Long Ball Stories

At the end of my last post, after the Blue Jays were swept in the Big Apple, I posed the question, “Can they regroup?”

After tonight’s shambolic and embarrassing loss to the surging Boston Red Sox in the TV Dome, the answer is “not any time soon”. All we can hope for after tonight is that the clock runs out on “any time” tomorrow afternoon at 1:07 p.m.

The smart guys who get paid to talk and write about these things have been full of comments about how this year’s Red Sox resemble in so many ways the Toronto team of 2015, getting by as they are on better-than-average starting pitching, good defense, adequate relief pitching, an awesome offensive array and the killer instinct to pounce on any openings they are given. Well, I beg to differ. Those attributes certainly define pretty accurately the successful playoff formula for the Blue Jays last year.

These Red Sox are a different hue of hose, however. Though they can certainly sting you with the long ball from almost anywhere in the batting order, they hit for much higher average than last year’s Jays. They can put up a big inning without the long ball, and they have batters all up and down the order who can confidently spray line drives all over the field. I find it hard to imagine what it’s like for a Red Sox fan, not having to go into pessimist mode every time one of their hitters has runners in scoring position with two outs. They’re also a much faster team than the 2015 Jays, and they employ their speed very aggressively on the bases. In short, think the 2015 Kansas City Royals, with much better numbers one and one-A starting pitchers (Price and Porcello) and a hell of a lot more muscle.

Being a control and finesse pitcher, Marco Estrada has had considerable success in the past against the typically free-swinging Red Sox. But the Marco Estrada who faced Boston tonight, is not, for whatever reason, the same Marco Estrada that made the All-Star team this year, and became the rotation’s go-to guy in the playoffs last year. And the Sox offence that lined up against Estrada is most assuredly not the same offence he had faced in the past.

Since Toronto was just flat out beaten in every aspect of the game last night, let’s give the devil his due and look at what Boston brings to the table, at the moment, to borrow the term from English football, what they bring to the top of the table. With the revival of David Price, the emergence of Rick Porcello as a legitimate front-line pitcher, the apparent recovery of Eduardo Rodriguez from his recent ailments, and the occasional appearance of the Clay Buchholz of old, the Boston rotation is good, probably good enough to pitch over the loss of knuckle baller Stephen Wright, apparently for the season. The Boston bullpen might be a weak spot. Batwing-Man Craig Kimbrel was untouchable earlier in the year, but after some time on the DL he’s shown himself considerably more mortal than before.

Porcello did his job efficiently tonight. As the Sox scrambled into a lead over the first couple of innings, he kept Toronto off the base paths and unable to mount an immediate counter-attack. When they did strike to get a couple of runs back in the third inning, he was effective in limiting the damage. After that, he went into cruise control, as the Sox’ lead mounted toward the end of his outing. There’s hardly any point in mentioning Boston relievers Brad Ziegler and Koji Uehara. By the time Ziegler came in in the eighth it was 11-2, and relievers could hardly make a difference.

We saw a typically solid, if not awesome offensive display from the Red Sox tonight. They did manage a few lucky bloopers and were able to take advantage of two Toronto errors and other miscues (we’ll get back to those), but they also wasted little time letting Estrada and his successors know who was boss. In the first it was Dustin Pedroia, who led off with a single, the baseball equivalent of the crack of doom descending on the TV Dome. Pedroia is a great hitter and a fine, old-style hustler who plays a nifty second base without earning any style points. Any team that can keep him off the bases has a big step up on beating this Boston team.

But I’m ashamed to say that watching the swaggering Pedroia dig in at the plate arouses something visceral in me. I find myself pining for the old days, not so far back, really, when a Jack Morris or a Randy Jackson would have used the first pitch of every at-bat to knock him on his kiester until he stopped digging in like he does. Nothing dangerous, mind you, just a little token reminder that all good hitters need a little dust on their uniforms, just like the oregano in a nice Italian sauce. I’m not talking about going all Yordano Ventura here. I’m just talking about pitching tight, the inner half and beyond, standing him up a bit. Ventura’s another story altogether. If his career had been set in the pre-DH era, when he would have had to hit, Ventura would have been a very different pitcher—and person—indeed.

Xander Bogaerts is a bit of a free swinger, a good shortstop, though given to the odd lapse of attention, with good power, but he’s not matured quite to the point that Mookie Betts has. He’s still susceptible to the big-swing punchout from time to time.

David Ortiz is David Ortiz, and we have to hope that he sticks to his retirement plans, so that the seats in the TV Dome can get a break from the battering that he has given them over the years. But I’m not really sold on the value of his work in terms of career stats, or in terms of his actual value to the Red Sox this year. I have some ideas about that that may take shape in a supplementary article some time soon. For now, just thinking about tonight’s game, it’s important to note that with an average of just under .320, he can hurt you big time with singles and doubles, as well as homers, though I’m sure Manager John Farrell would rather not see him gum up the works by hitting a single, unless, of course, he cashes in a couple of runs with it.

Hanley Ramirez is a guy that I want not to like, somehow, but there’s no good reason for it. Maybe it’s the floppy dreads. They just don’t look terribly good flowing out from under a baseball cap. I thought at the beginning of the season that moving him to first to accommodate Pablo Sandoval (who?) was going to weaken the Sox at two positions, but he’s turned into a pretty good first baseman besides being a reliable power guy who drives in runs, especially in clutch situations. Turns out that his move to first only leaves them a hole at third, since Sandoval is AWOL, but when Travis Shaw is hitting he’s an upgrade on the Panda, whose time, irrespective of injuries, seems to have passed.

There’s not much to say about Mookie Betts that hasn’t already been said this year. He’s played like a bona-fide superstar, and he’s only twenty-three. It says all you need to know about Betts that he’s now batting cleanup, to protect David Ortiz. In fact, at two full years younger than Mike Trout, a comparison of their 2016 seasons to date is instructive. Betts has over 100 more at bats, has scored 3 runs less, has 32 more hits, 3 more homers, and 12 more RBIs. Trout has 2 more stolen bases, and is hitting .324 to Betts’ .315, albeit with 112 fewer at bats. Interesting.

Jackie Bradley Jr. is an outstanding centre fielder and a real asset on the bases, but I’m not convinced he’s the real deal at the plate, incredible hot streak earlier this year aside. I’m not sure in the long haul that he’s going to differentiate himself significantly from the two Kevins, Kiermaier and Pillar, the other young centre fielders in the AL East. (I know Kiermaier is barely hitting over .200 at the moment, but he’s also recovering from a serious injury and a long stint on the DL. If he played against the rest of the league the way he plays against us . . . )

Sandy Leon doesn’t have enough of a track record to support whether or not he’s a flash in the pan, but on both sides of the ball he has certainly answered Boston’s questionable catching status for the moment. One sign of encouragement for Boston fans is that his numbers this year are unprecedentedly high, but this is also the first time that he has been basically a full-time catcher.

The other players with regular roles for Boston, Travis Shaw, Brock Holt, and the veteran former Jay Aaron Hill, while each may have his partisans among the Boston fanatics, are basically interchangeable journeymen at this point in their careers, though both Shaw and Holt have shown considerable promise in the past.

When you combine better than average starting pitching with a lineup that includes in any order Pedroia, Bogaerts, Ortiz, Betts, Ramirez, and Leon, you are going to win some games, especially when your home is friendly Fenway. That’s what the Sox have done. They’re a formidable foe, and the last twenty games of the season are going to be a pretty rocky ride for the Jays if they hope to take the division.

If it was a rocky ride tonight (If??), it wasn’t so much the Red Sox that were making the waves, as it was that the Jays were swamping themselves. Estrada has been struggling since the All-Star break, and since his recovery, if it has been a recovery, from his mid-season back problems. Tonight there was no great mystery to his lack of effectiveness: he couldn’t throw strikes (he also couldn’t get a call from plate umpire Chad Fairchild on anything that wasn’t three inches in from the black—all the way around the plate, which didn’t help). Without overpowering stuff, if Estrada has to steer the ball to get a call, he’s in big trouble, especially against a hitting team like Boston.

None of this is to say that tonight’s game wasn’t close until the Sox blew it open in the seventh inning. For all his struggles, Estrada left in the third down only 4-0, and then watched as his team picked up two right after he left. And Aaron Loup, Danny Barnes, Brett Cecil, and Scott Feldman, who followed him through to the end of the sixth, did what they could to keep it close, and they were only down 5-2 going to the seventh.

The Sox had taken a two-run lead on sloppy Jays’ play, one run in each of the first two innings, but that hardly put the game out of reach. In the first, Pedroia scored from first on Betts’ “double” that embarrasingly hopped over Saunders’ head in right. In the second, Bradley led off with a walk, benefitting from some of the most egregious squeezing of the zone that Fairchild exhibited all night. He advanced to second on a passed ball by Dioner Navarro, and scored on Pedroia’s single under Travis’ glove. More craziness ensued when Pedroia hit first base, but luckily it ended up with two outs and the bases empty. In an effort to get Bradley at the plate, Pillar threw wildly off line to the plate, allowing Pedroia to take second. Pedroia got greedy and wanted third, too, but he didn’t get it as Navarro tracked the ball down and threw him out.

All sloppiness aside, this game was still an open book, if Estrada and the Jays could settle down, and if the offence could start to solve Porcello.

If you asked what the turning point was in tonight’s game some might repeat that old joke that it came when the umpire hollered “Play ball”, but that’s a stretch. If there was a turning point in the game before Scott Feldman threw a gopher ball to Bogaerts leading off the seventh, extending the Sox’ lead to 6-2, there are several possibilities.

One would be the embarrassing error committed by Melvin Upton in the third that permitted the third Sox run to score, and greased the skids for Estrada’s departure. With one out, truly soft base hits by Betts and Ramirez had put runners on first and third. Betts hit a looping sort-of-line-drive that fell in front of Upton for a single. Ramirez then launched a teasing popup to right field that fell between Travis, Saunders, and Encarnacion just inside the foul line. It should have been Travis’ ball all the way, but the aggressive Sox had started Betts on the pitch, and with Ramirez’ right-handed power at the plate, the second-base coverage was the responsibility of Travis, so he started the play headed in the wrong direction.

Then came the Upton faux pas that set the tone, really, for the rest of the game : Travis Shaw lofted a short fly to left, not very deep, on which it was questionable whether Betts would even try to challenge Upton’s strong arm. But he didn’t have to worry, because to Upton’s and everyone else’s horror, the left fielder muffed the catch, which also gave away the Shaw out, besides allowing the run. When Ramirez scored on Leon’s single, that was the night for Estrada. Manager John Gibbons wasn’t about to let the bleeding go on. Aaron Loup came in and got a double-play ball from Bradley to end the inning. Finally, a left-left matchup that worked. Mark that one down in red.

Rick Porcello had breezed through the first two innings, retiring six in a row with two strikeouts, and ordinarily, with the fine season he’s had thus far, you could have closed the book on the game, but despite having been set back on their heels, Toronto wasn’t quite ready to roll over and play dead.

The first four Jays’ hitters reached base, scoring two runs, and it looked pretty good for a swift recovery from a terrible start. Would this be another one of those Toronto-Boston 10-8 affairs? Michael Saunders beat the shift and singled to right. Upton walked. Pillar lofted a loop single to right. Saunders had to hold up on the ball, and only checked in at third. Travis bounced one hard through the left side, scoring two runs. You can take your pick as to whether it was Josh Donaldson looking at a fast ball in the zone on an 0-2 pitch, or Edwin Encarnacion grounding into a double play to end the inning that was a possible turning point. Either one will do.

Danny Barnes took over from Loup in the fourth and gave up a highly-tainted run to extend the Red Sox lead. Following immediately after the killed rally, this one pretty well nailed the coffin shut, with over half the game to go. Leading off, Brock Holt was generously awarded a double when Upton misplayed his single in left. He then went to third on a passed ball, the second allowed by Dioner Navarro, both of which contributed to Boston runs. Pedroia hit a deep fly to right that easily scored Holt.

Still, the Jays held them at 5-2 until the awful Boston seventh, as Barnes, Cecil, and Feldman for the last out of the sixth showed that you could keep the Red Sox off the scoreboard at least some of the time.

But not for the rest of tonight. In the top of the seventh, not only the wheels, but the doors, the mirrors, the steering wheel, and the roof rack fell off the Toronto bus, and what had been a messy but not unwinnable game turned into farce. Anything resembling a major league baseball game came to an end when Feldman returned to the hill after closing out the sixth.

Bogaerts homered down the line, barely inside the foul pole. Ortiz doubled to right centre. Betts hit an easy grounder to Travis, which he booted, yet another painful error on a must-make play. Ramirez homered to right centre, finishing Feldman’s night. The only out he recorded was the one that ended the sixth. He faced four batters in the seventh. They all scored. Ryan Tepera came in to pitch, and it started all over again. Shaw singled. Bradley doubled, Shaw to third. Pedroia knocked them both in with his third hit, counting his third and fourth RBIs. When it was all over, the score was Boston 11, Toronto 2, and the fans in the park started to relax and have fun. What else could you do but knock back a couple more beers at a time like this?

In keeping with the kind of game it was, the Blue Jays did score another run in the bottom of the eighth, on an error by second baseman Deven Marrero, in for Pedroia, on a ground ball from Dioner Navarro. The Sox added two more in the ninth, just to make sure, off rookie call-up Matt Dermody, making his second major-league appearance. Dermody should be glad that he managed to limit Boston to two runs, because I don’t think Gibbie was about to burn another pitcher to finish up this dog.

At the end of the night, Baltimore had lost and the Yankees had won, so the Red Sox were up by two over the Jays, three over the Orioles, and four over the Yankees, in the tightest division in baseball.

It may not be time for drastic measures, but soon . . .

There are lots of things worse in baseball than losing a thriller like last night’s Jays’ 7-6 loss to the Yankees, that went down to the very end, and depended on no more than the circumference of the baseball, before the win was recorded for the Yankees. For example, coming out flat as a pancake the next night. For example, doing absolutely nothing at the plate against yet another pitcher making his first big league appearance of the season. For example, continuing the offensive futility against a guy who was supposed to be the team’s two/three starter yet couldn’t even hold onto a place on the big-league roster for the whole year. For example, going down in the ninth inning on two strikeouts and a popup when you’re only down 2-zip and the closer is a guy you’ve pounded regularly in the past.

Shall I go on? I thought not. Yes, my faithful followers, tonight’s was as feckless and insipid a performance by a team full of offensive superstars as you might ever want to see. Or not.

And while Marcus Stroman, Joe Biagini, and Roberto Osuna did everything you could ask of your pitchers, and turned in a combined effort that 99 times out of a hundred would result in a solid W for their team, the Jays’ hitters gave them nothing. Every at bat that gave even the remotest hope that a breakthrough might be in the offing was followed by a lame and ineffectual effort that whooshed the air out of our hopes as instantly as a balloon that gets away before you can tie it off.

First inning: Devon Travis leads off with a single. Josh Donaldson waves at strike three down and away (way down and away). Edwin Encarnacion grounds into a double play.

Second inning: With two outs, Troy Tulowitzki doubles to right, a gift extra base because the inexperienced Tyler Austin dives for a ball he should have blocked. Michael Saunders works the count to 3-2 and eight pitches, then rolls over on one and grounds out weakly to second. (Note: “rolling over” on a pitch means weak contact creating by rolling your wrists in the contact zone and hitting it weakly on the ground.)

Third inning: Leading off, Melvin Upton walks. Kevin Pillar walks. Travis grounds into an around-the-horn double play. With Pillar on third Donaldson rolls over and grounds out to shortstop.

Wait. Time out. Scoreless game, we’ve been struggling to score runs for what seems like weeks, the first two hitters walk, and your leadoff hitter swings away and hits into a double play? What book on how to play baseball did that come from? Oh, we don’t bunt. We don’t give up outs. Stats show there’s a better chance of scoring when we have a guy on first and nobody out than with a guy on second with one out. Bunts are rally-killers, even if you do it right and score a run, you hardly ever score two. What if he screws up the bunt and then has to face an 0-2 count?

All of this may be true and legitimate, but the fact is that they didn’t bunt and the leadoff hitter, arguably the best contact guy on the team, hit into a DP. Oh, and what’s wrong with one run? It was scoreless at the time, and the Yankees won with only two runs. I’ll take a shot any day at having one of Donaldson, Encarnacion, and Bautista doing something to score a runner from third with one out. As for screwing up the bunt, if you create a culture where the bunt just isn’t on, ever, who’s going to put the effort into learning how to do it properly? Self-fulfilling prophecy: if you don’t bunt, ever, you won’t bunt successfully, hardly ever.

Where were we: oh, yes, fourth inning: with one out, Bautista slaps the ball through the empty right side for a single. Russell Martin lines out to left. Tulo grounds into a fielder’s choice.

Russell Martin’s at bat in the fourth was a worry because he lost his balance on a very hard swing, and went down awkwardly on his back leg. The knee collapsed again on the ball he put in play and he hobbled badly toward first. More worrying was the fact that with two other catchers on the bench he insisted on staying in the game. Most worrying was the fact that Manager John Gibbons apparently told him that he was coming out of the game, and he apparently convinced—or told—the manager that he wasn’t coming out. He was finally pulled for pinch-hitter Dioner Navarro in the ninth inning.

Fifth inning: In order, strikeout, 2 ground outs.

Sixth inning: Travis leads off with a double inside the bag at third that somehow doesn’t carom off the seats that jut out to the foul line. Then bizarre happens. Donaldson hits an easy high one-bouncer right back to pitcher Luis Severino. Severino dutifully checks the runner at second, only to discover to this delight that he’s half-way to third. Travis is caught in a rundown, and the only saving grace is that he dipsy-doodles just enough to allow Donaldson to get to second. Never make the first out at third . . . Encarnacion grounds out to the third baseman, the runner holding. Bautista strikes out.

Seventh inning: with one out Tulo splits the outfielders with a double to left centre. Saunders ostensibly beats out a little nubber while Tulo goes to third. But the call is overturned on review; Tulo’s at third, but with two outs. Upton fans.

Eighth inning: the only time when something almost happened. Donaldson walked with two outs. Encarnacion got into one that drove Aaron Judge back to the wall against the fence in right.

Ninth inning: shut down by Tyler Clippard, their erstwhile cousin.

In the face of this, it hardly mattered that the Jays pitched really well. Marcus Stroman only went five innings because his pitch count was high, 97, after five. When you walk one and strike out eight, it will elevate the count a little bit. The Yankees scored their two runs off him in the third inning. With two outs and nobody on, Stroman threw a 1-1 slider in the zone to Starlin Castro, who jumped on it like a puppy on a milk bone, a particularly vicious puppy with a particularly tasty milk bone. Note to Marcus Stroman: never throw a pitch in the strike zone, or anywhere in the same postal code as the strike zone, to Starlin Castro. He swings at junk. Throw him junk. Probably a bit rattled (Castro’s homer was like a rifle shot), Stroman gave up a double to Didi Gregorius, walked Mark Texeira, and gave up a single to Brian McCann to score Gregorius. The Yankees had two runs, and that’s all they needed.

Here’s a disturbing thing about Marcus Stroman’s performance tonight, which wierdly mirrored Aaron Sanchez’ last night. Twice in five innings he allowed base-runners to reach after two were out. Is this a young pitcher thing? Maybe not. R.A. Dickey does it all the time.

Here’s another disturbing thing. Stroman didn’t give up a hit or a walk with two outs in the first. But Didi Gregorius did reach with two outs and Gardner already on. He reached when Travis couldn’t handle his ground ball and was charged with an error. I repeat, a fielding error by Travis. Just sayin’.

For the Yankees’ part, Bryan Mitchell, making his first appearance of the season after breaking his toe on the last day of spring training and taking the whole season to recover, kept the Jays totally in check for five innings before departing after giving up the double to Travis leading off the sixth. In five plus a batter he gave up no runs, four hits, walked two, struck out two, and threw 80 pitches. I imagine the Yankees are happy to have him back, even if it did take until September.

Luis Severino, who was handed an important spot in the rotation and couldn’t keep it, was brought back up and sent to the bullpen. He came out of the pen tonight and did just fine, thank you very much. Three innings, retired nine of eleven, one hit, one walk, three strikeouts, 52 pitches. Not bad for a pitcher who was out of the loop for most of the year.

We went into New York with a 3-3 record on the road trip and alone in first. We came out of New York 3-6 on the road trip and alone in second. A day off, and then the big series with Boston at home. Can they regroup?

I was going to moan and groan over the crushing loss suffered by the Blue Jays tonight at the hands of the New York Yankees in the second game of the current series in the Bronx: Oh, what a disaster. It’s all gone to rat-shit. If we didn’t have bad luck we’d have no luck at all. I played around with variations on the idea of Game Five Redux: But Not in a Good Way as the theme. I pondered over all of the sins of commission and omission that brought us to the point that it mattered so much that Brett Gardner held on to his ice cream cone at the wall to end the game.

I was also thinking about Kevin Pillar, who in many ways is the heart and soul of this team, and how his legions of devoted fans so frequently resort to Superman references when they make up their signs and banners. It was, from that perspective, a game that was lost even with the intervention of Superman. It was a game in which Superman wasn’t enough.

The idea that Superman wasn’t enough summoned to my mind from I don’t know where the quirky phrasing of the title of a book of 1970s poems written by a proud young African-American woman, Ntozake Shange, a collection that was turned successively into a Broadway play and then a movie. The full title of all three versions of this work is For Colored Girls who Have Considered Suicide, when the Rainbow is Enuf. (Note: anyone reading this who is hypersensitive to covert manifestations of racism is asked to please google Ntozake Shange and verify that this title, with this wording, actually exists. Thank you.)

In thinking about Shange’s title I realized how appropriate its idea was for considering tonight’s game, but how it leads me in a completely different direction. No, I shall not mourn the what-might-have-beens of this wild night. Rather, I shall celebrate the crazy, awful beauty of baseball at its finest, at its ugliest, and in all of its manifest beauty. Why would I consider ending it all when there is always the prospect of another game as wondrous as this?

Mind you, it is not easy to take this approach. It means setting aside all considerations of trends and slumps and hot streaks, all concern over how the other teams did (they won, and so did they), all quibbles and criticisms (well, maybe not all. That is a bit much to ask.) It means setting aside fandom, or at least partisan fandom, and looking through the lens of “what is this thing of beauty”, rather than the lens of “what does it mean to our chances”. For those of you who think that there is no other way of looking at it except in terms of its consequences for the pennant race, well, you just don’t understand existentialism.

The other problem I face in writing about tonight’s game is that if I do my usual close narration of the course of a game that was so unlikely as to border on the fantastical, I would be here all night writing, and you would be all day reading, and we still wouldn’t do it justice. So I’m going to depart from the script tonight. In staying with the mood that a game like this needs to be celebrated, I can think of no better way for it to be celebrated than by singling out the notable characters, regardless of team, who contributed to the sum total of the night’s events. Since baseball is the most individual of team sports, this approach seems eminently suitable.

However, before I do, I should briefly outline the course of the game, in case you don’t know how it turned out, and also to make it clear why I’m not doing a play-by-play narrative.

Despite lacking command and allowing a number of base-runners, both starters, Aaron Sanchez and Luis Cessa, kept this a low-scoring affair into the seventh inning, Cessa with help from reliever Adam Warren in the sixth. An Edwin Encarnacion solo shot in the first was answered by a Brian McCann solo shot in the fourth, and the Jays had taken a 2-1 lead in the fifth on three straight singles, the RBI going to Jose Bautista. Sanchez ran into trouble with two out in the bottom of the seventh, as he gave up a single to rookie Aaron Judge and a two-run homer to the opposite field to rookie Tyler Austin to surrender the lead.

In the top of the eighth Troy Tulowitzki hit a two-out single to centre, and was replaced on the bases by Dalton Pompey. Melvin Upton followed with a tough base on balls while Pompey moved up to second on a passed ball. Kevin Pillar drilled a pitch from reliever Ben Heller into the gale in left that went right over Gardner’s head and hit off the wall. It took some funny caroms off the fencing, but with Pompey and Upton running it hardly mattered. Both scored, but Pillar was stranded at second, and with a 4-3 lead Manager John Gibbons turned to Jason Grilli to pave the way for Roberto Osuna in the ninth, but Grilli didn’t do much paving. He walked Ellsbury leading off, struck out Gary Sanchez, but gave up a triple to Didi Gregorius scoring Ellsbury. Gregorius scored on a sacrifice fly by Starlin Castro for the lead, Grilli walked McCann, and grooved one to Chase Headley who gave the Yankees a 7-4 lead.

It looked bad for the good guys as Dellin Betances came in to put them away. But a funny thing happened on the way to a save. Betances had finished the two previous games, and there’s no longer a Miller or Chapman to help out. He was wild as a March hare. He walked two, wild-pitched them up, let one score on an infield hit, walked another, let another score on an infield hit, and it was 7-6, bases loaded, one out. Betances had thrown 40 pitches and made his exit. The Yankees had to resort to call-up Blake Parker, who froze Kevin Pillar with a curve ball for the second out, much to Pillar’s fury with himself, and then gave up a deep, opposite-field, that is, into that wind, drive by Justin Smoak that took Brett Gardner back to the wall, up in the air, to make the catch and secure the most precarious snow cone you’ve ever seen, to end the game.

So, let’s look at the players that made this game one for the ages.

If in his first start after the Class A rehab stint, Aaron Sanchez showed that he hadn’t lost anything off his pitches, tonight he showed that he could persevere through whatever adversity he faced, even though his command was less than his best. He gave up a solo home run to veteran Brian McCann in the fourth, and then a two-run shot to rookie Tyler Austin in the seventh. He was in and out of trouble all night, with only one three up, three down inning, the sixth. He did only face three batters in the second but that’s because Starlin Castro, who runs like he swings the bat, i.e., wherever, whenever, decided that the rumours about Jose Bautista’s diminished throwing ability were true, and got himself gunned down at second by about four feet or so when Bautista played the carom of his line shot perfectly off the wall. Tonight Sanchez fell behind hitters, he got in trouble with two outs, but still persevered, and even despite all kept his pitch count down, throwing only 87 in seven full innings. It’s the mark of a pro to throw a quality start when you’re not throwing your best, and Aaron Sanchez is rapidly becoming a pro.

Brian McCann, who counted the first run against Sanchez in the fourth, is a guy who deserves the chance to do something once in a while, despite the changed circumstances in the Bronx. Unlike Alex Rodriguez, who had the good grace to accept his dismissal, and Carlos Beltran, who quietly rode out of town to the Rangers, McCann, a free agent at the end of the year, and his contemporary Mark Texeira, who has already announced his retirement, have had to hang around in significantly diminished roles while the new kids on the block get all, or most, of the playing time. So it was bittersweet to see McCann, relegated from catcher to DH, go deep on Sanchez. He erased the lead Sanchez had been guarding since the first inning, which hurt, but if somebody had to do it, why not him?

Not every individual who contributed to tonight’s proceedings did it in a positive way, and yes, we’ll eventually get to Dellin Betances, but right now I’m referring to Toronto’s dirty little secret, the evident defensive shortcomings of Devon Travis, a subject that no one seems to want to address. Twice tonight, in my opinion, Travis contributed to the accumulation of base-runners Aaron Sanchez faced. In the first inning he ranged quickly behind second to scoop a ground ball up the middle by Yankee rookie catcher Gary Sanchez, and given that it was Sanchez running, he had the time to plant and throw, or do a Troy Tulowitzki ballet move and throw across his body. Instead, he fumbled the ball away from himself toward second. Sanchez was given an infield hit, but dollars to donuts Ryan Goins makes that play. Every time. It’s no knock against Travis that he doesn’t field like Goins, but he’s deteriorated so far from the level of not-quite-Goins that sooner or later somebody should notice.

Then, in the fifth, perfectly positioned in the shift in short right field for Brett Gardner, he had to move just a little to his right, towards second, to pick up a sharply hit ground ball by Gardner. Gardner’s fast, sure, but Travis still had plenty of time to make a good throw for the out. This time he got an error for a throw that was so far toward the pitcher’s mound that Edwin Encarnacion had to come nearly two steps off the bag to flag it down.

With the Jays’ hitters struggling so these days, their pitchers have to play a tight sort of game, and they can hardly afford to have to deal with extra base-runners. I’m getting more than a little frustrated by the fact that no one is talking plainly about this problem of Travis’ defence that is going on right in front of our eyes.

Speaking of Encarnacion, coming to bat against hard-throwing young Luis Cessa, yet another rookie pressed into service by Yankees’ manager Joe Girardi, in the first inning, he might have been intimidated a little by the fact that Cessa had caught Jose Bautista looking, and fanned Josh Donaldson already. Or, maybe not. On a night with gale-force winds blowing in from left field, Edwin got hold of a 2-1 pitch that Cessa I’m sure wishes he had never thrown, and pounded it, “high and deep”, into the second deck in left. It was Edwin’s 37^th home run, but more importantly his 112^th RBI of the season, a new career high for Edwin.

Luis Cessa started for the Yankees and turned in a performance remarkably similar to that of Sanchez. Both starters tonight were exemplars of the old “bend, but don’t break” adage. It’s to Cessa’s credit that he managed to get the big outs when he needed them.

Kevin Pillar has been the anchor of whatever little offensive success Toronto has had in the midst of this bleak period of overlapping battings slumps. Despite the fact that he took minimal time to return from his thumb injury, and is clearly subpar physically as a result, he has had a number of key base hits since his return from the DL. In fact, despite their mutual tendency to strike out more often than you’d like, Pillar, Melvin Upton, and Devon Travis, to give him his offensive due, have at times put together exciting offensive sequences featuring tough at bats, good situational hitting, speed put to good advantage, and so on. They have been, at these times, a sub-set of small-ball players on a team of big-ball bashers. Whether they are hitting seven-eight-nine or eight-nine-one, they have shown the ability to shake things up when needed.

Tonight Kevin Pillar had a great game and contributed monumentally to his team’s efforts. Even when he failed, his failure was central to the drama of the game. When he came to the plate in the top of the eighth with Pompey and Upton at second and first and two outs, he’d already had two singles and a walk in three plate appearances, and his leadoff single in the fifth inning had started the mini-rally that gave the Jays their 2-1 lead. His shot over Gardner’s head in left and off the wall seemed at the time to be the clutch bomb the Jays had been looking for this entire road trip. For once the strange anatomy of Yankee Stadium gave us a break, as the ball caromed twice in opposite directions off the ledge and then the upright in the wall’s padding. This left Gardner with no hope of holding Upton at third to keep the game tied.

But sometimes the task is just too big, even for Superman (though don’t mention that inconvenient truth around comic-con!) Having vaulted the Jays back into the lead with his clutch blast, it was too much to expect that he coud also run down Gregorius’ shot over his head in the bottom of the eighth that tied the game. And while there was no poetry in it for Blue Jays’ supporters, there was a certain poetic justice when he couldn’t pull the trigger on a curve ball from Yankee newcomer Blake Parker, who spent most of the year in the minors, with the tying run only ninety feet away and one out in the top of the ninth. My kingdom for a fly ball . . .

We’ve completed our tour of the key players in tonight’s drama, all, that is, except for the three who made up the dramatis personae of the final, shocking, stark moment of the game. On the mound was Blake Parker, recent call-up, little-known itinerant bottom-of-the-bullpen kind of guy, with the wierdest herky-jerky, how-can-that-not-be-a-balk windup you’ve ever seen. At the plate was the much-maligned Justin Smoak, who this year, it seems, has never seen a clutch situation where going down on strikes with wild overswings was not the likeliest outcome. And in left field was one of the somewhat-forgotten Yankees, Brett Gardner, a mid-career veteran who’s too old to be part of the youth movement, and too young (and useful) to be shown the door. Decent hitter, good speed on the bases and in the field, and a guy who’s learned how to play the angles and the tricky spots of left field in Yankee Stadium about as well as anyone.

With, remember, two outs and the bases loaded, Smoak doesn’t waste any time at the plate. A mighty cut on the first pitch from Parker makes good contact, and our hearts jump. But we can see off the bat that it’s opposite field, and there’s the power-diminishing slice, and the wind to contend with, and as the scene shifts to Gardner racing for the fence, we know that it is not a no-doubter, and with the game in the balance and our hearts in our throats we watch with fascinated horror as Gardner reaches the fence, gathers himself—all of this taking an eternity—and leaps. And the ball lands in the pocket of his glove. With the impact of his body against the wall, we see the glove open, the ball start to roll up, teetering on the edge of the pocket. Staring intently at the ball as he drops back to the ground, Gardner rolls his glove around and under it; it drops back into the pocket, this time securely, as securely as the game is won for his team.

Nothing more need be said after describing the final act of this game for the ages. Yankees 7, Blue Jays 6.

For any sensible person, that is to say, someone who does not think that the New Year should be ushered in with a splitting headache while frantically deleting photos that shouldn’t have been posted and watching faux-students playing faux-amateur football representing big faux-academic institutions, Labour Day is the true beginning of the new year.

On Labour Day, Canadians return from vacation or their cottage rental, swim in the outdoor pool one last time, start looking around for something nice to do in the fall during their dwindling free time. Young Canadians organize their backpacks, sharpen their pencils, charge their laptops, hack the parental controls on their I-Phones, rip holes in their new jeans, frantically read Cole’s Notes on all their summer reading list books, all in anticipation of the first day of school.

The heat and humidity break (most years, anyway), the air is cooler and crisper, the morning light brighter and clearer, and there’s a spring in our step as we set out on new adventures or return recharged to our regular routines.

In France, where summer holidays are clearly delineated by the month of August on the calendar, as any Canadian visitor knows who drives miles out of their way to eat at that special new restaurant only to find it closed and deserted “pour les vacances”, they even have a name for the first week of September, “la rentrée” , the return to normal, to routine, to the bustle of life.

In short, about this time of year, change is in the air.

But not, it seems, for our beloved but oh so frustrating Toronto Blue Jays. Having escaped Tampa Bay with one win out of three and their pride barely intact, they took the field under a surprisingly bright sun, given the proximity of Hurricane Hermine, of a holiday Monday, eager to do better for themselves against a foe and in a venue where in recent times they have achieved a lot of success. Surely they would get a jump on this three-game series, and not start out in a hole again.

But it was just not to be. R.A. Dickey, whose recent outings have been very respectable despite the relative lack of results in the win column, would once again come a-cropper in the grandchild of the fabled House that Ruth Built, a venue that has of late been very friendly to his team, but decidedly inhospitable to his own pitching efforts.

Masahiro Tanaka, who continues not to impress me as a big-game pitcher despite his undeniably good stats, once again fussed and bothered like a pokey old grandpa and wandered haltingly through a Toronto lineup that at every moment threatened to expose his inadequacy, but that he knew he was fortified against by the protection of the baseball gods and, to be frank, blind luck.

It’s long been a cliché in sports that teams create their own luck. In the case of the current play of the Blue Jays that seems to be more than a little true. Despite being in every game and having every opportunity, they have done little to advance their cause at the plate, in the field, or on the base paths. Their pitchers have done the best they could to keep their fingers in the dike, but there’s only so many fingers for a lot of holes and a whole lot of water on the other side. Needless to say, the luck has not followed for them.

Tanaka started the game by not fooling anyone. Facing a lineup curiously devoid of three major bats, Troy Tulowitzki, Russell Martin, and Dioner Navarro all at the same time (at least partly caused by Dickey’s start and the concomitant need to have Josh Thole behind the plate), he served up a ringing double on an 0-2 pitch to the leadoff hitter Devon Travis, moved to the top of the order to compensate for some of the missing bats (I’ll leave Manager John Gibbons to explain that one to you, but he won’t), and then Jose Bautista ripped one past Chase Headley at third to score Travis, also on an 0-2 pitch—Tanaka hadn’t thrown a pitch outside the strike zone, and was down by a run already.

But here was the first instance of blind luck, not to mention the perversity of the planners of the Big Apple, that came into play. One of the architectural quirks of the original Yankee stadium was a strangely protruding bank of seats that jutted out almost to the foul line behind third, and then fell away again, creating a blind corner in left field. Not being ones to ignore tradition, no matter how stupid, the designers of the new ball yard thought it necessary to preserve this weird anomaly in the new ball park. So what happens is that a ball ripped past the third baseman often doesn’t make it into the left-field corner, into rattle-around territory, but caroms sharply off that stupid wall and back into the playing field. Yankee left-fielders, knowing this, will charge a ball that’s headed for the corner, rather than go into the corner to cut it off. Brett Gardner is a master at this move.

Thus Gardner raced in, judged the bounce, and hustled the ball into second to keep Bautista to a single, negating what should have been back-to-back doubles. After Jacoby Ellsbury flagged down a testy little looping liner by Josh Donaldson, Edwin Encarnacion slashed a hard line single into left centre that shoulda scored Bautista, but no, Jose was only at first, not second, and only made it to third, where he died. Michael Saunders followed with a bouncer to first, first baseman Tyler Austin came to the plate, and Bautista, running on contact, unaccountably stopped then started again and was easy prey for a tag play. With two out and two on, Kevin Pillar grounded out to first. An inexplicable TOOBLAN from a veteran, combined with a bad-luck bounce, ended up holding the Jays to their recent standard of scoring a run in the first but having bigger things escape them.

The Jays’ lost run in the first would have been a lot easier to swallow were it not for a bit of a problem, shall we say, that R. A. Dickey ran into in the Yankee half of the first. His first pitch to Brett Gardner was a knuckleball in for a strike. I always feel better when he throws a strike with it on the first pitch. But the next two pitches, also strikes, were something else again. Gardner lined the second knuckler into centre for a single. Jacoby Ellsbury jacked the third one into the short porch in right, and the 1-0 lead was overcome after three pitches.

About that famous short porch: it’s another architectural anomaly from the original Yankee Stadium that they just had to retain in the new structure, and why not? Isn’t it just thrilling to see how many hitters with warning-track power can chalk up homers on ordinary medium fly balls into the right-field corner? Sure, these oddities favour both teams equally, but the Yanks play 81 games here, so they get the advantage through their whole home schedule, plus the advantage of being able to adjust to them.

After the Ellsbury homer, hot rookie Gary Sanchez lined a single to right, still with nobody out, but Chase Headley, hitting fourth, grounded into a double play and Didi Gregorius flied out to centre, and it was two to one after one.

The Jays completely wasted an opportunity to tie the game in the second, as Melvin Upton led off with a ground rule double to right. This brought Josh Thole to the plate, and raised one of those existential crises that really seem to trouble Manager John Gibbons’ soul. Thole’s in the lineup because he can, for the most part, block Dickey’s knucklers. Playing once a week, it’s okay to ask him to absorb a bit of punishment to save Russell Martin from absorbing a lot. And being on the field means he has to hit. All understood. And my sense is that Thole has a good swing, and sometimes exhibits a good eye. But he’s just a guy who hits .159 and that’s not going to change without a massive increase in at-bats, and that’s not going to happen.

But Gibbie looks at the situation, and his player-loving little heart says, “aw, poor guy, he hardly ever gets a chance to knock in a run. I can’t take that away from him in the second inning. Maybe later if we need it.” But we needed it then didn’t we, to get the game back to even after the rocking of Dickey? Thole can bunt—he spent years with the Mets, so he knows how to do it. But, no, swing away, guy, give it a shot. And Thole popped out to the second baseman on the first pitch. Darwin Barney fanned for the second out, with Upton still at second, but Barney’s a vet who can go the other way. Maybe he changes his approach with Upton at third. And then Aaron Judge swoops his giant self in and launches an improbable swan dive to catch Devon Travis’ soft liner to right to end the inning. Bad decision by Gibbie. Bad luck for Travis. No tie game.

No first inning jitters any more for Dickey, he only needed ten pitches for the second. Starlin Castro flied out to left, and Austin Romine and the Giant Judge both fanned. Sometimes it’s almost amusing to see newbies try to make contact with Dickey for the first time.

In the Jays’ half of the third, Tanaka luck again came to the fore. With one out he walked Josh Donaldson, his first walk in his first start in September, which equals the total number of walks he issued in all of August, so there’s that about Tanaka. After Edwin popped out to second, Michael Saunders once again stroked a base hit through the shift-vacated left side of the infield, Donaldson stopping at second. Chase Headley then saved Tanaka’s sushi with a sparkling grab of a hard-hit ball by Kevin Pillar that he turned into an inning-ending fielder’s choice. More luck.

But the Yankees, well, they don’t need no luck. They’ve got Jacoby Ellsbury. Leading off in the bottom of the third was one of their fine prospects not named Gary Sanchez, Tyler Austin, today playing first for Mark Texeira. It’s a real sign of the Yankees’ turnover that Texeira, in his last days as a Yankee, is reduced to being the defensive caddy for a rookie hitting .205. But that doesn’t mean he can’t hit, oh, no. Austin, facing Dickey for the first time, wasn’t too fussy about what the knuckler was doing, and hit a double to left on a 2-1 pitch. Brett Gardner popped out, bringing Ellsbury back to the plate, where he singled in Austin with the third run. So in the realm of the mano a mano, the score was Jacoby Ellsbury 3, R.A. Dickey 0. After striking out Gary Sanchez, Dickey, incredulous at the indignity of it, was called for a balk by first-base umpire Mark Wegner. But Ellsbury was stranded at second when Headley popped out to second.

After three it was 3-1 for the Yankees, and Dickey had actually pitched as well as Tanaka, with a lower pitch count, the only difference being the first-inning gopher ball to Ellsbury, and Tanaka’s luck. The luck held in the top of the fourth, when Upton again led off with a base hit, only to be caught stealing by a very quick release and a strong, accurate throw to second by the rookie Sanchez. It’s not often that Upton gets a good jump but is thrown out by four feet. That little business taken care of, Thole, on another popup to second, and Darwin Barney on a grounder to second were quickly retired to end the inning.

Still essentially matching baserunners and pitches with Tanaka, Dickey was again walking the tightrope in the bottom of the fourth, but unfortunately, with two on, a base hit by Starlin Castro and a walk to Austin Romine, and two outs, bookend strikeouts of Gregorius and Judge, he had to face the unconscious who gives a damn Tyler Austin, who smacked another double to left, picking up two RBIs and extending the Yankees’ lead to 5-1. Dickey struck out Brett Gardner to end an inning in which he struck out the side, but Gibbie was unwilling to let the bleeding go on, and decided that Dickey had seen enough of the Yankees.

In the last two games in Tampa, the Jays had yielded early leads, only to have their bullpen close the door completely on the Rays and give their hitters a chance to get back in it. The first time it didn’t happen, the second time it did. With at least four innings to go, could they do it again, and in the meantime could they finally rough up Tanaka, or jump on his successors?

Well, yes, the bullpen was aces again, and yes, they did mount a challenge as Tanaka exited the game, but they couldn’t quite capitalize on enough chances to do anything other than make it close.

After his first disastrous outing from the bullpen, Francisco Liriano needed a confidence-builder, and with Dickey only going four, the Jays needed some innings. Both got what they were looking for. How about two innings, one base hit, a tainted infield single by who else, Ellsbury, who reached when the ball slipped out of Travis’ hand, yet again, and generously not counted as an error, and three strikeouts? The only blemish on Liriano’s performance came after the game, when we found out that he hadn’t gone out for a third inning because his back had stiffened up. Brett Cecil followed with an encouraging clean inning, and Joaquin Benoit finished up with his now-traditional one-walk but striking out the side.

As for the Jays’ offence, Tanaka drew on his personal bank of good luck again, accompanied by Jose Bautista’s second baserunning blunder, to survive another threat by Toronto in the fifth. After Travis grounded out, he walked Bautista, second walk of the new month for Tanaka, what’s the world coming to, then ducked a bullet as Donaldson hit a screamer right at Headley for the second out. This brought Encarnacion to the plate, and there arose again the spectre of the home-team-friendly box seats behind third.

Edwin hit another shot past Headley, and again hit the billiard rail and caromed right to Gardner who was perfectly positioned. Not only was Encarnacion held to a single, but Bautista, with the play right in front of him all the way, ran into the out at third by about a half a mile to end the inning. Never make the first or third out at third? Check. TOOBLAN number two? Check. Once again, we didn’t capitalize on baserunners, and once again our own sloppiness was the decisive factor.

Tanaka took on a second wind after that, and set the Jays down in order in the sixth, with two strikeouts. After Liriano’s second clean inning, we came to the seventh, which would be Tanaka’s last, going in with 98 pitches. The top of the seventh was the kind of inning that, in the American League, you only see after the September first callups. The Jays used three pinch-hitters, and the Yankees used four pitchers. When it was all said and done, Tanaka was of course gone but still in line for the win, the Jays had closed the lead to five-three, but the scoring was closed out for the night, whether the Blue Jays could admit it or not.

Tanaka walked Thole leading off. Dioner Navarro, hitting for Darwin Barney, hit a deep fly to right that the giant Aaron Judge reached up and plucked from the top of the wall. That was enough for Manager Joe Girardi, and he brought in Jonathan Holder, who got the second out on a short fly to right, and then the fun began. Holder walked Bautista and Donaldson to load the bases, and was replaced by Ben Heller, who gave up a single to right by Encarnacion to drive in two runs. Finally Tommy Layne came in and retired Martin on a little bloop to Castro at second. The Jays had closed the gap to two, but that was as close as they would come.

The Yankees bullpen was up to matching the success of the Jays’ relievers, and didn’t allow a base-runner in the eighth and ninth. Tyler Clippard struck out one and threw 14 pitches, while Dellin Betances struck out two on only ten pitches for the save. Andrew Miller? Aroldis Chapman? Who?

Well, here we are, Tampa Bay redux. We have to win tomorrow night to avoid the sweep. So far, we’re absolutely not out of it, but if we don’t start putting together good at bats, fielding the ball, and running the bases well, we soon will be.

You could have viewed today’s pitching matchup between Tampa’s Chris Archer and Toronto’s Jay Happ in two different ways.

Taking the long view, as in season-long, things looked pretty good for the Jays. Happ has had a surprisingly good, make that surprisingly superb, season for Toronto, while Chris Archer, already established as one of the premier starters in the American League prior to 2016, has had a shockingly bad season. But if you take the short view, as in the last month, or since the All-Star break, it would look quite a bit different. Happ has struggled in a number of starts since mid-season, perhaps reflecting the fact that he had logged a high number of innings in his excellent first half, and might now be facing the wall. Meanwhile, Chris Archer has recently looked like the Chris Archer of yore, or at least of 2015.

While Happ has gone 4-1 in his last seven games, and his ERA has risen by only about a quarter of a run, the telling figure is that he has averaged less than six innings a start in those last seven games, whereas in the first half of the season he was pretty well guaranteed to go seven, or even into the eighth inning. Meanwhile, though Archer has gone 3-3 in his last seven games, reflecting the fact that the Rays are sitting in last place, his ERA has been 3.00, he has averaged 6.1 innings a start, and most impressively he has struck out 56 in 45 innings while walking only ten. This is not the same Chris Archer that the Jays cuffed around earlier in the year.

Regardless of who would prevail, it looked pretty certain that neither team would score a bunch of runs early, and that this would be a day for the bullpens to step up, and a game that would likely be decided by a late-inning lightning strike. Luckily for our heroes after struggling through two losses under the Tampa ceiling, the summoner of lightning this day would be wearing road greys rather than powder blue.

So despite anticipating a tough go against Archer, the Jays once again managed to score in the first inning, but once again they didn’t start to rock and roll until two were out, limiting their chances to go big early on Archer. In fact, Jose Bautista and Josh Donaldson had both fanned already when Edwin Encarnacion came to the plate and pounded one to centre field that even Kevin Kiermaier couldn’t run down. On second with a double, Edwin was in position to score when Dioner Navarro singled to right. Navarro, inserted into the lineup as DH and cleanup hitter, took the central place in the Jays’ batting order thanks to his good numbers in the past against Archer, and the move paid dividends immediately in the form of an RBI.

The inning ended with Navarro being tagged out off first by the pitcher, but if this appeared to be a TOOBLAN, it was a TOOBLAN with a purpose. (Sorry to repeat for regular readers, but for the benefit of first-time visitors, a TOOBLAN is Thrown Out On the Bases Like A Nincompoop). With the play in front of him, Navarro could see that Souza, who has a strong arm, had made an accurate throw to the plate. It’s fairly clear that he intentionally gave himself up to protect Edwin’s run. As you would expect, catcher Bobbie Wilson, seeing Navarro in no-man’s land, stepped out from behind the plate, took the throw on the fly from Souza, and fired to Archer covering, who put the tag on Navarro.

With a one-run lead and knowing that his mates had hit a couple of solid shots against Archer, Happ took the mound and immediately had the lead taken away by the very aggressive top of the Tampa batting order. That second baseman blank blank led off the game with a single to left on a 2-2 pitch. Kevin Kiermaier hit a hot grounder off Edwin’s glove at first that deflected to Devon Travis, but of course there was no getting Kiermaier by then. The veteran Evan Longoria drilled a booming double off the wall in right centre, scoring that guy and moving Kiermaier to third. The latter would score on a sacrifice fly to right by Matt Duffy after Happ had caught Brad Miller looking. Happ then struck out Stephen Souza, but Tampa, and more to the point Archer, were up 2-1.

The second inning cemented the trend for both starters. Buoyed by the quick Tampa response in the first inning, Archer came out and blew the visitors away, Russell Martin grounded out to first, Troy Tulowitzki popped out to second, and Michael Saunders struck out. Though he didn’t give up another run, Happ continued to struggle as his pitch count rose like the tally of lies in the Donald Trump campaign. After getting the first two outs, he walked Curt Casali, the number nine hitter, and then the no-name guy, before retiring the side on a line smash by Kiermaier hit right at Travis at second. Alarmingly, after two innings Happ’s pitch count was at 61, and the writing was on the wall for him.

It wasn’t all beer and skittles for Archer, though. Like Happ he quickly dispatched Kevin Pillar on a popup to the shortstop, and Travis, who fanned. But like Happ he lost concentration with two outs and got in trouble for himself. Jose Bautista hit a ground single up the middle, and then, goodness gracious, Archer issued a walk to Josh Donaldson. Just so you know how well Archer had pitched in August, the walk to Donaldson equalled his entire total of walks for the whole preceding month. Presumably shocked by this unforgiveable lapse, Archer uncorked a wild pitch, bringing Encarnacion back to the plate with two outs and ducks on the pond. This time the spindly youngster with the fluid motion and the retro Afro peaking out from under the back of his cap got the better of Edwin, who went down swinging. The good news from Archer was that he still had the lead; the bad news was that despite being an inning ahead, Archer’s pitch count was also climbing quickly, and had reached 59 already.

Happ gave us some faint hope by retiring yet again the first two batters in the third inning, but that was his last hurrah; this just wasn’t his day. Longoria flied out to right; Brad Miller flied out to centre, but Matt Duffy, Stephen Sousa, and Corey Dickinson strung together three straight singles for the Rays’ third run, and that was it for Jay Happ. Manager John Gibbons, now having an expanded pen available to him, wasn’t about to draw out the agony for Happ. He only gave up three runs, but on six hits and two walks, and had already thrown 85 pitches, enough for a quality start, which this wasn’t. Gibbie called in Danny Barnes, one of the September callups who had impressed in a short visit in August, to finish off the third, which he did by retiring Bobbie Wilson on a fly ball to centre.

Well, that could easily have been the ball game. Archer settled in, the Jays’ bullpen did some great work to keep the game close, and the only issue lurking on the horizon was Chris Archer’s ominously rising pitch count, which would signal an early end to his day and perhaps change the complexion of the game. No insult intended, but the Rays haven’t sunk to the bottom of the division on the strength of a knockout bullpen, now have they?

Pitching on the lead, Archer certainly showed he still has his best stuff. Since fanning Edwin to end the mild threat in the third, he retired eleven out of twelve batters, only giving up a sharp base hit to Travis in the fifth. He also fanned five of the eleven outs. But when he came out for the seventh with 99 pitches in the books, the leash was pretty short. After Russell Martin flied out deep to left on a three-one pitch, Tulo rifled the ball into right through the vacated infield. That was it for Archer, and, as it turned out, for the Tampa Bay Rays as well. Brad Boxberger came in to face Michael Saunders, and it took just three batters for the Blue Jays to erase Chris Archer’s shot at a hard-won W. Saunders singled to right despite the shift. Kevin Pillar walked to load the bases. On a 1-0 count Devon Travis pulled a ground ball hard past Evan Longoria into left, and both Tulo and Saunders scored to tie the game. It took a little more work for Boxberger to extricate himself without giving up the lead. Jose Bautista hit into a fielder’s choice to move Pillar to third, and Josh Donaldson walked to load the bases again, but Edwin popped out to first in foul territory to finally end the threat.

Just a word about the shift, which Kevin Cash employs as much as anybody in the league. The Jays had three base hits in the inning, with the shift in place on all three. Tulo just laughed at it and hit through the big hole on the right side. But Saunders and Travis both pulled the ball through the shift. You still have to make quality pitches when you’re in the shift, because line drives and hard grounders will always find holes. If hitters start pulling the ball through shifts, and alternately crossing it up, I think the amount of shifting is going to decline, because what’s the point?

With Archer out of the game and the score tied, my bets were on the Jays beating the Rays’ bullpen, but nothing’s carved in stone, right?

In the meantime, Danny Barnes had done yeoman’s work to hold the Rays for another two innings after bailing out Happ. He left with a line of 2.1 innings, no runs, one hit, one strikeout, and 29 pitches. This fellow throws strikes and pitches to contact, and he does it with efficiency. Could he be a candidate for the post-season roster? Does his previous time up with the Jays qualify him? Hope so.

Scott Feldman retired the side in order with a strikeout and a couple of groundouts in the sixth, on 17 pitches.

With the game tied going to the bottom of the seventh, Gibbie turned to his high-leverage relievers, and the BenGriNa team came through in fine order. Let’s lump them together as one; it’s more impressive that way. Joaquin Benoit gave up a single to some guy I don’t recognize, and then struck out the side in the seventh. Jason Grilli retired Matt Duffy on a ground shot that bounced off the pitcher and caromed right to Donaldson at third. Then he struck out the next two, and gifted us with another gleeful fist pump. Roberto Osuna struck out two in the ninth, giving up a deep fly to right centre in between, and turned to thank his god, while we thanked ours for the gift of BenGriNa.

The drive to right centre by Nick Franklin off Osuna produced a scary moment, in more ways than one. First, it looked like it was going to the wall, but then, as Kevin Pillar and Zeke Carrera raced toward each other tracking the ball, neither backed off, and Carrera ended up plucking it out of Pillar’s glove as they collided. For a moment it looked like Pillar had taken the brunt of the collision on the same hand that had been recently injured, but luckily he was okay.

I don’t now whether it’s more impressive as narration or as numbers, but here are the numbers for BenGriNa: 3 innings, ten batters faced, one base hit, seven strikeouts in nine outs, 45 pitches thrown, 35 for strikes. And all of this after Barnes and Feldman went three and a third scoreless, giving up only one hit. Bring on the playoffs, the bullpen is ready!

But a shut-down bullpen don’t butter no turnips if the guys with the sticks don’t do something: this game was not over. After the Benoit whitewash of the Rays in the seventh, Kevin Cash called on Kevin Jepsen to keep the Jays in check. Don’t ask him how that worked out. Jepsen has managed the Jays well before, including a clean inning on Friday night. But this time it was another story, with a better ending for our side.

It was as quick as it was decisive. Jepsen walked Dioner Navarro. Dalton Pompey made his first appearance off the bench for the year to run for him and immediately stole second. He would have stolen third, too, but he didn’t have to, because Russell Martin, freed by his manager to call his own shot on a 3-0 count, hit a no-doubt blast to left for the lead, and the winning runs. After Jepsen gave up a following single to Tulo, Cash had seen enough, and brought in Danny Farquhar, who struggled to keep the score close, and succeeded, despite giving up another single to Pillar, and throwing a wild pitch to advance the two runners into scoring position with only one out. With his back to the wall, Farquhar fanned Travis, and got Bautista on a short fly to right.

Osuna scored his thirtieth save in thirty-three attempts, though maybe some of them should be divided into thirds and shared with his elderly uncles in the combine.

Thus the disaster of a sweep was averted, and the Jays could depart for New York, following Hurricane Hermine with a lighter heart and a good win under their belts. The lesson from the second and third games in Tampa Bay is that the modern game is still nine innings, but even the best of starting pitchers can only manage seven most nights. When you’re stonewalled by a good performance, you’ve only got a small window to recover, but it is a window. The best teams are the ones that can find a way to squeeze through more times than not. And nail some plywood over their own window in the meantime.

Will no one rid us of this troublesome second baseman?

I’d better be careful what I write. According to the story, some of King Henry II’s knights overheard him asking roughly the same thing about Thomas à Becket, and we all know what happened to the saintly Becket!

So it’s not that I want Logan Forsythe assassinated in front of the altar. A nice, annoying little hamstring issue will do nicely; but whatever it takes, please, keep him out of the game today!

If the Orange Juiced Dome has become once again the House of Horrors for the Toronto Blue Jays, the major domo, host, and doorman of the Castle of Doom is Logan Forsythe. Every time you look up, he’s at the plate. Every time you look away and look back, he’s on base. Every time you sneak a peak, he’s either scored a run or driven one in.

Today it was up to Marco Estrada to put a rope around this annoying pest and rein him in, and he did, and all his pesky little cronies, too, sublimely, definitively . . . for five innings.

But it was also up to the Toronto batting order to do their part and lay a beating on Tampa’s young left-hander Blake Snell, like they did in August, when he only managed one and two thirds innings and gave up five runs on five hits. (I’ve already referred to assassinating Logan Forsythe and beating Blake Snell; the Rays seem to evoke the violent side of me like no other team. Wonder why.)

The worst possible thing that could have happened to Toronto today would be a repeat of yesterday’s horrendous performance in a game in which they were not only badly beaten, but they contributed materially to the outcome themselves.

Well, you can argue that any loss is as bad as any other, and in some ways you’d be right. It’s a loss; who cares how it happened; clear your mind of it and move on. But yesterday, yesterday was special. So did they repeat yesterday’s mess fest in all its glory? No. But was it a close call, a tight game, a good effort, where you could take something positive away for the next day? Not really.

Take Estrada’s start. For five innings he was as good as he has ever been. His pitches were things of beauty. The frustration on the faces of the Tampa batters as they made soft contact or swung and missed was beautiful to see. In five innings he gave up no runs, two singles, and one walk. The walk was erased when he teamed up with Dioner Navarro to cut down Corey Dickinson trying to steal. The first hit was nullified when he made Kevin Kiermaier, one of the game’s premier bunters, pop up his bunt attempt to catcher Dioner Navarro. He struck out six, two of them looking. He induced four popups; ten of his fifteen outs came from strikeouts and popups.

Estrada’s brilliance was brought into full focus by the fact that Blake Snell was doing a nearly equally effective job on Toronto. In four of his six innings he retired the side in order. He shrugged off a first-inning walk to Edwin Encarnacion, and only in the third did he waver, allowing the Jays the only run either team scored in the first five innings.

The Jays hardly undressed Snell in public in the third. In fact, if he hadn’t issued his second walk on the day to Josh Donaldson, the game would have entered the sixth a scoreless tie. With one out, Devon Travis looped a single to centre. After Jose Bautista made the second out, Snell walked Donaldson, pushing Travis to second, whence he scored on a two-out, soft looped single to centre by Edwin Encarnacion. After the Edwin RBI, Snell retired the last ten batters he face. Overall he struck out seven, and finished strong, with two strikeouts and a short fly to right in the sixth, his last inning of work.

Toronto is once again going through a protracted stretch of poor hitting. Even in the Baltimore series, where they won two out of three, they only scored 13 runs in the three games, well below this year’s average of runs scored per game, and even more of a departure from the record of last year’s batting behemoth.

When you’re in a stretch like this, being involved in a tight pitchers’ battle is even more stressful than you’d expect, because you have the firm intuition, the pessimism if you will, that if the other side breaks through, especially with multiple runs, then your goose is cooked, because you just ain’t gonna climb back into it. The attack that waylaid Marco Estrada in the sixth didn’t just cook the Jays’ goose, it boiled and mashed the potatoes, made the gravy, carved the bird, and served the dressing. In the immortal if wildly optimistic words of Tiger Williams, the Blue Jays were done like dinner. Estrada was sent off to lick his wounds and ponder his misfortune, and the Jays’ batters were condemned to try to erase the entire deficit with one swing, which is never a good idea.

Estrada’s fateful sixth started off with another soft-contact lollypop put into play by Rays’ catcher Bobby Wilson, who’d be sitting on the bench in favour of Luke Maile if I were Tampa Manager Kevin Cash. Unfortunately, his lollypop touched green just inside the right field foul line, falling between Jose Bautista racing in and Edwin Encarnaction racing out. Devon Travis, who’d normally take this one, was nowhere to be seen, stationed somewhere behind the bag at second in the accursed shift. This turned the lineup over to Logan Forsythe. If the Jays’ players last year all took turns stirring the pot, Forsythe seems constantly to be stirring up trouble. He ripped a single into left, the first base hit off Estrada that was stroked with authority.

This put runners on first and second with nobody out and Kevin Kiermaier at the plate. That Kiermaier would bunt was a foregone conclusion. Besides patrolling the outfield like a gazelle and hitting occasionally with authority, Kiermaier is an excellent bunter and runs like the wind. You will recall that yesterday Marcus Stroman made a crucial error in judgement on a comebacker, and tried for the force at second when he had time to get Brad Miller at first after checking the runner at third, and ended up getting the out but no double play while Logan Forsythe scored. Marco Estrada must have had that in mind on Kiermaier’s bunt today. It was a good bunt to the third-base side, and Estrada was on it quickly, Josh Donaldson immediately retreating to the bag as soon as the pitcher was on the ball. Unlike Stroman yesterday, Estrada went for the “sure out” at first, which he didn’t get, his throw pulling Devon Travis off the bag. Meanwhile, Bobby Wilson, lumbering toward third, would have been a fairly dead duck (that’s a joke, folks) on the force, but Estrada never looked at him. The result, after one cheap hit, one decent hit, and a mis-judgement on a bunt, was that the bases were loaded with no one out.

This was a fine fix for Estrada, after sailing through the first five innings like he did, and must have left his head spinning. Three batters later, the Rays had five runs, Estrada’s gem had turned into a scratched zircon, and he was out of the game. Evan Longoria singled Wilson in from third, Brad Miller drew a walk on a three-two pitch forcing in Forsythe, and Matt Duffy cleared the bases with a ringing double to left.

Manager John Gibbons brought in Brett Cecil to deal with the two left-handed hitters among the next three batters, and this time he did the job, despite giving up a soft broken-bat single to centre by Logan Morrison that moved Duffy to third. He then fanned Nick Franklin and caught Corey Dickerson on a called third strike before giving it up to Joe Biagini, who stranded Duffy at third by getting a ground-ball to shortstop by Wilson, who finished off the inning he had started with the bloop single.

With the game in the hands of the bullpen and three innings to go, there were two questions to be asked: would the Blue Jays bullpen hold their opponents scoreless to give them a chance to scramble back into the game, and would the Jays’ hitters be able to mount any kind of an offence against the Tampa bullpen. The answers to these two questions were no, not completely, and yes, some, and that’s how we lost the game. It’s interesting as yer humble scribe chronicles game after game (after game . . .), to see how baseball always comes down to the simple proposition of hit their pitchers while you contain their hitters. Leaving aside the occasional pitchers’ duel or slugout, either of which can be decided by a fluke, that’s just about it, isn’t it?

Erasmo Ramirez pitched the seventh for the Rays, and stranded a couple of baserunners to keep Toronto off the board. As threats go, it wasn’t much, a one-out walk to Melvin Upton who stole second after Dioner Navarro flied out to centre for the second out, and took third on Kevin Pillar’s infield single before Devon Travis popped out to first.

Having thrown only five pitches to get out of the disastrous sixth, Joe Biagini came back for the seventh, and finally received his full initiation into major league baseball. If you want to know what a bargain Joe Biagini was in the Rule Five draft, consider this: Before today he had made 49 appearances (that’s right), pitching 57.1 innings, and had not given up a home run. He was the last qualifying pitcher in major league baseball to give up his first home run of the season, which was the first home run of his big league career as well. Thanks to Kevin Kiermaier, who rocketed one over the fence in left after a leadoff single by the Second Baseman Whose Name I Shall Not Utter, er, Write, Biagini has joined the ranks of mortals who have been dinged for a four-bagger in the show this year. More to the point, Kiermaier’s blast extended the Rays’ lead to 7-1, which was just a bit too much for the Rays’ bullpen to give back in the bottom of the ninth. Biagini stayed in to finish the inning, which was probably a good thing for his confidence. He gave up a one-out single to Brad Miller, but then benefitted from the latter’s wanderlust when Devon Travis snagged Matt Duffy’s liner and trapped the Wand’ring Minstrel off first.

There wasn’t going to be any Toronto uprising in the top of the eighth against Ryan Garton, no sir. He carved through some bums named Bautista, Donaldson, and Encarnacion in eight pitches, popup, flyball, flyball.

The bottom of the eighth brought the major league debut of Matt Dermody, one of the September callups for the Blue Jays. Dermody was drafted by Toronto out of the University of Iowa in 2013, and until this year he spent pitching in A level. But this year he started in high A, moved through AA and then finished the season with Buffalo. He pitched in 47 games at the three levels in the minors and compiled an ERA of 1.82. He wobbled in his debut, but didn’t fall on his face by any means. Facing Tampa’s six-seven-eight-nine, he gave up a double to right on a 1-1 pitch to Logan Morrison. Then he fanned Nick Franklin, and retired Corey Dickerson on a liner to right. His last batter, Bobby Wilson, singled sharply to left on the ground, with Dickerson being held at third. He threw 15 pitches, ten for strikes, and was picked up by Ryan Tepera, who did him the favour of striking out Kiermaier after walking Forsythe, keeping the ledger clean for him.

With a 7-1 lead Tampa Manager Kevin Cash tried to slip lefty Enny Romero into the game to get some work in the top of the ninth, but it didn’t go too well. In fact, it went so badly that Romero created a save situation, and Alex Colome had to be used for his thirtieth save. Basically, for the Jays their late rally consisted primarily of standing with their bats on their shoulders while Romero threw balls. He walked Russell Martin. He walked Troy Tulowitzki. Melvin Upton popped up to first on the first pitch to him, which raises questions about his judgement. Then Romero wild-pitched the runners to second and third. Dioner Navarro made the second out with a grounder to second that scored Martin and moved Tulo to third. Kevin Pillar drew a walk, then took second on defensive indifference, putting him into position to follow Tulo across the plate on Devon Travis’ single to left. At 7-4, that was finally enough for Cash, and Colome came in to sort things out. Not having learned their lesson with Pillar, the Rays let Travis take second, from where he was able to score on a Jose Bautista single to left. 7-5. Josh Donaldson kept the dream alive with another single to left, but Edwin Encarnacion finally brought things to an end with a sharp fly ball to left. From the sound of it, Encarnacion didn’t miss getting all of it by very much. Now that would have been something!

So, was this an awful game for the Jays, like last night’s? Not particularly. Did it hurt as much? Absolutely. The Wilson bloop gets caught, or Estrada gets the force on him at third, and it’s an entirely different game. We scored five runs, enough to win. Estrada pitched well enough to win, just not long enough to win. Chalk this up as woulda, shoulda, coulda. Now we have to make sure that the Tampa brooms stay in the closet tomorrow!

The Blue Jays must have been feeling fortunate that they had an off day on Thursday to make their way from Baltimore to Tampa Bay for this weekend series against the Rays, since they had already safely arrived when the fringes of Hurricane Hermine, with its epicentre over the Florida Panhandle north and west of Tampa, hit early Friday morning. They would have felt even more fortunate that they would be playing indoors tonight, in the Orange Dome, out of harm’s way of the tail of the storm that was lashing the area.

So fortunate must they have felt that they forgot that they had to play a ball game tonight, didn’t show up, and some crowd of incompetent semi-pros had to be suited up in their stead. What’s that you’re saying? Those were the real Blue Jays, that flailed at the plate against a guy who hadn’t pitched in two years, kicked the ball around in the field when they really needed to be sharp, and generally suffered brain cramps every time they had to make a decision?

Well smoke my ham-hocks, chile, y’all coulda fooled me!

If Toronto rolled into Tampa brimming with over-confidence, and that’s why they played so badly, then maybe instead of calling up seven Buffalo Bisons they should have called up the whole Triple-A team, and just had them trade places with the purported major leaguers. If there’s any team and any city where the Jays have absolutely no right to succumb to over-confidence, it’s when they play the Rays in Tampa. After all, it was only in mid-season last year, in the midst of the best Jays’ performance in 22 years, that they finally broke a string of consecutive lost series to the Rays in Tampa that stretched back about as far as Bismack Biyombo’s pointer-finger reaches up.

In preaching calm and equanimity as the operative mood for Toronto fans, I’ve been saying all along that no single loss is significant, as long as we build up the record of winning series, because two out of three not only ain’t bad, it’s more than we need to clinch the division. There haven’t been that many three-game series in the last two months where the Jays have clinched a win in the first two games, so each series has had its own tense little story line. But what could be worse than condemning yourself to having to win two out of two in Tampa, when Tampa is such a rat-hole full of lurking dangers for the boys?

Where to start, not that I want to . . .

Okay, let’s start with the hitters. The Jays were facing Alex Cobb, who was making his first start since 2014, after undergoing Tommy John surgery in early 2015. Now, I’m not suggesting that a pitcher in such a situation couldn’t possibly pitch well, but Cobb’s rehab starts in the minors prior to rejoining the Rays for this start had been little short of terrible. And it was clear from Toronto’s first inning that he was rusty and therefore vulnerable. By the end of two he had already thrown 53 pitches, and should have been gone after three because of a pitch limitation for his first start back in the bigs, but the Jays let him off the hook, and he turned in a very creditable five innings of work.

But back to the first. Jose Bautista struck out looking on a three-two pitch that looked like a terrible call. Bautista certainly thought so, his dark visage glowering even more than usual. Then Josh Donaldson lofted an ordinary if rather deep fly ball to centre, that was an easy reach for the brilliant Kevin Kiermaier until the later pulled back and raised his arms in bewilderment. A second later the ball dropped harmlessly to the warning track and hopped over the fence, for maybe a ground-rule double, maybe a home run. Some tall foreheads somewhere would have to figure it out.

Playing in the Tampa Dome, you see, is like playing in a pinball machine, where there’s no rhyme or reason to the way the light comes through the ceiling panels. Lost balls in the roof are as common as peanut vendors. In addition, the ground rules for Tampa read like the libretto for Wagner’s Ring Cycle. There are rings around the ceiling of the dome, four rings, labelled A, B, C, and D Rings. Each ring is marked for fair and foul territory. Any ball hitting any ring outside of fair territory is a dead foul ball. Any ball hitting either lower ring, C or D, is automatically a home run. This has to do, presumably, with projected trajectory. A ball hitting one of the higher rings, A or B, is in play. If it’s caught, it’s an out, if not, it’s a fair ball in play. If it stays up there, though, it’s a ground-rule double. Got all that?

It turns out that two things happened on Donaldson’s hit. First, it got lost in the ceiling, and Kiermaier, obviously, didn’t know where it was. Second, it hit either the A or B ring. (They never said which.) Therefore, it was in play. Therefore, when it hit the turf and bounced over the fence, it was a traditional ground-rule double.

Edwin Encarnacion didn’t mess with the Ring Rules. He hit the first pitch he saw from Cobb about as hard as you can hit a ball. It banged off the wall in left in a hurry, scoring Donaldson. Edwin ended up going into second standing up, winning a bizarre foot race with first baseman Brad Miller, a sight you’d never have seen before the era of the shift. Early in the count, like on this pitch, the Rays play three infielders on the left side of the infield for Encarnacion. If Edwin pulls a ball that has the potential to be an extra-base hit, both the second baseman and the shortstop have cutoff duties—second baseman to second and home, shortstop to third. So they both head out into the short outfield. Who covers second, then, for the hitter? Why, the first baseman, who has to read the play and get to second before the hitter for a possible tag play.

In this case, the sharply-hit ball came back quickly to Kiermaier, who has a strong arm among other talents, and he cut loose with a direct throw to second. Problem was, Miller, who’s just learning first base, was late reacting to the play, and lost the race to the bag to Edwin, so we had Edwin going in to second standing up, with Miller frantically trying to catch up to him. If anyone tells you that the shift hasn’t changed the game, they’re talking through their hat.

That’s a lot of words for two at-bats, but what can you do? It’s the Trop, right? It goes like that here. Besides, this was the high point of the game for the Jays. Let’s get out of the first, shall we? Michael Saunders grounded out to first with Edwin moving to third. Russell Martin then grounded one up the middle that Forsythe ran down, but couldn’t make a play on. Edwin scored on the infield hit, and then Troy Tulowitzki hit a hard grounder to short that Logan Morrison handled nicely for the third out.

Going into the Jays’ second, Cobb was down 2-0, and had thrown 27 pitches. The Jays had two more base runners in the second, but couldn’t capitalize on Kevin Pillar’s single and a walk to Jose Bautista, as Josh Donaldson popped out to first to strand the two runners. Yet once again Cobb had laboured, throwing another 26 pitches, leaving him at 53 for two innings. He should have been pretty close to the end by then, especially since the Rays had him on a 75 or 80 pitch limit for his first outing.

Yet somehow Cobb found his rhythm, and the two-out walk to Bautista in the second was the last baserunner he allowed. He retired the last 10 batters he faced and struck out five of them. The next time the Blue Jays would score after the first would be in the eighth inning, by which time they were down 8-2. The run came off Eddie Gamboa, a rookie knuckleballer making his major-league debut. Danny Farquhar in the sixth, who benefitted from the decisive home run by Logan Morrison in the bottom of the sixth, and so got the win, Kevin Jepsen in the seventh, Brad Boxberger who picked up Gamboa in the eighth, and Ryan Garton in the ninth kept the Jays off the scoresheet while their mates were building up an insurmountable lead with timely hitting at the plate, and a lot of help from the sloppy Jays.

It doesn’t appear that the management of the Blue Jays is altogether clear on where they want to go with the rotation. Originally, this was to be Francisco Liriano’s fifth straight Friday night start, but by Thursday it had been announced that Marcus Stroman would get the start on something resembling normal rest, and that Liriano would be sent down to shore up the bullpen, giving the relief corps another left-handed option. Not a lot of consideration was given, it would seem, to whether Liriano would be able to adapt to pitching out of the pen on such short notice. Of course, the typical response from Manager John Gibbons on this would be something like, “he can do it, he’s a veteran.” Like I said Wednesday about the Aaron Sanchez saga, this ain’t science, folks.

No need to spend time on the what’s right/wrong with Marcus Stroman question tonight. Leaving aside the pitches to Matt Duffy and Logan Morrison in the sixth, I thought he had a fine outing, and the numbers generally bear me out, six innings, three earned runs, five hits, two walks, three strikeouts, 94 pitches. Most significantly, he was working generally in the lower regions of the strike zone. If Marcus Stroman had a problem tonight, to me it was with the zone of home plate umpire John Tumpane, who seemed very reluctant to call some of the low strikes thrown by Stroman. A good gauge of whether the ump is a problem is how many times Russell Martin points with his glove at the pitcher in his “good pitch” gesture when a pitch has just been called a ball. It happened a lot tonight, and the squeezing of the bottom of the zone by Tumpane resulted in counts that were less favourable to Stroman than they should have been. Another oddity with Tumpane was the number of times that he seemed to be going into his strike call, and then backed off, lending an air of uncertainty to what should be a decisive act.

Gifted with the two-run lead before he took the mound, Stroman pitched around a leadoff single by Logan Forsythe in the first. He gave up a rather soft run in the second when he walked Logan Morrison with one out, then gave up a looping double to right by Nick Franklin, with Morrison stopping at third, until he could score on Corey Dickinson’s groundout to second. He gave up the tying run in the third, an even softer one precipitated by another Devon Travis error at a crucial moment. Logan Forsythe led off, again, with a grounder up the middle for a base hit. Kevin Kiermaier, who runs like the wind, and always hard, then hit a medium-slow bouncer to Travis’ left. With Kiermaier running, the obvious play was to first. Who has played baseball and not heard “take the sure out”? But Travis’ eyes were bigger than his stomach, he thought he could start a double play, despite his awkward orientation toward first, and in his haste dropped the ball. E4, runners on first and second. Another Travis error that hurt, I might add.

I said above that Stroman’s only problem tonight was being squeezed by the umpire. Well, not quite. Besides the obvious damage caused by Travis’ error that was precipitated by a bad decision on the fielder’s part, Stroman himself made a bad decision that allowed the run to score. Evan Longoria grounded to short for a fielder’s choice on which Forsythe smartly advanced to third, now with one out. Then Brad Miller bounced one back to Stroman, a little on the first-base side. Take the sure out? Not our guys. Without even looking at third, Stroman rushed an ill-advised throw to second, hoping for a miracle double play, just like Travis. He got Longoria but there was no chance for a throw to first, and Forsythe checked, then broke for the plate as soon as Stroman let fly to second, scoring easily. The obvious play, the mature play, was to check Forsythe at third and take the out at first. But no, a second run batted in, this time on a fielder’s choice/no out recorded. And the game was tied.

It stayed that way until the sixth. Stroman retired six of seven he faced in the fourth and fifth, walking only Logan Forsythe (good job, that!) and the game remained tied going to the bottom of the sixth after the Jays had failed to capitalize on their base-runners against Danny Farquhar in the top of the inning. After fanning Brad Miller to lead off the sixth, Stroman made the only two (pitching) mistakes he made all night. Matt Duffy slashed a wrong-way double to right, and Logan Morrison followed with a shot over the wall, for a two-run Tampa lead. Stroman finished the inning, but departed on the hook for his sixth loss, with Toronto trailing 4-2.

After Kevin Jepsen disposed of the Jays in order in the seventh, Manager Gibbie decided it was time to introduce his new reliever, Francisco Liriano. It did not go well for Liriano. Luke Maile greeted him by stinging a line drive over the little home run porch down the left field line for a home run on a three-two count in an 8-pitch at-bat. By the way, what in the world is that anomaly in the fence all about? What justification is there for having a spot where a ball can be a home run, and yet ten feet to the right the ball hits off the wall and stays in play?

If the lead being extended to three runs wasn’t disheartening enough, what happened next certainly was. Forsythe having already been on base three times, twice with base hits and once on a walk, Liriano was finally able to do what Stroman hadn’t been able to, get him to make an out, but it didn’t stick. He hit a bouncer to third that Josh Donaldson first mishandled, and then dropped again and kicked around when he tried to pick it up to make a throw. The soccer pitch is the next gate over, Josh. Forsythe scored from first when Kevin Kiermaier hit a shot to right centre, a double that he ran into a triple with the help of Michael Saunder’s errant heave that missed two cutoff men. With Kiermaier’s speed, he no doubt would have made third anyway, but I still have to ask, yet again: why is Saunders in right and Upton in left when Bautista is the DH? Moreover, why are we kicking the ball around in a pennant race?

Having helped the Rays to two more runs, the Liriano experiment was over, for tonight, in any case.

It was Ryan Tepera’s turn to try to contain the feisty Rays, who, by the way, despite trailing badly in the East, have one of the best second-half records in the majors, and he didn’t do a lot better than Liriano, though he did get out of the inning eventually. Tepera, now that it’s September, can presumably leave the keys to the Buffalo Shuttle home on his night table and unpack his suitcase for once. He started well by striking out Evan Longoria on a foul tip, but Brad Miller proved another matter as he took Tepera deep to right for an 8-2 lead. Matt Duffy flied out to centre, Morrison got himself plunked—serves him right, after the dinger off Stroman—just joking—and then Nick Franklin fanned to bring the mess to a conclusion, the game now out of reach.

The Rays decided it was a good time to debut the latest knuckleball convert, Eddie Gamboa, a 31-year-old Californian who has been reinventing himself in the minors to get one last shot at the show. Sound familiar? Gamboa had an adventure in his one third of an inning. He got his first strikeout, gave up his first run and his first hit and his first two walks, and left the bases loaded for the first time, for Brad Boxberger, who came in and retired the two hitters he faced, Tulo and Upton, though Tulo’s force-out grounder to third plated Donaldson, who had led off with the single.

That run made it 8-3 and that’s how it ended. Danny Barnes, part of the seven-man contingent of reinforcements from Buffalo, mopped up for the Jays in the bottom of the eighth, with two strikeouts, a most prudent base on balls to Forsythe, and an infield popup by Kiermaier. He looks good. With his earlier callup, is he eligible for the playoffs? Ryan Garton retired the dispirited Jays in order in the top of the ninth to close it out.

My dad, who grew up on a farm outside Detroit and was born two centuries back (actually, in 1897, but it’s kind of funny to think of it as the second century ago), had a wealth of folksy expressions that he employed whenever they were called for. He announced that he was going out for a walk by saying that he was “going out to blow the stink off”. Which usually meant adding to the local funk in Detroit by smoking one of his big nasty cigars, but that’s beside the point. I hope the Jays all went for a nice long walk after the game tonight, because they sure had a lot of stink they needed blown off!

Let’s put this one behind us and look forward to Marco Estrada on the mound, and an all-around better performance, befitting the leaders of the American League East.