Hill at third, the throw was a bit off, and Travis was first called safe, then out, on review. Edwin Encarnacion followed with a smash on the ground to third that ticked off Aaron Hill’s glove and ricocheted into short left centre field. Donaldson ended up on third, with Encarnacion safe at first on a very harsh error decision. Jose Bautista followed by fighting off a not-great pitch and looping it into centre for a run-scoring single. But that was all the Jays got, as Rodriguez reached back and fanned Russell Martin and Troy Tulowitzki.

Incidentally, Sportsnet’s Hazel Mae filed an in-game report on how Travis had spent some time working on ground balls with infield coach Luis Rivera before the game. Hmmm. I would say “about time”, except that if Mae’s report was accurate, apparently Travis took about 25 or 30 ground balls under Rivera’s tutelage. When some players will take 100 balls in a session to work on something, that 25 to 30 sounds more like normal infield practice. Oh well, baby steps.

Though the Sox made it close with the run in the seventh, they were only able to muster a base-runner in each of the eighth and ninth, David Ortiz in the eighth on a rare muff by Tulo of his grounder off Jason Grilli, and Ramirez in the ninth on a leadoff walk from Roberto Osuna, after which Osuna closed it out for the tense save.

The Jays’ and Donaldson’s, frustration over the failure to cash in an insurance run in the seventh helped to make it tense in the ninth. After Matt Barnes fanned Justin Smoak leading off, Pillar singled to left and Travis to centre on the hit and run, Pillar reaching third. But Donaldson hit one right on the button, right at Bogaerts at short, and Edwin hit one right on the button, right at Mookie Betts in right field, to end the inning.

So, great pitching and a well-timed blast from Melvin Upton led to a series-tying win, and the future looks a bit brighter, with Aaron Sanchez shrewdly placed to try to pitch Toronto to a series win on Sunday, and a tie for the division lead.