Long Ball Stories

ALCS GAME FIVE, CLEVELAND 3, JAYS 0:

THE KID WAS ALL RIGHT,

THE JAYS, NOT SO MUCH!

Let’s be clear on this right from the start: I had my hopes that the Jays’ offence would suddenly wake up and stomp all over this young Ryan Merritt’s tra-la-la, and that our boys would be off to Cleveland for game six on Friday night, for another go at Josh Tomlin, but I wasn’t really expecting it.

Hoping for a win, sure, but beating up on a rookie pitcher whose utter lack of experience meant he had no business starting an ALCS game? Why would they, when they’ve faced similar circumstances a dozen times before in this maddening season, and have almost always been stymied by the upstart, whoever he might have been?

I can’t think of a worse set of circumstances than Toronto going into a must-win game against a pitcher they had never seen, and carrying the weight of expectation of an entire nation on their backs. Over the last two years this team has on many occasions shown a remarkable ability to rise to the challenge and come through in dire circumstances, but it has also, especially recently, shown a frustrating tendency to come up flat at the worst time.

Thus it was today, as the Jays took the field behind Marco Estrada, hoping to consolidate the gains they made yesterday when they temporarily, anyway, derailed the Cleveland locomotive’s drive to the World Series. Needing a win to extend the season, the team had pushed all the right buttons to turn in a crisp and commanding performance. Could they do it again today? The auguries were all there, to be sure, but sometimes the damned entrails of the damned birds just flat out lie.

Not to belabour the obvious, but giving the ball to Ryan Merritt today in game five of the LCS was the ultimate proof of the chaos into which Cleveland’s starting rotation has descended in the course of this post-season. Having started the LDS short-handed already, they benefitted from great performances from the three established starters they still had, who over the season had in fact been their one, four, and five starters, to sweep the Red Sox. In a five-game series they would have been in immediate difficulty if the Sox had even extended the series to four games.

Then on the eve of the LCS came the unbelievably unlucky/stupid injury to Trevor Bauer’s finger that reduced the team’s starters even further, to Corey Kluber, Josh Tomlin, and Mr. Mangle. The first two pitched well enough in Cleveland to beat a hitting-challenged Jays’ team, despite Manager Terry Francona having to move up Tomlin’s start in place of Bauer. Then came Monday night’s gore fest, when the Jays on home ground couldn’t light up a succession of Cleveland relievers. Tuesday Kluber was mediocre on short rest, and Toronto won handily, and today with Tomlin not ready to go again Francona was left looking under rocks to find a starter.

We may never know if it was dumb luck or if Francona’s crazy like a fox that the lot fell on Ryan Merritt, a twenty-five-year-old left-handed rookie with all of one start, four appearances, and a grand total of 11 innings pitched in the major leagues. Hell, Merritt was drafted in the sixteenth round in 2011, exactly the 488^th name to be called in that draft.

But it was neither dumb nor crazy that Merritt’s instructions were: do not throw a fast ball for a strike, and the only time you’re throwing a pitch on the inner half of the plate it’s to hit somebody, and don’t hit anybody. And it was utterly to Merritt’s credit that whatever other merits he may have (sorry, just once, okay?) he sure can follow directions.

Before Merritt even got to the mound he had become the beneficiary of one of those weird and unlucky first-inning runs that seem to have been allowed by the Jays far too many times already this season. Marco Estrada retired the first two hitters on nine pitches, Carlos Santana fouling out to Russell Martin on a full count, and Jason Kipnis hitting a 1-1 fast ball admittedly on the nose but right at Zeke Carrera in left. The fast ball Kipnis hit clocked in at 88, typical velocity for Estrada. The fastest fast ball Merritt threw in the bottom of the inning clocked out at 86 plus. Slower than Estrada. Just sayin’.

But then with two outs Francisco Lindor, who’s both good and lucky, completely mis-timed a curve from Estrada, made bad, late contact with it, and looped a soft little liner over Donaldson into left for a base hit. That brought Mike Napoli to the plate, and, like Kipnis, he hit one on the screws to left. Lucky it stayed in the park as it shot over Carrera’s head and banged high off the wall. The ball came off the wall and right back to Carrera, so fast that Lindor had already been stopped at third. But Carrera tried to bare hand the ball off the wall and it spun out of his hand and bounced away, allowing Lindor to crank it up again and score the first run on Carrera’s error. Jose Ramirez followed with a routine grounder to second for the third out, which made the Cleveland run unearned.

No problem, really, because, well, you know, the rookie on the mound and all . . ..

Thirteen pitches later, the Clevelands were back in the dugout, and the Jays were in deep doo-doo already. Jose Bautista rolled over on a cutter and grounded to short. Josh Donaldson rolled over on a cutter and grounded to second. Just for variation Edwin Encarnacion took a 71.8 mph curve ball for strike three. I think Edwin may still be waiting for that pitch to reach the plate. You can come in now, Edwin. The inning’s over. The game’s over. The season’s over. Worse, you may never hit for us again. Sob.

It really helped the Jays’ cause that Estrada settled down in the second and fanned Lonnie Chisenhall and Tyler Naquin on either side of an easy fly ball to centre by Coco Crisp. 14 pitches in the second looked like he might be able to keep the overall pitch count down to a reasonable, clocking in at 35 for two innings.

It didn’t help the Jays at all that Troy Tulowitzki led off the Jays’ second against Merritt with a short pop fly to right, and that he was followed by not one, but two, called third strikes, on Russell Martin and Melvin Upton. On both hitters Merritt threw a terrible 1-2 change up, to Martin low and way outside, to Upton down the middle but in the dirt. Then he threw his roughly 87 mph fastball for strike three, to Martin up but on the outside corner, to Upton near the bottom of the zone but right down Broadway. What were they expecting on a 2-2 count, another waste changeup? I wish I could get into the minds of these guys to figure out how they’re thinking. Merritt didn’t have to worry about knowing what the Jays’ hitters were thinking; he was already in their heads! Six up, six down, and no hope in sight.

Marco Estrada is a fly-ball pitcher, so he’s going to give up a home run here and there. You just hope that there’s nobody on base when somebody connects. That’s what happened in the third. Carlos Santana lined one into the stands in right with one out and nobody on. After Kipnis flied out to right, Lindor hit another single to left, but was stranded when Estrada caught Mike Napoli looking for his second strikeout of the inning, and fourth of the game.

The Jays were just down 2-0, on the homer and the unearned run, but it might as well have been ten as the clocked ticked and Merritt survived yet another inning. Zeke Carrera led off the home third by putting a charge in one to deep left for Crisp, but it hung up and stayed in the park. Then, more of the same: Kevin Pillar grounded out to Ramirez at third, and Darwin Barney popped out to the shortstop. Three innings, nine up, nine down, 31 pitches. Tick, tick, tick.

Estrada continued to induce soft contact in the Cleveland fourth, popping up Ramirez and Naquin, and fanning Chisenhall again. Oh, except for little Coco Crisp, if you can believe it, who’d been marking time with Oakland as a part-time platoon outfielder until Cleveland acquired him at the trade deadline and turned his world upside down. With two outs Crisp timed a 2-2 changeup and drove it over the wall in right, the second solo home run by a left-handed hitter off Estrada in the game. The Clevelands now held a 3-0 lead, and the sense of desparation in Blue Jay Land was growing stronger by the minute, or by the out, to be more accurate, as their aspirations for 2016 dribbled away in a series of ineffective and feckless plate appearances.

In the bottom of four, Bautista flew out to centre. Donaldson finally broke the ten-out string and the hitless day by lining a single into left centre. Edwin Encarnacion then had an at-bat that could serve as a microcosm for every game the Jays lost this year because of lack of hitting. Merritt threw a cutter, a changeup, and a cutter, all wildly outside the strike zone, running the count to 3-0. Then Edwin took not one, but two waist-high batting-practice fast balls on the outside corner to go to a full count. Then the rookie threw him a changeup in the same location, and he grounded into a double play. Four innings, twelve up, twelve down, 44 pitches. Tick, tick, tick.

Just for a moment there, in the fifth inning, it seemed like the clock stopped ticking. First, Estrada breezed through Cleveland on nine pitches; after five innings his pitch count was 79, low enough to stay around for a while, if his mates could get something going. In the Jays’ half of the fifth, Tulo hit one deep to left field, but like Carrera’s in the third, it stayed in the park. Russell Martin blooped a single into right, and then Terry Francona threw a little surprise at Toronto, immediately popping out of the dugout to yank Merritt. Or was it a surprise? Merritt had done a great job for him, and he really didn’t owe a raw rookie any consideration for leaving him in to qualify for a win. Besides, Francona knows the horses in his stable of relievers very well, and he had a good notion that he had enough fresh ones to take over from here.

He brought Brian Shaw in, to face Melvin Upton, and John Gibbons responded by pinch hitting the left-handed Michael Saunders for the right-handed Upton. On a 1-2 pitch, Shaw made a mistake to Saunders, leaving a cutter up in the zone, right down the middle. Unfortunately for the Jays, Saunders only lined it into centre for a single, instead of hitting it out of the park. Shaw recovered, though, and fanned both Carrera and Pillar, leaving the two runners on, and snuffing what was, basically, Toronto’s last real opportunity to climb back into the game.

Don’t get me wrong. This wasn’t like game two, when we only had one base runner after the third inning in the 2-1 loss. Cleveland only retired the side in order in the seventh, and there was a glimmer of hope wasted in both the eighth and the ninth, but after the fifth Toronto never had more than one base runner per inning.

Shaw stayed in to start the seventh and got Darwin Barney to ground out to short for the first out, then gave up a single to Bautista. Enter Andrew Miller, who threw one pitch to get the last two outs: Donaldson grounded into a double play to erase Bautista. Miller stayed on in the seventh and retired the side on twelve pitches.

He came back out for the eighth to face Dioner Navarro hitting for Saunders. Navarro, who so far had the only Jays’ hit against Miller in the series, did it again, lining a sharp single into left field to give Toronto a leadoff base runner. Now here’s where I get upset with the way John Gibbons runs his team, nice guy, funny guy all very well, but why doesn’t he ever act?

The team is down 3-0 in the eighth inning of an elimination game, and the slowest—by far—guy on the team leads off with a base hit. Your team has devoted a full roster spot to Dalton Pompey, for the sole purpose of pinch-running for a Dioner Navarro in a situation like this. You haven’t had the opportunity or reason to use him yet in the first four games of the series. This is the second-last inning of what may be the last game Toronto plays in the series, unless the team avoids outs and scores runs. When else would you insert Pompey for Navarro??

Surely, with possibly only one inning left in the season, there’s no point in worrying about taking your spare catcher out of the game; you’ve already hobbled your options by inserting him as the designated hitter. And no one is suggesting here that this was a steal situation, when the team needed three runs, not one. The only point is to have someone faster than Navarro (the peanut vendor? Gregg Zaun?) on first so that what happened next would not have happened! Because after Zeke Carrera struck out, Kevin Pillar hit a hard ground ball into the hole between third and short, that Francisco Lindor barely got to, and had absolutely no play on, to first base. A gold-standard infield hit, except . . . Here came Navarro, bless his heart, chugging into second like Tommy the Tugboat. There have to be twenty-two players on the Jays’ LCS roster who would have beaten Lindor’s throw to second. But none of them, specifically Dalton Pompey, was running. Instead of having runners on first and second with one out, we had a runner on first with two outs. A promising rally was now just a blip to be overcome, and Miller did just that, getting Darwin Barney to hit a short fly to left for the third out.

Not to beat a dead manager here, but did anyone else notice that even with two outs it would have been appropriate for Justin Smoak to have hit for Barney? After all, Ryan Goins was still on the bench, and able to take Barney’s place at second for the ninth inning. Sure, Smoak was as likely to strike out against Miller as Barney was to fly out to left, but Smoak had at least a chance of getting hold of one and hitting it a long way.

So—last word on this—here’s my best case scenario: Pompey runs for Navarro, Pillar is on with an infield hit, Smoak hits for Barney, and, miracle of miracles, hits one out to tie the game. That could have happened in my world, but not in Gibbie’s, no sir.

With the help of the one-pitch double play, Andrew Miller kept the Jays off the board for two and a third innings on only 21 pitches. It was no surprise that Terry Francona turned to his closer, Cody Allen, to get the last three outs of the American League season.

First up against Allen was Jose Bautista, who pulled a 3-2 fast ball that Allen threw right down the middle into the left-field corner for a double. One more time the hopes of Jays’ fans everywhere rose from the ashes: in possibly his last at-bat ever for Toronto, Joey Bats had shown the way, and somehow the great sluggers who followed him to the plate would pull this thing out, and send the Series back to Cleveland. But Bautista never strayed from second, and spent his last inning as a Blue Jay (we assume) watching Josh Donaldson strike out, Edwin Encarnacion strike out, and Troy Tulowitzki foul out to the first baseman to end the game, the series, and Toronto’s season.

But it would be completely unfair to end on the note of hitting futility, without addressing the noble souls who took up Marco Estrada’s cause on the mound for Toronto.

Not to skip over Estrada’s efffort today. Repeating a sentiment I’m really sick of, Estrada, of course, pitched well enough to win. He went six innings, gave up two earned runs on five hits, walked none, and struck out seven, on a tidy 92 pitches. It was a microcosm of Estrada’s season that he received so little support from the Jays’ offence. How did he compile the metrics he did this season while having a record of only 9-9? Then in the playoffs he was 1-2, but his ERA was 2.01 over 22.1 innings. I mean, what the hell?

In fact, this is a good time to mention that the Jays lost this ALCS in five games while giving up only twelve runs, an average of 2.4 runs a game. We needn’t really say another word about how and why the Blue Jays didn’t make the World Series this year. Not only Estrada, for whom the team scored zero runs in fourteen innings, but Jay Happ and Marcus Stroman, for whom they scored one and two runs respectively in their starts, are all clearly owed dinner by Aaron Sanchez, who feasted on five runs in the Jays’ only win in the series. Given Sanchez’ relatively impoverished contract status, though, I’d think that Swiss Chalet might be a wise budgetary choice for Aaron’s treat.

So today Brett Cecil followed Estrada and pitched the seventh, retiring the side on thirteen pitches with one strikeout. It’s certainly representative of Cecil’s entire Toronto career that what was probably his last, and a very effective, relief appearance for the Jays (like Bautista and Encarnacion, not to mention Michael Saunders, Cecil is headed for free agency this fall) went largely unnoticed by the fans in the ball park, and, I’m sure, the rest of the country in the Blue Jays’ diaspora.

Joe Biagini also retired the side in order in the eighth while striking out one, and he did Cecil a little better, taking only ten pitches to do it. Though there is absolutely no question which team will remain Biagini’s home for the foreseeable future, we won’t know until well into spring training next year whether this was his last relief appearance for Toronto. The plus side of Biagini transitioning into a starter role would be the addition of another hard thrower with great stuff, a twin peak, so to speak, for Aaron Sanchez, to complement the more refined and versatile skills of Estrada, Happ, Stroman, and Francisco Liriano. The minus side, of course, is that Biagini’s would be the sixth name in a very strong mix, and how does that work itself out? A season starting in Buffalo might be in the offing for big Joe, but how do you keep him down on the farm . . . ?

In some ways Roberto Osuna is like a chess player, who sharpens his skills by solving set problems. The difference is that Osuna sets the problems for himself, and then wiggles out of them. Today was no different when Gibbie sent him out to keep Cleveland in sight before the bottom of the ninth.

This time he gave up a ground-rule double to Francisco Lindor, who finished up a fine series with another productive three-for-four night, though the fluke RBI single in the first still rankles. With Osuna sufficiently aroused by the ringing crack of Lindor’s bat, he managed to keep Mike Napoli in the park, though Napoli did hit the ball right on the nose and drive it on a hard line to Kevin Pillar in deep centre. Credit Pillar with a strong throw in to keep Lindor at second, and thus keep Cleveland from adding a fourth run when Jose Ramirez followed with a ground-out to second which only moved Lindor to third instead of scoring him. Osuna then fanned Lonnie Chisenhall to end the inning on his eleventh pitch.

So Cecil, Biagini, and Osuna threw 34 pitches, gave up one hit, and struck out three in three innings of work. In the five games of the ALCS, Osuna, Biagini, Cecil, and Jason Grilli, the only relievers who worked, threw 12.2 innings, gave up no runs and allowed only one inherited runner to score, on five hits, two walks, and twelve strikeouts.

In short, the Toronto pitching was outstanding in this series. Full credit to the starters who went deep enough in the five games to preserve the relievers, and full credit to the four relievers who were in effect perfect in fulfilling their roles.

As for the bats, back to the woodshed you go, where a nice big chipper is waiting to turn you into garden mulch. The order for new, better bats for next year is already being written up.

Thus the 2016 ALCS: Cleveland is on to the World Series, having won seven of eight post-season games, and being full measure for the ALCS win. The Blue Jays scatter to the winds for the off-season, after winning the Wild Card game, sweeping the Rangers, and being brushed aside by Cleveland. Winning five of nine is normally a good thing, but just wasn’t good enough for our contact-challenged sluggers in this 2016 postseason.

Wait ’til next year! What’s the temperature in Dunedin tomorrow?

Look at it this way: we won the wild card game, right? Sudden-death, one-and-done and all that rot. But, we won. This afternoon we won another wild card game: win and you play on, lose and you’re done. Now we just have to do that three more times. Gulp.

On the other hand, if I were in the Cleveland camp right now, I wouldn’t be feeling all that positively, and the reasons are, first, that they’re hardly hitting better than we are, and, second, their pitching, both starters and bullpen, has achieved well above reasonable expectations, and it becomes increasingly questionable whether or not the Cleveland management is going to be able to keep patching together a starting rotation with little more than spit and bailing wire.

Consider tomorrow’s game, which the Jays’ win today has put on the menu. The great Cleveland rotation from mid-season is now down to two starters: Corey Kluber and Josh Tomlin. The mangled Trevor Bauer has to be out of commission at least for the rest of this series, however long it may go. Kluber pitched today on three days’ rest and didn’t blow anybody away, throwing five innings on 89 pitches and taking the loss. Josh Tomlin, who pitched game two, isn’t being asked to pitch on the same short rest as Kluber, so he is pencilled in for a possible game six in Cleveland. Terry Francona has to find a starter for tomorrow. Pitching Kluber today was a bit of a gamble: if Cleveland won for the sweep, the staff would have a full week to recover, which would bring Bauer, probably, and Danny Salazar, possibly, back on line. If they lost, they’d be up 3-2, with only Tomlin and question mark left in the tank.

But they had to get past Aaron Sanchez and a restive Blue Jay team, playing in front of even more restive fans, to earn a respite. Today was the last stand for Toronto in so many ways. Yes, first, it was the game we had to win to avoid the sweep. But it was also a chance for redemption after the overwhelming embarrassment of Monday night’s loss to a string of Cleveland relievers.

Although you had to be concerned about the Jays’ return to the hitting doldrums seen in the first two games of the series, and it’s never good to start out in the hole, losing both games in Cleveland hardly seemed fatal. After all, they’d experienced even worse last year in the division series against Texas, by losing both games at home in a five game series, before prevailing. They even made a series out of last year’s ALCS, coming so close to taking it to game seven, after losing the first two in Kansas City. And they were returning to their home digs in the TV Dome, a venue that has proven especially friendly to them in big games over the last two seasons.

Moreover, the Cleveland pitching was in apparent disarray. After two serviceable starts in Cleveland against Toronto bats gone silent again, there was a major question about their game four starter, not to mention the fact that it was altogether uncertain as to whether Bauer would be able to make a go of it in game three. There’s no need to reiterate the gory details (for once the adjective is, if anything, understated here) of last night’s 4-2 Cleveland win. The fact that the Jays could only score two runs in eight and two thirds innings off a string of six Cleveland relievers speaks for itself; but the angst created by this sad exhibition hung over the stadium like a bad smell at the end of the game.

So the Blue Jays needed to come up big, stop their own bleeding, and give themselves at least a ghost of a chance in this series that had suddenly gone so very, very wrong.

And if anything has gone right for Toronto in the last week, it has been the way manager John Gibbons and his pitching coach Pete Walker have manipulated the pitching rotation. Faced with the need to control as much as possible the number of innings pitched by Aaron Sanchez, yet recognizing that he has become without question their stopper, their best chance in a must-win game, it had to have been some sort of divine providence guiding the decisions that led to his being ready to start today.

The fact that he would face off against Cleveland’s only recognizable ace, Corey Kluber, was of little concern. The Jays had, after all, let him off the hook in game one of the series, and in some respects he was fortunate to have survived the first inning. Today this less-than-intimidating presence would be taking the mound on only three days’ rest, an almost unthinkable assignment in the contemporary game.

Can you imagine we’re talking about the same sport that saw both Bob Gibson and Mickey Lolich start three games each in the 1968 World Series? And both pitch three complete games? With the same ERA of 1.67? And Lolich, in one of the greatest pitching performances in World Series history, pitch a complete game win in game seven, giving up one run on five hits, on October tenth, after pitching a complete game win in game five on October seventh? Denny McLain, who won 31 games in 1968 and entered the series as the team’s number one, had started games one, four, and six, but went one and two. The only reason he started game six on the same rest as Lolich had for game seven was that he didn’t get out of the third inning in game four, which ended up a 10-1 rout by the Cardinals.

Back in 2016, when iron horse pitchers are just a dim memory, neither team managed much of a threat in the first two innings, but the Jays touched up Kluber with a two-out single by Edwin Encarnacion in the first, and a one-out single by Michael Saunders in the second. On the other hand, Sanchez got the results that the Jays were looking for through the first two. Three strikeouts and three ground ball outs, with only a leadoff walk to Mike Napoli in the second inning. If anything, he had a bit too much movement, resulting in a higher number of pitches outside the zone, especially in the first inning, when he went 3-2 on two of the three hitters. But after the walk to Napoli in the second, he set Cleveland down on just twelve pitches.

The first threat came from Cleveland in the top of the third, and from an unlikely source, as Tyler Naquin drove a ball into the alley in left centre to lead off with a double. Robert Perez nicely bunted Naquin to third and a Cleveland chance to take the early lead again was staring Toronto in the face. In an unusual move (for him) Manager John Gibbons brought the infield in. Normally, Gibbie would concede an early run for an out, trusting in his offence to be able to overcome a one-run deficit. But with his team in such a hitting funk, it was a smart move, and it paid off.

Carlos Santana hit a bullet to the right side. Ryan Goins, on the edge of the grass, was able to snag it before it got past him, the momentum of his reaction to the ball bringing him to his knees. Still kneeling, he stared Naquin back to third and threw Santana out at first for the second out. Back at normal depth, Goins handled Jason Kipnis’ routine grounder to end the inning.

Kluber looked to be getting stronger, striking out Goins and Jose Bautista to start the third, but then two hard shots put Toronto in the lead and showed that the Cleveland ace was hittable after all. He hung a two-two curve ball to Josh Donaldson, who was all over it and deposited it in the seats in left centre. This was the shot we had been waiting for since the beginning of game one, a lightning strike that would give us our first lead in the series. Then Edwin punished a waist-high slider on the outside corner, going with the pitch and driving right fielder Lonnie Chisenhall back to the wall for the third out, but the relief in the stadium, not to mention living rooms around the country, was palpable.

Sanchez came out for the fourth and presented a gift to the Jays’ multitudes, swiftly dispatching the heart of the Cleveland order, Francisco Lindor, Napoli, and Jose Ramirez, on only nine pitches, giving us the shutdown inning we needed after finally scoring the first run of a game for the first time.

Kluber’s fourth inning suggested that the strain of pitching on such short rest was starting to tell on him. He walked Troy Tulowitzki on four pitches. He went 3-0 on Russell Martin before battling him back to a full count, but then lost him on the eighth pitch. Kluber braced up to fan Michael Saunders, but then Zeke Carrera, moved up to seventh in the order to face the righty (and as a sort of reward for the contributions he has made this post-season; who can not see Carrera as a candidate for the left-field starting position next year if Saunders signs elsewhere?) yet again put the ball in play with little fanfare on the first pitch. He lofted an easy little bloop single into centre which Tulo read perfectly off the bat, got a great jump on, and scored easily from second. Though Kluber fought back to fan Kevin Pillar and Goins for the second time, that big 2-0 on the scoreboard was looking pretty good with Sanchez throwing so well.

But Sanchez notwithstanding, this Cleveland team has a lot of grit in it, and the two-run lead lasted only a little longer than the interminable network commercial break, Sanchez helping out as Cleveland cut the lead in half. But the fact that the visitors’ comeback was stopped at one is a measure of the determination of the Blue Jays to reach a different outcome from the first three games of the series. It was also a measure of how much Josh Donaldson means to this team.

This time, though he did get Lonnie Chisenhall to ground out to short for the first out, Sanchez didn’t achieve the desired shutdown-after-scoring result. He walked Coco Crisp, then struck out Naquin, but in the process threw a wild pitch that advanced Crisp to second. Then he threw a 95 mph two-seamer to Roberto Perez on a 1-2 count that Perez must have thought was a nice round vanilla ice cream scoop, waist high over the heart of the plate. He doubled to left centre to knock in Crisp, bringing Carlos Santana to the plate, the cue for Donaldson to take centre stage.

With two outs and the switch hitter Santana hitting from the left side, the Jays’ infield was in a modified shift, with Donaldson playing in what would have been the hole, rather than at straight-up shortstop, as in a full shift for a left-handed pull hitter. Santana managed to make contact with a 2-2 curve ball that broke well outside on him, and lashed it toward left centre, to Donaldson’s left. It skipped once and looked like it was already by him when he dove and pulled it back from the outfield. He leapt to his feet and barely was able to plant before firing it to first, just in time to nip Santana, who, despite his bulk and the fact that he has caught nearly as many games as he has played first base, is pretty fast down the line. The 2-1 lead was preserved, which was important enough, but even more significant to me was the fact that the play broke the back of a dangerous threat posed by the Indians, and was truly their last gasp at the plate.

In his last inning of work, the sixth, Sanchez worked quickly through Cleveland’s dangerous two-three-four hitters, Kipnis, Lindor, and Napoli, on 13 pitches. Given the start in a game that his team had to win, Aaron Sanchez gave his mates six innings of one-run ball on two hits, with two walks and five strikeouts on 95 pitches; he had done his job, and it was up to his mates to pad the lead and the bullpen to protect it.

Terry Francona decided not to risk another inning with Kluber, and brought in Dan Otero to pitch the sixth against Toronto. Although they touched him up for two hits, a rocket off the wall in right that Chisenhall played well to hold Tulo to a single, thereby saving Cleveland a run, and a Michael Saunders single to centre, he held the lead at one, thanks to the unfortunate GPS coordinates Zeke Carrera imparted to the bullet he hit to right field that was right at Chisenhall, and drove him to the base of the wall to reach up and make the catch. Funny that. Zeke hits a soft touch into centre that falls in for a run-scoring single, and then crushes one right at an outfielder, and gets nothing for his pains.

Aaron Sanchez was followed on the mound by Brett Cecil in the seventh, Jason Grilli in the eighth, and Roberto Osuna in the ninth. Did I mention that when Donaldson robbed Santana to end the fifth it was Cleveland’s last gasp at the plate. Well, it was. Sanchez finished up with a clean sixth, making for his last four outs in a row. Then the Indians went nine up, nine down against the relief trio. Cecil got a fly ball and fanned two. Grilli got a fly ball, a grounder to first that Edwin made a nice pick on, and a popup to Russell Martin. Osuna got a grounder to second and two strikeouts. Thirteen batters in a row and four strikeouts, on 46 pitches. Remember way back when, when we all said that the Jays wouldn’t get anywhere with such a leaky bullpen?

While the Jays’ bullpen was stonewalling Cleveland, the offence set to work to try to add a little cushion to their slim lead. In the seventh, with Brian Shaw on for Cleveland, Ryan Goins, hitless for the series so far, fell behind one and two leading off, but Shaw left a 96 mph cutter out over the plate and Goins rifled it to left for a solid base hit. Shaw then committed his team’s first error of the series, and dug a pretty deep hole for himself. Jose Bautista hit a little squibber up the right side, between the pitcher and first. Shaw got to it first, and very energetically threw the ball right past Napoli’s frantically outstretched glove. Bautista was safe at first, and Goins came around to third on the play. In an unusual but not terribly surprising move, Francona elected to put Donaldson on, even though first was occupied, to load the bases for Edwin. Edwin produced for the first time in this series, pounding a grounder right back up the middle and through to centre.

Goins scored easily, of course, with Bautista following, but Donaldson as he rounded second, with the throw going to the plate, suddenly broke for third, forcing Napoli to cut the throw to the plate from Rajai Davis and firing to third, where Jose Ramirez easily put the tag on Donaldson for, oh no, the first out of the inning at third base, as Bautista scored. Those of you who might be wondering if Donaldson had made some sort of blunder probably didn’t notice that, as he popped up from his slide and headed for the dugout, he gave two short, sharp little claps of his hands. He had purposely drawn the throw to third to protect Bautista from being thrown out at the plate. Securing the fourth run to give your team a three-run lead in the seventh inning is clearly a good trade for being thrown out at third.

Mike Clevinger came in to replace Shaw and ended the inning without further damage by getting Tulo and Martin to ground out, even though he bounced one in the dirt that allowed Edwin to move to second with only one out before retiring the side.

Francona left Clevinger, who had been considered a possible starter for this game, in for the eighth inning, and he gave up a fifth run that truly sealed Cleveland’s fate. After he struck out Saunders to lead off the inning, Clevinger gave up two really hard hit balls that produced the fifth run for the Jays. Zeke Carrera swung at and missed the first changeup from Clevinger, took two more for balls, and somehow managed to pull the fourth one, which was on the outside corner, sending a shot into the right centre field alley that ran to the wall, and by the time it was recovered he was on third with a triple.

With one out Cleveland suspected a squeeze play because it was Kevin Pillar at the plate. They threw a pitchout on the first pitch, then Pillar fouled off a four-seamer at the bottom of the zone. The next four-seamer was up and in, and like Carrera Pillar managed to hit it the wrong way, a rocket of a line drive right at right-fielder Brandon Guyer in medium-deep right. Carrera scored easily, and Clevinger should have been relieved that there wasn’t more damage.

So riding behind a fine start by Aaron Sanchez, perfect bullpen stints by Cecil, Grilli, and Osuna, fine power, base running smarts, and scintillating defence from Josh Donaldson, and some clutch at bats, Toronto finally managed to break the horse collar that Cleveland had hung around their necks. They still have a really tough hill to climb, but they do play on, tomorrow afternoon behind Marco Estrada, going up against we-don’t-know whom.

Stay tuned at eleven for further details.

Artwork courtesy of storyboard artist Ed Chee.

To view more of his work please visit   http://www.edwardchee.com

With apologies to the late, great Yogi Berra, who would perhaps not mind the emendation:

It ain’t over till the fat lady sings;

And you ain’t toast till the dinger dings.

Well, Brunhilda’s not on stage yet, but we can hear her trilling scales in her dressing room. And the toast isn’t brown, but the aroma is starting to fill the kitchen . . .

Images, key moments, inconvenient truths: where to begin?

Images: the gnarled hamburger meat that was Trevor Bauer’s pinkie. The blood dripping from the wound, white uniform pants already spotted. Bauer’s face glistening as he left the game, raising his glove to the acknowledgement of a hostile crowd. The ball excruciatingly spinning out of Jose Bautista’s glove, and hitting the wall. Toronto hitters perpetually out at first “on a close play.” The shock on Josh Donaldson’s face as Coco Crisp pulled the horseshoe out of his glove just in time to rob him of immortality. The dazed look of John Gibbons as the Toronto tragedy unfolded in front of him.

Key moments: a leadoff walk to Santana by Stroman. Otero facing down the drama after Bauer’s exit to retire Russell Martin. Napoli finally making contact. Twice. Kipnis going deep on Stroman. Francona going to Allen in the seventh. Napoli advancing on a wild pitch, scoring on a two-out hit by Ramirez. Crisp’s—let’s face it—lucky snag. Zeke Carrera flying around to third to give fleeting hope. Saunders’ wrong-way homer. Miller, dominant to the end.

Inconvenient truths: Three runs in three games. Excellent starting pitching and a near-perfect bullpen dumped at the side of the road by dispirited hitters carrying useless bats. A worse than decimated* pitching staff striking out major league hitters almost at will. The Jays’ only offence provided by the role players at the bottom of the order. Andrew Miller may not be human. The impossibility of hoping for a shutout, every game. The history: of 35 teams that have gone down 3-0 in a seven-game series in major league baseball, only one has ever come back to win, the Red Sox over the Yankees in the 2004 ALCS.

Tonight’s game three of the 2016 ALCS started with a sudden, two-out RBI when Santana scored from first as Jose Bautista tracked Mike Napoli’s drive to the wall, timed his jump, met the ball, but had it escape his glove for a double. The Blue Jays were behind the eight-ball already, with no report yet on whether the hitting shoes had arrived from cold storage. Spoiler alert: they hadn’t.

But the top of the first was quickly overshadowed in the home half by one of the strangest and saddest spectacles that you may ever see in an extremely important professional sporting event. Trevor Bauer had calmly told the workout-day press conference on Sunday that his cut pinkie with its ten stitches was “healed” and wouldn’t bother him in the least.

The rules of major league baseball had a direct bearing on what took place. The relevant rule states:

“The pitcher may not attach anything to either hand, any finger or either wrist (e.g., Band-Aid, tape, Super Glue, bracelet, etc.) The umpire shall determine if such attacment is indeed a foreign substance for the purpose of [the rule], but in no case may the pitcher be allowed to pitch with such attachment to his hand, finger or wrist.”

It wasn’t until Bauer, in full compliance with the above rule, took the mound for his warmup pitches that it was revealed to the world just how bad his injury was. His pinkie was swollen, split along the top of the knuckle, with the split engorged with drying darkened blood. It looked exactly as you would expect a badly mangled finger to look, and in no way “healed”, as he had stated the day before.

Bauer took his warmup pitches and there didn’t seem to be anything out of the ordinary. When the game started he “ernied” Jose Bautista (caught looking), walked Josh Donaldson, which is not unusual, considering he leads the league in walks. (His 109 walks this season was third in the majors, and second to Mike Trout in the American League.) Edwin Encarnacion flied out to centre. But as the inning continued, the cameras started focusing on Bauer’s pitching hand.

First you noticed the spots on his white uniform pants, and that he was rubbing his finger on his uniform. Then it started dripping. A lot. Almost a steady stream. He walked Troy Tulowitzki on a 3-2 count; Tulo was the last batter he faced. Manager John Gibbons initiated the discussion after strolling laconically up to the plate umpire and crew chief Brian Gorman. He later reported that his video crew had called the dugout to tell him that blood was actually running from the wound.

I can imagine how Gibbie might have approached this: “Say, uh, Brian, ya know he’s bleeding pretty bad from that finger, eh? Well, I was just kind of wonderin’ ya know, isn’t bleedin’ on the ball about the same thing as puttin‘ spit on it? Jus’ sayin’, ya know?” Well, as Gorman, Terry Francona, and the trainers gathered around the distraught pitcher, it became pretty obvious that Bauer couldn’t continue,. The camera focussed on Bauer’s glistening face as he tried to hold back the tears while he walked off the mound. The local crazies in the crowd showed a little respect for once, and gave him a bit of an ovation as he walked off, and he waved his glove in acknowledgement. He had retired two batters, walked two batters, and thrown 21 pitches.

So at least one game before he planned to, Francona was forced to manage a “bullpen” day, and without the luxury of having a fill-in starter go three innings or so. First up was Dan Otero, who managed to come in and calmly work through all the pent-up drama of the moment to induce Russell Martin to ground out to second to end the inning.

Before I leave the subject of Trevor Bauer, nobody seems to have noticed the level of cynicism that was displayed by Cleveland’s management in this business. It did not take a medical genius to know that with this injury that Bauer was not going to be able to pitch in this game. I don’t understand why they even tried, because it was pretty clear that the wound would open as soon as he started throwing. The only thing I can think is that the whole thing was an attempt to disrupt the Jays’ preparation for the game–oh, Bauer’s okay, he’s starting, let’s look at the video one more time. Naming someone else to start off a “bullpen day” would have given the Jays the opportunity to prepare for the pitcher(s) they’d actually see.

After the two losses in Cleveland, in the best of all worlds Marcus Stroman would have mowed through the first inning on eleven pitches or so, with a couple of ground outs and a strikeout. Then the Jays would have cashed some runs after the two walks in their half of the first. However, none of this happened, and the pattern of Cleveland scratching out a lead and the Jays not being able to counter seemed destined almost from the beginning of the game to continue.

Despite eventually giving up four runs, one scoring after Joe Biagini had replaced him in the sixth inning, Stroman pitched well enough to have kept the Jays close, which he did until he gave up the lead run in the sixth inning on a home run to right by Jason Kipnis. The gopher ball has been Stroman’s problem in a number of his starts this year, and it was tonight as well, though both Mike Napoli in the fourth and Kipnis hit theirs with nobody on base. Stroman’s line was 5.1 innings, four runs on only three hits (all for extra bases, the Napoli double in the first and the two homers), three walks and five strikeouts on 94 pitches.

Manager John Gibbons pulled Stroman after he walked Napoli with one out in the sixth. Kipnis had already led off with the home run that gave Cleveland the lead. Unfortunately, Joe Biagini wild-pitched Napoli to second, so he was able to score on a single by Jose Ramirez. Biagini then finished the inning with two fly-ball outs to centre.

No matter how this series turns out, and, at the moment, it is looking pretty grim, not only will the Toronto starters not be to blame, but the bullpen has been spectacular in keeping the Clevelands in check, theoretically giving the Jays’ hitters a chance to battle back in these low-scoring affairs.

Tonight was no different. After Biagini, Jason Grilli started the seventh, and gave up a one-out single to Robert Perez. After recording the second out, Gibbie brought Brett Cecil in match up with the left-handed Kipnis, whom he retired on a fly ball to right. Cecil then pitched the eighth inning, yielding only a leadoff walk to Francisco Lindor. He tightened the screws after that, fanning Napoli and popping up Ramirez to Edwin Encarnacion in foul territory. Then, with Lonnie Chisenhall at the plate, Francona decided to start Lindor, and he was DOA at second on a strong throw from Russell Martin to Troy Tulowitzki for the tag.

Following his controversial (listen to Gregg Zaun on this issue; on second thought, don’t) pattern of using his closer when his team is tied or behind in a close game, manager Gibbons brought Roberto Osuna in to finish off the game. This almost backfired as Osuna got into trouble and then had to really buckle down to keep Cleveland off the board. After Chisenhall flied out to centre, Coco Crisp singled to right, and then Osuna and the Jays caught a big break. Tyler Naquin hit a gapper to right centre that would easily have scored the speedy Crisp, but it took one hard bounce on the turf and skipped over the fence for a ground rule double, sending Crisp back to third.

(Rule alert, for those who aren’t aware of this: when a ground rule double has been hit, the batter is entitled to two bases, but any base-runner is also only entitled to two bases; a runner on first goes to third, a runner on second or third scores. Crisp, on first when the ball was hit, had to stop at third.)

When Osuna went to 3-0 on Roberto Perez, it looked like the “semi-intentional” walk, intended to load the bases to set up the double play. But then he fought back on Perez, throwing three straight 96 mph fast balls, the first high and down Broadway for a called strike, the second at the bottom of the zone that Perez fouled off, and the third up and in, for a swing and miss. With two down Osuna could focus on Carlos Santana, who jumped at a waist-high four-seamer on the outside half, and pulled it on the ground to the second baseman for the third out.

So it’s the same old story, isn’t it? Marcus Stroman pitched well enough to win and the bullpen shut Cleveland down, so what happened? Well, the Jays’ hitters hopes must have really swelled at the prospect of chewing through a half-dozen Cleveland bullpen arms after Bauer’s inevitable first-inning exit. But it didn’t quite work out.

It would seem that the combination of carrying the huge weight of a prolonged batting slump to the plate and facing a different pitcher every time they hit gave the Jays’ offence just as much trouble as a lights-out starter would have. Oh, sure, they weren’t completely shut down. Michael Saunders surprised with an opposite-field home run in the second inning off Dan Otero, and Ryan Goins’ hard grounder up the middle in the fifth scored Zeke Carrera, who had put a little life back in the ball park by leading off with a triple to the gap in right centre off Zach McAllister.

But Francona’s parade of relievers, who threw eight and a third innings, held things together enough for Cleveland’s scratchy four-run output to prevail. The sequence of Otero, Jeff Manship, McAllister, Brian Shaw, Cody Allen, and Andrew Miller ended up with a combined line of eight and a third innings, two runs, seven hits, one walk, and ten strikeouts. It was just what the doctor had ordered, after he tended to Trevor Bauer’s wound.

Even a leadoff single by Dioner Navarro, hitting for Saunders, was easily stranded by Miller, who retired the next three batters for the save. And, yes, that was Miller in for the ninth: Terry Francona used Cody Allen in the seventh, and then brought in Miller to finish off. Just to keep us guessing.

So our backs really are against the wall. Tomorrow afternoon it’s Aaron Sanchez taking the hill for what is clearly the most crucial game of his career. He will be facing Corey Kluber, starting on only three days’ rest, as Francona starts to scramble to cover for his paper-thin starting rotation. But if the Blue Jays can’t produce a base hit when it matters, Francona could throw Pee Wee Herman and Tiny Tim out there, and it would be all the same. Time for some Blue Jays’ hitters to get crackin’.

Remember the Bosox of ought four!

*”Decimated” is one of the most consistently misused words in the lexicon. Everybody but yer humble scribe uses it to mean slaughtered or destroyed in large numbers, but it’s a word with a much more restricted meaning. It stems from the practice in the army of Ancient Rome of taking every tenth man out of the line to be executed, either as an example for the sake of intimidation, or in punishment for a failed attack. (“Decima”–tenth). If you say that the troops were decimated, that means one in ten was lost, and no more. Just sayin’.

The most depressing thing about watching yesterday’s game two of the ALCS was not that the Jays’ hitters fell like tenpins before the unhittable darts of Andrew Miller, but that I constantly needed to write “g6-3” (ground out to shortstop) in my notes. It doesn’t matter if they can’t hit Andrew Miller, because he can’t pitch every out in the series. It does matter if they can’t figure out a way to stop rolling over on off-speed pitches and hitting easy ground balls to the Cleveland infield.

Francisco Lindor is reputed to be a great defensive shortstop, in addition to his obvious relish at hitting in clutch situations. But so far he hasn’t had to flash his superior glove at all, as our heroes have hit easy grounder after easy grounder right at him.

The worst thing that could have happened to the Toronto Blue Jays in the 2016 ALCS was for their offence to go in the tank again.

Well, it happened in Cleveland this weekend, and all we can do is hope that it’s over, and the bats will venture out of their bat cave when they realize they’re back in the friendly confines of the TV Dome.

Jeff Blair wrote truly on Sportsnet.ca this morning that what the Jays’ hitters need to do is forget about trying to solve Andrew Miller, and focus totally on attacking any Cleveland pitchers not named Andrew Miller, because it’s their failure to create any runs against two run-of-the-mill starters that has made them vulnerable to the overwhelming left-handed slants of Mr. Miller. Hear, hear, Mr. Blair!

If we don’t create conditions which make it unlikely that Cleveland manager Terry Francona brings in Miller, we will be looking at a short, untimely end to this long-awaited opportunity. But if we do put up some runs early against our opponents’ starters, I know this seems obvious, the series is eminently winnable.

Because the Clevelands aren’t exactly tearing the cover off the ball against the Toronto starters either. In fact, consider the combined lines of Corey Kluber and Josh Tomlin, versus Marco Estrada and Jay Happ. Kluber and Tomlin: 12 innings pitched, 1 run, 9 hits, 4 walks, 12 strikeouts. Estrada and Happ: 13 innings pitched, 4 runs, 10 hits, 2 walks, 10 strikeouts. What stands out here is that the only appreciable difference in the performance of the starting pitchers is that ours have given up four runs, theirs only one. In fact, they’ve also given up four walks to only two free passes by our guys, which should have been a boost to our production, but wasn’t.

Marco Estrada and Jay Happ are both fly-ball hitters. As such, they are both somewhat more susceptible to the home-run ball than, say, Aaron Sanchez. If you had asked me, going in, if I’d accept, sight unseen as it were, that is, without knowing what our offence would produce, one solo shot off Jay Happ, and one two-run shot off Marco Estrada, I would jump at the chance, especially if you told me that these two dingers would produce 75 per cent of the runs scored by Cleveland in these first two games of the series.

Toronto’s first inning performance against Josh Tomlin really set the tone for the entire game. Unlike Friday night’s game, when Corey Kluber had to work himself out of a serious jam right away against aggressive Toronto hitters, today the Jays opened the game with three easy ground-ball outs, two to second and one to short.

Tomlin, who got the start thanks to the bloody doins’ at the Bauer Drone Service repair facility on Thursday night, is one of those relatively soft-tossing junk-ball pitchers, the kind whose stock-in-trade is the 58-foot curve ball that good hitters just ignore. Unless they’re in a funk. What’s more, he regularly starts out ahead of the hitters by throwing a batting-practice fast ball right down the middle on his first pitch, a pitch that he should get away with exactly once. To exactly one hitter. But what actually happens to that lame-duck first-pitch fast ball? Either the Jays’ hitters take it, or they lunge at it like a cat after a bird, though less gracefully, and over-eagerly beat it into the ground. Right at somebody.

You’d think that this is an LCS for which both teams had to qualify by showing how they could swing the bat with just one hand. The two offensively-challenged teams produced the three runs scored in the game by the end of the third inning, and after that the hitters were so ineffective that the pitchers for both teams must have been laughing behind their gloves in the dugout between innings. Well, the Cleveland pitchers, anyway.

After Toronto’s meek first inning against Tomlin, Russell Martin did manage to single with two out in the second (another ground ball, let it be noted, that ran up the middle), but he was stranded at first when Michael Saunders was ernied by Tomlin. (“Ernied”: out on a called third strike, in honour of Ernie Harwell, who always said that the batter took the strikeout pitch standing “like a house by the side of the road”.)

Jay Happ had given up his first hit in the opening inning when Francisco Lindor lofted one over Troy Tulowitzki’s head into left on a pitch that broke his bat. However, there were two outs already, and Happ fanned Mike Napoli to retire the side. But in the second, Carlos Santana, leading off, and not carrying a guitar to the plate, did not break his bat on a 1-1 two-seamer that was down and in, and barely lined it over the wall in left for a 1-0 Cleveland lead. A strikeout and two ground outs followed to retire the side.

In the top of the third came the only glimmer of hope we’ve had at the plate in two games. After Kevin Pillar—guess what—grounded out to third, Darwin Barney hit a—guess what—ground ball single to left. When John Gibbons sends a runner with one out you know he’s getting desperate. Gibbie sent Barney with Zeke Carrera hitting, so you get the picture of the manager’s state of mind. Carrera hit a—guess what—ground ball to short, Barney made it to second and Lindor made the out at first. This brought Josh Donaldson to the plate. Donaldson took a four-seamer (87 mph—Tomlin sounds like Estrada) and then reached out and drove a waist-high cutter on the outside corner on a—surprise—line drive into right field and hustled into second as Carrera scored to tie the game. That little rising was more than enough work for the Jays’ lumber on this day; they immediately went back to sleep. Edwin Encarnacion raised some hope by taking a walk on a 3-2 pitch, but the slumping Jose Bautista fanned to strand Donaldson and Encarnacion.

In the top of the third Cleveland “rallied” to take a 2-1 lead and settle the whole affair right then and there. They utilized a walk, a stolen base, a wild pitch, and one legitimate two-out base hit by Lindor to plate the only run that mattered. Happ walked catcher Roberto Perez leading off. Rajai Davis hit a double-play ball to Tulo at short, but, Davis being Davis, he beat the throw to first for a fielder’s choice. Replacing Perez at first with Davis: not good.

The one part of Jay Happ’s game that is problematic is that for a left-handed pitcher he gives his catcher little help if a runner might be going. You could see at home with the angle they were showing how Davis took a one-way lead, and practically pointed to second to signal his intention, while Happ studied him, and then just continued his delivery to the plate. Davis could have walked there. It may not have mattered because Happ wild pitched him to third, so he would have been on second anyway when Lindor hit the RBI single. But, still.

Once again Happ retired Napoli, who did not have a good day, to strand Lindor, but that gigantic, terrifying “2” was up there for all to see, and the countdown was already starting to “Miller time”. (I wonder how Andrew Miller feels about having his name mixed in with the slogan for a really awful, pissy beer?) With three innings in the books, and the way Francona has been bringing Miller in willy-nilly regardless of the inning, Toronto at this point might have been looking at only two more innings to get to Tomlin.

They actually had two and two thirds innings of Tomlin left, but it didn’t really matter. At all. They could no more hit Tomlin than they can Miller. After he walked Encarnacion in the third, Tomlin retired nine in a row, five by strikeout. When he walked Bautista with two outs in the sixth, Francona pulled the plug and brought in, not Miller, but the right-handed Brian Shaw, to face Tulo and possibly Martin. Shaw got Tulo to hit a comebacker to end the inning.

In the seventh Shaw yielded to Miller, who threw two innings on 24 pitches, striking out five of the six batters he faced. Then Cody Allen breezed the ninth, adding two more punchouts on 13 pitches. So, in case you’re not keeping track, from the time Donaldson knocked in the then-tying run until the end of the game, the walk to Bautista produced the only base-runner the Jays had. Tomlin, Shaw, and Miller faced one over the minimum to retire nineteen batters.

The only thing wrong with Jay Happ’s outing, besides the fact that Toronto was unable to provide him any support at all, is that, like his appearance in game two of the LDS, he did let the pitches accumulate, and though he could have gone one more inning, John Gibbons decided to pull him after five innings and 94 pitches. At two runs, four hits, one walk and four strikeouts, he had nothing to be ashamed of.

After the long break since the last game of the LDS, Gibbie took the opportunity to give two of his three major bullpen arms some work, to make sure that they hadn’t gotten too rusty, and, not incidentally, to keep Cleveland from adding to its lead. Joe Biagini pitched the sixth and seventh, gave up one walk and struck out two on 29 pitches. Roberto Osuna retired the side on 13 pitches in the ninth.

So the Blue Jays leave Cleveland with nothing to show for it, and back in the doldrums at the plate. There are three games in Toronto, and we have to win two of the three to stay alive. We need the bats to warm up, the pitchers to stay hot, and the damned Cleveland skunks to stay on the other side of the border. How about calling the border services, to enforce no cross-border hexing? We need to do something, eh?

ALCS GAME ONE, CLEVELAND 2, JAYS 0:

HITTERS STRAND ESTRADA,

LET KLUBER OFF HOOK

Note about team names: In solidarity with Jerry Howarth, Mike Wilner, and the many other Canadian broadcasters who have pledged not to use the Cleveland team name or the term “the Tribe”, I will refer to the team from Cleveland only as “Cleveland”. From time to time I have referred to various teams by the name of the city in the plural, such as, for example, “the Clevelands”. This is a very old usage in baseball reporting, which may go back to the nineteenth century. In order to avoid the static repetition of “Cleveland” I will be using this old form a bit more frequently while covering this series.

Just one pitch. For Cleveland, it was a changeup, down and in, on the edge of the plate, that Francisco Lindor golfed into the first row of seats in centre field, scoring Jason Kipnis, on base with a walk ahead of him. The Lindor homer would produce the only runs of the night off either pitcher, and was the difference in the game.

As for the Blue Jays, you could say that it was also just one pitch that could have changed the entire course of the game. We can take our choice on this one, because it could be any one of the eight pitches that Jose Bautista and Russell Martin did not take for a base hit with runners on second and third in the first inning. Toronto’s best chance, though not their only chance, died early, with Martin’s bouncer to first following Bautista’s strikeout in the opening inning.

After that, watching this game only provided clinical observaton of the scientific hypotheses that, one, it is not a good idea to let Corey Kluber off the hook, and two, you definitely do not want to let Cleveland’s starter turn a slim lead over to the back end of their bullpen after the sixth inning.

Marco Estrada demonstrated in spades tonight why he was a good choice to start the first game of the ALCS in Cleveland. He pitched a complete game, gave up only two runs on six hits, with one walk and five strikeouts on 101 pitches. His only mistake came in the sixth inning, with one out. Two mistakes, actually. He issued his only walk to Jason Kipnis, and then gave up the home run to Lindor. The extra run from the walk might as well have been Mount Everest looming behind K2 to the Jays’ hitters once Andrew Miller came into the game.

Unfortunately, someone forgot to tell the hitters to sweep all the spiders out of the bat rack, and the middle part of the lineup was unable to capitalize on six base runners against Cleveland starter Corey Kluber in the first three innings, five reaching on base hits. After that, Kluber settled in and kept the Jays in check just long enough to benefit from Estrada’s gopher ball to Lindor, and hand the ball over to Andrew Miller.

If the general perception that there was far more pressure on Cleveland to win the first game of the series was extant before today, this morning’s news out of the Cleveland camp made it all the more imperative that they carve out a win behind Corey Kluber.

Since the season-ending injuries to their numbers two and three starters, Carlos Carrasco and Danny Salazar, predictions about the early demise of the team’s playoff hopes have been rife. They were fortunate indeed to get past Boston in the first round behind Kluber, Josh Tomlin, and Trevor Bauer, and even more fortunate that the series didn’t go to a fourth game, because now that the team is facing a seven-game series, the issue of who is available, let alone strong enough, to be a fourth playoff starter has become critical.

Cleveland’s original projection was that the first three would be followed in game four by Mike Clevinger, who hasn’t even been stretched out as a starter, and Manager Terry Francona is referring to game four as a “bullpen day”; a term you don’t really expect to hear used about a game in an LCS. I have no doubt that if Cleveland were to lose two of the first three games, that Clevinger would be bypassed to bring Kluber back on short rest.

But today, on the very day of game one, we hear the news that Trevor Bauer, who was slated to start game two, will have to be pushed back until at least game three in Toronto on Monday, after the travel day. The reason for the delay is hard to credit, and in fact seems to fall into about the same level of strangeness as the long-ago ankle sprain suffered by one-time Blue Jay Glenallen “the Thrill” Hill. For those among you who don’t go back that far, Glenallen Hill, a big, strapping guy with loads of power, had an inordinate fear of spiders. One night during the season he experienced a very troubling nightmare that prominently featured his least favourite creepy-crawlies. Waking in a panic, he leapt out of bed and started stomping around, presumably trying to dispatch his tormentors. Unfortunately, he lost his balance, tripped, sprained his ankle, and had to go on the disabled list.

Funny, huh? How about this: Trevor Bauer, who pitched so well against Toronto to get the win in the epic Canada Day 19-inning marathon, is a great fan of drones. He owns them, flies them, and fixes them when they need fixing. So, the night before his team is to open its ALCS against Toronto, he is working with one of his drones, trying to fix it, and somehow, he’s not saying, at least publicly, he slipped with something sharp and gashed the pinkie on his pitching hand, to the tune of “stitches”, rather than just one stitch. Thanks to this bloody incident at Bauer Drone Services (“you fly ’em, we fix ’em, and mind the blood stain on that chair—it’s fresh!”), Tomlin gets moved up to game two, Bauer (maybe) pitches game three, and now there is uncertainty about the Cleveland rotation for game three as well as game four. Anyone betting against Kluber getting the game four start is really eager to lose money on the deal.

Toronto wouldn’t go into a game facing Corey Kluber with quite the same awe and respect that they would facing, say, a Rick Porcello or a Chris Sale, or even a Yu Darvish. They’d faced him only twice this year, a consequence of the unbalanced schedule in the American League that saw Cleveland and Toronto only meet for a single series in each city. They’d cuffed him around in his shortest outing of the year in Toronto in July, and then he’d held them to two runs over six and two thirds innings in Cleveland in August in a no-decision that Cleveland eventually pulled out late.

And after three Jays’ hitters in the top of the first, it was clear that Kluber would be getting little respect from the visitors tonight. After Zeke Carrera struck out to lead off the game, Josh Donaldson lashed a single into centre on a 2-2 pitch, and Edwin Encarnacion followed, also on a 2-2 pitch, by going the opposite way, pounding the ball over the head of a frantically retreating Lonnie Chisenhall. The ball short-hopped the fence and just died there, without much of a carom, allowing the Cleveland right fielder to get to it quickly and get it back in, holding Donaldson at third.

Surely, Jose Bautista would at least plate the first run of the game. But in an appearance that would set the tone for the rest of the game, Bautista took a suspect called strike on a slider that was down and in, and then swung over two curve balls that dove into the dirt off the outside corner for a strikeout. It would be up to Russell Martin to come up with a two-out base hit, which has been less of a rarity for Toronto since the start of the month. But Martin reached out for another low outside curve ball and tapped it meekly toward Mike Napoli at first for the third out.

For a scoreless game through five and a half innings, it seemed like Kluber’s efforts to keep the Jays off the board sucked up all the oxygen in the stadium, leaving Marco Estrada to toodle along in relative obscurity, doing what he does best: efficiently keeping the opposing hitters off balance and off the bases.

Leading off the bottom of the first, Carlos Santana pulled a little surprise out of the bag for the Blue Jays by steering a bunt down the third base line, which of course was vacant because Josh Donaldson was playing shortstop in the shift. No problem, though. Jason Kipnis grounded into a double play started by Travis, and Francisco Lindor grounded out to Travis to end the inning.

Estrada gave up three hits by the end of the fifth, stranding a single by Lonnie Chisenhall in the third, a single by Lindor in the fourth, and a leadoff single by Chisenhall, his second hit, in the fifth. Chisenhall in the fifth was the only Cleveland runner to advance past first base. Coco Crisp bunted him to second, Tyler Naquin advanced him to third on a comebacker to the mound which Estrada had to play on to Devon Travis covering first. Estrada then calmly threw three off-speed strikes to catcher Roberto Perez, who didn’t offer at any of them, to end the inning.

The great Tiger broadcaster Ernie Harwell popularized the phrase that characterizes a hitter taking a called third strike as “standing there like the house by the side of the road.” Maybe I should coin a usage here for taking strike three. It could be that the ineffectual hitter has been “ernied”, or “harwelled”. What do you think?

On Naquin’s comebacker to the mound, Edwin Encarnation had to try to play the ball, which was eventually handled by Estrada, so Travis had to cover ground quickly to get to first to take the throw from Estrada. As he came off the bag after the out, it was obvious that whatever “bone bruise” they had been treating while he sat out two games in the division series had either recurred, or was significantly worse than they had let on. Travis was hobbling and unable to continue. Ryan Goins came in to replace him for the last out of the inning. At this point it is unclear what the young second baseman’s status will be for the rest of the post-season, but the team management must have had an inkling that this might happen, since they had opted to include Goins on the LCS roster, at the expense of Justin Smoak.

Estrada was through five innings on three hits but only two left on base, with a pitch count of only 59, though no one was noticing, mainly because the attention of most fans was riveted by the spectacle of Corey Kluber dancing around on the mound, dodging bullets and escaping from traps set by the Blue Jays’ hitters.

In the second inning, Kluber got a double-play ball off the bat of Travis to escape after Michael Saunders had singled and he had walked Kevin Pillar with one out. In the third, with two outs, Edwin singled to left and Jose Bautista walked, but Kluber fanned Russell Martin. In the fourth the Cleveland starter got a big boost from Jason Kipnis after Saunders had crossed up the shift and singled to left. Kevin Pillar hit a hard bouncer into the hole off first base that seemed destined for a base hit to right. But Kipnis ranged far to his left, fading back as he went for the ball. He dove, and snagged it when it seemed already past him, leapt to his feet, and fired out Pillar at first. The diving Kipnis had erased a likely first and third with one out, and Kluber was able to end the inning by retiring Travis on a fly ball to centre. In the fifth inning, though, Jays’ fans had to be getting a little worried that Kluber was finally able to retire the side in order: was he settling in? Was that all there would be? After four innings Kluber had struggled to 69 pitches, but he only needed eleven more for the fifth, taking him to 80.

Through five innings Estrada clearly had the best of Kluber. But baseball is a funny game, and the funniest (sorry, in this case not funny) of them can be the low-scoring pitchers’ duel, since it can turn on almost anything. Much like a fight between two unevenly matched boxers, sometimes the wrong guy loses. You can have one fighter miles ahead on points, even with a couple of knockdowns, where the decision is a foregone conclusion, but the guy who’s losing manages to line up one magnificent punch, and wins with a knockout.

While the analogy is not perfect—Estrada and Kluber were not throwing directly to or at each other, obviously—it still serves to explain how Marco Estrada might give up the only runs of the game. Maybe Carlos Santana foreshadowed what was to come as he smashed a one-hopper directly at Ryan Goins in short right field to lead off the sixth. Goins played it like a goalie, blocking and dropping to cover the rebound, though in this case picking it up and firing it to first for the out, rather than smothering it. Estrada then walked Jason Kipnis, his only walk of the game.

This brought up Lindor, who already had one of the four hits to this point off Estrada. On an 0-2 pitch, Lindor went down and in to hit a ball hard to the power alley in right centre. All you needed to know about the hit was what you could read in Kevin Pillar’s back, as he raced over and back for the ball, then, shoulders sagging, slowed and watched it clear for the only two runs that would be scored in the game.

Estrada quickly retired Mike Napoli on a popup to second, and fanned Jose Ramirez, but we headed for the top of the seventh with a sinking feeling in the pits of our stomachs: regardless of how much longer Kluber lasted, we were well within the range of the possibility of Andrew Miller and the closer Cody Allen picking him up without any other bullpen help needed. We would need a quick strike right away, or we were probably looking at the end, well before the end would be played out.

We were encouraged when Kluber came back out to start the seventh inning, but Manager Terry Francona was too smart for the Jays, and too smart for our taste. He let the right-handed Kluber face the right-handed Kevin Pillar. This gave us one last shot at Kluber, which at best would only yield a single run to shorten the lead. And when Kluber got Pillar to ground out to short, his day was over, and so was ours, if we couldn’t create any chances against Miller and, eventually, Allen.

Well, we couldn’t. Francona brought Miller in. John Gibbons pinch-hit Darwin Barney for Goins and Melvin Upton for Carrera. Miller struck them both out, to end the seventh.

For the Clevelands, the Lindor shot was the only damage against Marco Estrada. After finishing the sixth, he gave up Chisenhall’s third base hit in three at-bats against him to lead off the seventh. Coco Crisp sacrificed Chisenhall to second, and then Estrada struck out Naquin and got Perez to fly out to centre.

Ironically, Gibbons sent Estrada back out for the eighth, and he responded with a final three-up, three-down inning on 13 pitches. Carlos Santana popped up, Jason Kipnis flew out to centre, and in an almost Quixotic gesture, Estrada struck out his tormentor Lindor after going to 3-0, throwing 3 straight fastballs. The first was a called strike. Lindor fouled off the second, and he swung and missed at the third.

So for the first time all season, a Blue Jays’ starter pitched a complete game. For the first time in Marco Estrada’s career, he pitched a complete game. In the opening game of the 2016 American League Championship Series. In a losing cause.

Oh, and the Jays’ hitters? The last-minute dramatics? The tying run dying on third? Huh. Josh Donaldson ripped a single to centre off Miller to lead off the eighth and hopes soared. But Miller “ernied” Edwin (struck out caught looking), fanned Bautista, and fanned Martin, Donaldson withering on the vine at first.

Cody Allen threw eleven pitches in the ninth. Troy Tulowitzki grounded out. Michael Saunders struck out. Kevin Pillar grounded out. End of game one of the ALCS, Cleveland two, Toronto no score.

We can take any number of consolations from this game. The Indians absolutely did not beat up on Marco Estrada, and won’t be facing him with a lot of confidence if his number comes up in the series again. Corey Kluber didn’t exactly blow the Jays away; it was rather that they beat themselves for the most part: no need to be intimidated if we face him again. Then again, it’s a seven-game series, and a split in Cleveland at the start would be an excellent result. Then again, the Cleveland rotation is very much up in the air from this point forward, starting with Tomlin replacing Bauer tomorrow afternoon. Then again, Miller threw 31 pitches tonight.

So let’s not get all bent out of shape over this. It’s one game, folks, and Cleveland needs four to win the series. No big deal. Only a shutout in game one of the LCS, that’s all.

Ask me if I feel better now. No, don’t. I have to go pull some blankets over my head and not sleep.

Artwork courtesy of storyboard artist Ed Chee.

View more of his work at http://www.edwardchee.com

“There’s nothing wrong with this team that a nice little winning streak won’t fix”

–Blue Jays’ Manager John Gibbons, in far too many post-game press conferences throughout the 2016 regular season.

Well, how about six straight wins in October? In fact, how about ten straight? Fourteen straight? How about never losing again in 2016? Well, that’s just crazy talk.

But isn’t this starting to feel like a team of destiny? They needed to win their last two games of the season against the Red Sox at Fenway, when the Sox still had something to play for, just to get into the post-season. They needed to win the Wild Card game against Baltimore, and needed to go to the eleventh inning before Ed-wing’s parrot took flight and chased the Orioles out of town. They needed to start fast and finish strong in the ALDS, so that they could rest their weary bones for a few days. They have done everything they needed to do.

Not even the most devoted and optimistic of Toronto baseball fans could have foreseen the achievement of these first six October do-or-die matchups, a streak that came to fruition last night thanks to the courage and talent of Josh Donaldson and Roberto Osuna, both of whom overcame pain and fatigue to rise to the occasion on the most demanding stage in sport, the major league baseball playoffs.

And who among us would ever have guessed the role that the hidden hand of karma might play in the defeat of this very talented but fatally star-crossed band of Rangers from Texas?

Consider that Roughned Odor had supposedly restored his team’s “pride” last May by clocking Jose Bautista in a brawl precipitated by Texas’ need for revenge over the ending of last year’s ALDS. And consider that it was Elvis Andrus, whose defensive meltdown in the infamous seventh inning of game five last year was the real cause of the Rangers’ elimination by the Blue Jays, who earlier tonight seemed to have redeemed himself, with his homer off Aaron Sanchez that cut the Jays’ early lead to one.

Consider, then, that it was this Texas keystone combo, Andrus and Odor, who were sadly at the heart of the messed up play that sent the Rangers home. In the fateful tenth inning it was Andrus who missed the better play on Donaldson at third base (thanks to Gregg Zaun for noticing this) and rushed a poor feed to Odor at second in an ill-advised attempt to pull off an inning-ending double play. And it was Odor who took that feed and unwisely unloaded a bad throw to first baseman Mitch Moreland that allowed Josh Donaldson to race then fly the last five yards home with the series-winning run.

But let us dwell not on the karma, but the courage, because for the Toronto fan, whether watching in Etobicoke, Okotoks, Kelowna, or Iqaluit, this is not a tale of bitter defeat, but of thrilling victory.

First, Josh Donaldson. Josh, who has been playing with a painful hip injury, plus other unspecified injuries, for the latter part of the season. In a quotation that at the same time characterizes the combative and competitive nature of the Jays’ third baseman, and exposes the droll disingenuousness of Manager John Gibbons, Gibbie, when asked what else was bothering Donaldson beside the hip, responded, “I don’t know. He won’t tell me.” Josh, who had suffered through arguably his worst month at the plate of his two-year Blue Jay career in September, not coincidentally the same month that the Jays had swooned to their worst monthly record of the year.

Yes, it was that Josh who went three for five tonight, even though before the tenth his was a curious on-again, off-again performance. It was his awkward, lunging strikeout by Colby Lewis in the first that was sandwiched between Zeke Carrera’s leadoff single and Edwin Encarnacion’s heart-stopping two-run homer that put us on the board and neutralized the small-ball run the Rangers had scored without benefit of a hit in the first off Aaron Sanchez.

Then his ground-rule double in the third scored Carrera, on second with his second solid base hit and a steal. This run crucial because Andrus’ homer in the top of the third off Sanchez, the Rangers’ first hit, had halved the lead Encarnacion had created in the first. Yet, it was hardly vintage Donaldson firepower: he reached for a slider down in the zone and lifted a slicing fly toward the right field line. Nomar Mazara made a valiant sliding effort to get to it as it hit just inside the line and spun away from him, bouncing into the stands. This drove Lewis from the game. Donaldson then scored a fifth run on Edwin’s single to centre that followed off Tony Barnette.

In the fifth Donaldson singled to right, but behind the pitch again, and moved to second when Edwin was walked. He died there when Jose Bautista grounded into a double play. In the seventh, with the Rangers now in the lead, the Jays were best positioned to come back, with their three super-sluggers due up. But Josh was fanned by Keone Kela leading off. Encarnacion and Bautista then weakly elevated pitches from Kela for a quick one-two-three inning for the young fireballer.

But it was in the tenth that Donaldson finally melded his undeniable competitiveness with a real power stroke. The excellent but hard-nosed thirty-year-old rookie Texas reliever Matt Bush had stormed through six straight Jays’ hitters in the eighth and ninth innings, striking out four on only 22 pitches, the loudest contact being a lazy fly ball to left by Darwin Barney. But in the bottom of the tenth, Bush tried to sneak a curve ball past Josh on an 0-1 pitch, down and in but still in the strike zone. Donaldson inside-outed it enough to drive it into right centre. Though the play turned out not to be close, Donaldson stormed into second with a furious dive, with no regard for his hip or other sore spots.

It should be noted with a tip of the cap here that Bush, who took the loss that ended the Rangers’ season, in two and a third innings gave up only the one hit to Donaldson. The Rangers once again elected to put Edwin Encarnacion on to set up the double play and face Jose Bautista instead. The portents were there for a moment of supreme Shakespearean drama: Bush, who had hit Bautista with the pitch back in May that had started the ruckus that ended with The Punch, facing Bautista, who had initiated all the resentment that had festered for the last year, with his death-dealing three-run homer and the subsequent defiant bat flip. Bush won the controntation this time, blowing Bautista away with a 98 mph fast ball on a three-two count. The world, at least the world that lives and dies with baseball, let out its breath with a whoosh.

But it was only the first out, and the last one the Rangers recorded in 2016. Russell Martin, the quintessential composed veteran, was the next challenge for Bush, and if Bush was going to face down Martin, he would do it with his best pitch. He threw eight straight four-seam fast balls to Martin, ranging in speed from 97.3 to 99 mph. Martin fell into the hole at 1-2 while swinging for the fence. Bush missed with two, taking the count to full. Martin fouled off the next two, the second last pitch he saw clocking in at 99. On the eighth pitch of the at-bat, Bush’s 42^nd of the game, the most he has ever thrown for the Rangers this year, Martin managed to make contact and keep the ball in fair territory, the ground ball that the Rangers needed.

But it was a slow hopper to Andrus’ right. Andrus picked it, turned away from third and a possible force on Donaldson, threw the ball to Odor’s feet at second, Odor tried to reach down, pivot and throw as Encarnacion thundered into the bag with a hard but legal slide, his throw pulled Mitch Moreland off the bag at first, the ball dribbled off Moreland’s glove, Josh saw a chance, a really small one, and broke for the plate. Moreland recovered but his throw was off so that Rangers’ catcher Jonathan Lucroy had to go get it and come back. Donaldson dove fearlessly—what injury?—past a lunging Lucroy, swept the plate with his hand, and the festivities began, albeit only tentatively, until the New York review umpires had waved away Rangers’ manager Jeff Bannister’s inevitable but futile appeal, which it turned out was filed only to verify that Donaldson had touched the plate.

Thus the courage of Josh Donaldson on this night. Who could possibly equal what he gave to his team’s victory? Only a preternaturally calm and focussed twenty-one-year-old baseball lifer, a veteran before he was dry behind the ears, a young man who with his family’s approval bet his entire future on the chance of striking lightning and rising from a humble and mundane existence in Mexico to make his fortune in the bright lights of the baseball world. If Josh Donaldson could ignore the pain that had been hobbling him for so much of the last month and rise to the occasion, Roberto Osuna was no less heroic in shrugging off shoulder stiffness to shut down the Rangers, creating the possibility of a decisive tenth for his team.

As we all remember Osuna had been pulled from the Wild Card Game in the tenth inning. He had come in for the ninth in the tie game, and retired Mannie Machado on a comebacker and fanned Mark Trumbo and Matt Wieters. Being in the do-or-die situation, Gibbie sent him back out for the tenth, and he retired Chris Davis on an easy fly to right, but then something was up. Edwin Encarnacion came over and spoke with him, and signalled to the dugout.. The manager with the trainer George Poulis went out and spoke with Osuna. They returned to the dugout with him in tow as Blue Jay World looked on in distress. Luckily for the Jays the survival of their season was placed in the capable hands of Francisco Liriano, who completed Osuna’s task for him and secured the win.

But joy over the team’s advancement to the LDS with Texas was certainly tempered with concern over Osuna’s condition, which was said to involve “shoulder stiffness”. It would be a Pyrrhic victory indeed for Toronto to advance to play Texas stripped of their redoubtable closer, especially in light of the previous loss of Joaquin Benoit.

That the first game of the LDS series with Texas was a blowout was a great boon to worries about the condition not only of Roberto Osuna but the bullpen in general. Jose Bautista’s three-run homer in the ninth that extended the Toronto lead to 10-0 at the time, combined with Marco Estrada’s brilliant eight and a third innings of work, meant that all that was needed from the bullpen was two outs, ably secured by Ryan Tepera on seven pitches.

Friday afternoon’s game was another kettle of fish altogether. And, as the game moved into its later innings and Gibbie, forced to cover for Jay Happ’s abbreviated five-inning start, chewed through his A-list relievers, the question hovered, what would happen if the Rangers closed the 5-1 gap and created a save situation? Was Osuna available? If so, would it be the full-on Osuna, or less, perhaps at risk of further damage?

The eighth inning brought things to a head. Brett Cecil and Jason Grilli had both been used to finish the seventh, as Joe Biagini couldn’t quite complete the two innings that were needed following Happ. After his great work in the Wild Card, Francisco Liriano was the obvious call for the eighth, with the added bonus that as a starter he could easily do two innings again. Except that the back of his head got in the way of a Carlos Gomez screamer through the box which scored Texas’ second run, and the bullpen was down another important arm: obviously Liriano would fall under the concussion protocol, with its automatic processes.

Even though Osuna had been warming up, there was no certainty that he was able to take the ball until he actually came in to the game. A grounder to short by Ian Desmond plated the Rangers’ third run, but Gomez then moved up to second when one of Osuna’s nasty sinkers got away from Russell Martin. This set up an epic confrontation with Carlos Beltran, hitting with Texas’ fourth run at second base. Osuna won that face-off by striking out Beltran. After taking a ball, Beltran fouled off three fast balls and a slider, took a changeup for a ball and a 2-2 count, and then mightily swung and missed at a slider that dropped off the table.

In one of those supreme ironies that so often happen in baseball, Melvin Upton, inserted in left field for defensive purposes in the ninth, misplayed a deep fly by Adrian Beltre into a leadoff double. Upton shied away as he approached the wall, much like Desmond had pulled up on the ball hit by Troy Tulowitzki in game one. So Osuna got to work with the fourth run at second base again. No one else reached base. Dramatically, he fanned Roughned Odor, induced a pop fly from Jonathan Lucroy, and got Mitch Moreland to hit an easy fly to Kevin Pillar in centre to end the game. We worried about Osuna’s condition; yet he threw 31 pitches to get five outs and the save.

Tonight, John Gibbons had to face perhaps the hardest decision of his career as a manager. After the Jays tied the game in the bottom of the sixth on a very tough passed ball charged to Lucroy, Keone Kela had escaped further damage with the help of Nomar Mazara in right field running down Carrera’s drive into the corner. Kela breezed the seventh and then Matt Bush came in and breezed the eighth. In the meantime, after giving up the Moreland double (almost caught by Pillar) that had put Texas temporarily in the lead, Biagini was able to close out the sixth and pitch a clean seventh with two strikeouts. Jason Grilli and Brett Cecil set the Rangers down in order in the eighth.

As is his habit in a tie game, with the zeros mounting on the scoreboard, Gibbie turned to Osuna for the ninth. This wasn’t a tough call. Despite the heavy load two nights before on Friday, he figured on getting one inning out of Osuna, and, as usual, was hoping that the Jays would pull it out in the ninth and relieve him of a harder decision. Osuna’s ninth was perfect, and short: two foul popups and a grounder to second, Osuna covering, on eight pitches.

But the Jays were at the wrong end of the order, and unless they got some effective table-setting from Pillar, Barney, and Carrera, a tenth inning would happen. Bush was too much for Toronto’s eight/nine/one, though, with a strikeout, a short fly to left, and a popup to the shortstop behind second. Bush had retired six in a row on 22 pitches, and now Gibbie was in trouble.

Remaining in his bullpen were Aaron Loup, who’d only be used for a one-out matchup, Danny Barnes, the rookie who’d been added when Liriano went down with the concussion, Ryan Tepera, and Scott Feldman, who seems to have been relegated to long man in a blowout role. The manager could roll the dice with one of the three right-handers for the tenth, and hope they might hold the Rangers. But given the futility of the Jays’s hitters so far against Bush, who would only be replaced by Sam Dyson, there was no telling how many innings they might have to hold.

Or he could lay it all on the line with Osuna, risking all for the sake of keeping the game tied so that the meat of his order could win it in the bottom of the tenth and end the series on the spot. But risking all meant more than this game: if he used Osuna, and the Rangers eventually won, he would have to plan game four’s pitching with not only Osuna but all of his remaining high leverage relievers unavailable.

The manager decided to roll the dice with Osuna, and it paid off in spades. The young bull—when he is shown in closeup taking the sign from the catcher, I’m continually astonished by how his shoulders fill the screen—struck out Jeremy Hoying, who had taken over in right from Mazara. He struck out Carlos Gomez. Ian Desmond flied out to Pillar in centre. Two innings, 22 pitches, 2 strikeouts, and for the second time in two games, in three days’ time, Roberto Osuna had stifled the Rangers beyond one inning of work. If the Blue Jays could pull out the series win right now, the young closer and his mates would benefit from five days of rest before the beginning of the ALCS.

And that’s exactly how it worked out. Josh Donaldson led off the bottom of the tenth with his booming double to right centre, and you know the rest of the story.

I’ve chosen to examine in detail the end of the story, the confluence of karma and courage that brought the Toronto team through to the promised land of the ALCS, and I’ve done so at the expense of the whole rest of the game, so let’s look at the salient points that brought us to the end-game drama.

With all the hype and build-up, it would have been almost too much to ask of Aasron Sanchez that he coolly shut down a Rangers team waiting to break out, and though he battled them all the way, he was, it seemed, over-pumped, too strong, however you want to put it. His fast balls really moved. His breaking balls really moved. When he got into situations where he had to throw a strike, he had to back off so much that he was vulnerable to the long ball. But in the first he walked Carlos Gomez to lead off the game, and Gomez came around to score without benefit of a base hit.

Unlike Sanchez, Colby Lewis pretty well pitched to the projection. That is to say, he pitched two innings and gave up five runs on five hits, two of which were first inning homers. He walked Carrera to lead off the game, struck out Donaldson, and Encarnacion smoked him into the second deck in left in the blink of an eye. He caught Jose Bautista looking, but Russell Martin lined a 1-0 pitch into the bullpen, and the Jays had turned the Texas lead into a two-run deficit.

Sanchez had his only shutdown inning in the second, still hadn’t given up a hit, and had his first strikeout on a vicious curve ball that Mitch Moreland couldn’t touch. Hopes were high for his settling in and pitching a gem, with a two-run lead in the bank.

Lewis matched Sanchez in the bottom of the second and it looked like the pattern was set for a close, low-scoring affair.

At least until Elvis Andrus led off the third with a homer to left, cutting the Jays’ lead to 3-2. But again Sanchez steadied and retired the side in order. It looked all good when Toronto rang up two more in the bottom of the third, and chased Lewis from the game. They combined the Carrera single and stolen base, the Donaldson ground rule double for the first run, and the Encarnacion single to centre off reliever Tony Barnette, who ended up retiring the Jays in order and stranding Edwin at first.

Any bettor would like the odds with Sanchez on the mound and a 5-2 lead after three, but strange things happen in the playoffs, and if things work out according to plan it’s more of a surprise than if they don’t. Sanchez walked Beltran leading off the fourth, got the ground ball from Adrian Beltre to force Beltran at second, but with no chance of a double play. And that brought up Roughned Odor, who after a quiet two and a half games finally found a way to make some noise, and crushed a liner to centre that just kept going. As usual, Pillar turned and raced for the wall, but then just slowed down, shoulders sagging, as it cleared the wall. It was now 5-4, and nerve endings were starting to buzz all over the city. Not to mention that Odor’s shot took a lot of the fervour out of the hearty booing he’d been receiving since the lineups were announced. . . .

As for the home team’s chances of extending the lead, they took quite a dip when Jeff Bannister brought in the soft-tossing Alex Claudio to pitch the fourth. Claudio had been very effective in shutting Toronto down in Game One after they’d jumped out to the big lead. Even after walking Michael Saunders, he got a double-play ball out of Darwin Barney, and only needed eight pitches for the inning.

After Sanchez showed flashes of the brilliance that might have been by fanning Mazara, Gomez, and Desmond, Claudio got one more out before giving up the base hit to Donaldson. Bannister wasn’t giving anyone much rope in this must-win game, so he brought in Jeremy Jeffress, who’s given him some very good outings this year, and who was briefly a Blue Jay. Jeffress walked Encarnacion, but Bautista grounded into a double play, Jeffress throwing only seven pitches to finish off Claudio’s fifth.

Sanchez seemed on a roll when he picked up his fifth and six outs in a row in the top of the sixth, but then he hit the wall, or at least Gibbie thought he had hit the wall. He walked Odor and gave up a hit to Jonathan Lucroy and that was it for his day. The call went out for the reliable Joe Biagini to face the left-handed Mitch Moreland. We might point to trust issues that Gibbie has with certain pitchers. He still had Aaron Loup available for a matchup, and could have gone to Biagini in the seventh if Loup had gotten Moreland out. But Biagini it was, and after fouling off a slider, Moreland got the better of the big rookie, going with a fastball low and away, driving it into left-centre field. Kevin Pillar, pulled around to right, got on his horse, and as we watched him and the ball converge, we hoped, expected, even, another miracle from Superman, and almost got it. But the ball was hit just that much too hard, and too far out of range. It ticked off the end of Pillar’s outstretched glove, Moreland had a double, and Texas had the lead.

But not for long. With one out in the bottom of the sixth, Troy Tulowitzki dropped a fly ball single into right, and that took Jeffress out of the game and brought in Jake Diekman to face Michael Saunders. In turn, Melvin Upton was sent up to hit for Saunders. Upton lashed the first pitch from Diekman into the left-field corner for a double, with Tulo stopping at third. Kevin Pillar was walked intentionally to fill the bases, and Kela came in to face Darwin Barney, whom he popped up in foul territory. But with Zeke Carrera at the plate Kela threw a wild one that ticked off Lucroy’s glove for a rather harshly scored passed ball. Tulo scored and the other runners moved up. Then Mazara made that fine catch on Carrera in right to preserve the tie.

So the Jays benefitted from an overthrown pitch from Keone Kela, still only 23 yet under the spotlight in the LDS for the second year in a row, to tie the score. This led to the bullpen standoff that ended in the tenth with Osuna’s lights-out pitching and Donaldson’s mad dash to the plate, completing the LDS sweep for Toronto.

Even diehard Blue Jays’ fans might have some sympathy for the Rangers as a team, which played so well the entire year yet exited the playoffs in such an ignominious fashion. And it would be hard to gloat over the misfortunes of players like Elvis Andrus, Cole Hamels, and Jonathan Lucroy, who turned in such good seasons only to come up short. Even Roughned Odor might come in for a share of sympathy. Might. A small share. A tiny share, really. Well, maybe not.

But the story of this 2016 ALDS sweep is written largely on the bruised limbs of its true stars, Roberto Osuna and Josh Donaldson. The ALCS begins Friday night in Cleveland, which eliminated Boston Monday evening while we digested our Turkey and reflected on an unbeaten October. In the meantime, let the healing begin!

Artwork courtesy of storyboard artist Ed Chee.

View more of his work at:  http://www.edwardchee.com

Yesterday afternoon we were mesmerized by Marco Estrada’s brilliance. So were the Texas Rangers, and we know how that turned out.

Today Jay Happ, Toronto’s rock (apologies to Toronto’s lacrosse team) mesmerized exactly no one. But at the end of five innings, the Rangers had only one run to their credit, on nine hits (one short of two per inning pitched) and by the end of the game Happ was in position to earn a gutsy playoff “W” for dipsy-doodling out of trouble in each of his first four innings.

Meanwhile, the imposing Yu Darvish, facing Toronto for the first time this season, also exited after five innings, having given up five runs on only five hits.

Fortunately for Happ the Rangers’ nine hits were all of the low and short variety, and none came with runners in scoring position. On the other hand, four of the five hits Darvish gave up were very long, hit very hard, and didn’t come back.

The upshot of Toronto’s four-homer outburst against Yu Darvish, which gave some breathing space to Happ while he extricated himself from jam after jam put up by the Rangers against him is that Toronto returns from the first two games of the division series with an imposing two-nothing record against Texas. The next two games are at the TV Dome Sunday evening at 7:30 and Monday afternoon at 1:00, a perfect time to watch a playoff game while the Big Bird roasts in the oven. (No kiddies, don’t worry, not that Big Bird!)

One week ago today, as we woke with a Blue Jay hangover after David Ortiz had engineered a comeback 5-3 win over Toronto, the way forward was murky and perilous indeed. We could barely hope that the stars would align in such a miraculous way as to salvage our strange and troubling season.

What a Diff’rence a Day Makes was the signature song of the brilliant but little remembered American jazz/rhythm and blues great Dinah Washington. I can hear the plaintive melody of that song as I consider what a difference a week can make in the life of a major-league baseball team, in the lives of its players, and in the lives of its fans.

As an aside, of some interest to sports fans, particularly those with connections to Detroit, like myself, is the fact that Dinah Washington, who, like many blues singers, lived a rather troubled life, was married six times; her last husband, who found her dead in bed in their home in Detroit in December of 1963 with a prescription pill bottle by her side, was Dick “Night Train” Lane, the NFL Hall of Fame defensive back who played for the Los Angeles Rams, the Chicago Cardinals, and the Detroit Lions. Lane was arguably the prototype of the modern defensive back, fast, hard-hitting, and a great open field runner. Lane had begun to serve as her business manager after their marriage earlier in 1963, and the songs of Dinah Washington became the soundtrack of the Lions’ locker room in the five years that Lane played for them.

Last Saturday Jay Happ got a better grip than Eduardo Rodriguez on a wet baseball, keeping the Jays in contention in a game that Boston tied in the bottom of the eighth when Roberto Osuna balked in the tying run, and the Jays won in the top of the ninth by scoring a run without getting a hit.

Last Sunday Aaron Sanchez out-dueled David Price—irony of ironies—and took a no-hitter into the seventh inning and the bullpen managed to cling to a one-run lead as the Jays secured a wild card spot, albeit with a little help from the Atlanta Braves.

After a day of rest, a day when, if the Jays’ players are anything like their fans, no one rested a bit, Toronto scored a thrilling 5-2 victory over the Baltimore Orioles in the American League Wild Card Game, riding Edwin Encarnacion’s three-run game-winning blast in the eleventh inning into a long-awaited rematch with the Texas Rangers, holders of the best record in the American League this year.

Yesterday a five-run outburst in the third inning provided all the runs a brilliant Marco Estrada needed to nail down the first game of the Toronto-Texas ALDS series as the Jays jump-started their title hopes with an easy opening-game win over the Rangers.

Today a quartet of long balls shored up Jay Happ’s gritty, laboured effort to send the Jays off to Toronto with a stranglehold (I should choke—sorry—on that word) on the ALDS, ready to punch their tickets to a meetup with, possibly, the Cleveland Indians, who are likewise leading Boston 2-0 in their series, but heading to Fenway.

How far we’ve come in a week.

Texas and Toronto finished their season series this year way back in May, with the fabled brawl game, the one that included The Punch from Roughned Odor, inflicted on our very own Joey Bats. Yu Darvish made his first start of the season, after missing all of last year and the beginning of this one due to Tommy John surgery, on May 28^th, so memories of Yu for most of the of the Blue Jays would date back to 2014. And it was equally uncharted territory for Darvish facing the Blue Jays.

Just for fun I looked up the last time Darvish faced the Jays. It was in Toronto on July 28, 2014. Here was the Toronto lineup that day:

ss Jose Reyes

lf Melky Cabrera

rf Jose Bautista

dh Dioner Navarro

1b Dan Johnson

cf Colby Rasmus

3b Juan Francisco

c Josh Thole (catching for R.A. Dickey)

2b Muni Kawasaki

Well, that was a different world, wasn’t it? Only three players are still with the organization, and only two of them are on the current playoff roster.

That was fun, but let’s get back to the matter at hand. Darvish briskly dispatched the Jays in the top of the first, Zeke Carrera and Josh Donaldson on easy fly balls to centre, and Edwin on an equally easy ground out to short. Darvish took all of eight pitches to do this, great work, but where were the strikeouts? He was facing three hitters who strike out a lot, and he didn’t fan any of them. By the way, in that game of July 2014, Darvish fanned twelve Jays’ hitters in six and two thirds innings.

Then Jay Happ took the mound against the Rangers, and established the pattern he would follow for the subsequent three innings. Two quick outs, Carlos Gomez on a popup and Ian Desmond struck out, but then Carlos Beltran had an infield single to Donaldson and Adrian Beltre walked (semi-intentional, and not a bad idea, once he

fell behind). Roughned Odor ended the inning by grounding out to Travis at second. One inning and 20 pitches.

In 100 innings this year, Darvish had walked only 31, and given up 12 homers, while striking out 132. In the top of the second he collected one of each, and suddenly the Jays had jumped into a 2-0 lead in this second game of the ALDS. Darvish walked Jose Bautista, then struck out Russell Martin on a 2-2 pitch. Then he went 2 and 0 on Troy Tulowitzki, and Tulo turned on a low four-seamer on the inside corner and rifled it out of the yard to left centre, a lightning first blow for Toronto. Darvish managed to get under the bats of both Michael Saunders and Kevin Pillar, resulting in a popup and an easy fly to end the inning.

The Happ roller-skating show continued in the second. Jonathan Lucroy’s bid for a hit to right was snuffed by a nice sliding catch by Bautista, but then Ryan Rua and Elvis Andrus singled, and the big left-hander had to bear down to strike out Nomar Mazara and Carlos Gomez, both looking, on 93 mph fastballs down and in, which had the Texas bench howling at plate umpire Lance Barksdale.

Darvish got his strikeout pitches working in the third and fourth, punching out two in the third to strand Darwin Barney, whom he had hit with a pitch leading off. In the fourth he gave up a single to Tulo’s suddenly very hot bat, but there were already two away and he fanned Michael Saunders to finish the inning.

For Happ it was déjà vu all over again, as he gave up two singles and no runs in the third, but in the fourth, after getting the first two outs (you know the drill) he gave up the usual two hits to Mazara and Gomez, but this time Ian Desmond followed with a third single, and the Rangers were on the board, the Jays’ slim lead now down to 2-1, with a lot of game yet to play.

Now Darvish was supposed to come in with a shutdown inning, to convince his mates that their target would stay in their sights, and not move on them. But thanks to Kevin Pillar’s quirky approach at the plate, the run they had just scored was neutralized. Pillar swung at a 2-1 pitch so up and so in that if he hadn’t hit it, it might’ve busted his nose. But he swung to protect his nose, and the ball streaked down the line and over the fence in left for a solo homer.

If you surveyed a thousand Blue Jays fans and asked them to name a combination of three players who might plausibly hit solo home runs in the same inning in a playoff game, I’m willing to bet that not one of them would name Pillar. Zeke Carrera, and Edwin Encarnacion, but that’s what happened in the fifth inning of game two of this 2016 ALCS. The funny thing is, none of them were back-to-back. Pillar homered, Darwin Barney popped out to short, Carrera homered, what may have been the most impressive shot of the three, to the power alley in right centre, Josh Donaldson popped out to third, and then Edwin Encarnacion drilled a liner to left that reached the seats might fast. Boring old Jose Bautista grounded out to shortstop, and the assault on Yu Darvish’s fast ball was over.

Needless to say, also over was the first playoff start of Yu Darvish, at 5 innings, 5 runs on only five hits, one walk, five strikeouts, and 84 pitches. Here’s how the Blue Jays started this 2016 ALCS against Texas: they faced the two best pitchers on the Rangers’ staff, Cole Hamels and Yu Darvish. This was their combined line: 8.2 innings, 11 runs, 11 hits, 4 walks, 6 strikeouts, 166 pitches, and 5 home runs. I’m tempted to say “what hitting slump?” but that would be tempting fate . . .

Just to rub it in a little, Jay Happ pitched his only clean inning in the bottom of the fifth, fanning Beltre, Odor driving Pillar to the wall in centre, and Lucroy hitting a lazy fly to right. At 83 pitches, it looked like manager John Gibbons could ask Happ to give him another inning, especially if he could replicate the fifth, but it didn’t work out for them. Ryan Rua rifled a base hit to centre on the first pitch of the inning, and Gibbie came out with the hook.

Happ’s early departure, while it might have been easily foreseen, posed a big problem for Gibbie, since there was no way pf knowing the condition of Roberto Osuna, whether he could pitch at all, and if so for how long. When you’re working your bullpen, you have to work backwards from your closer, and it’s a much bigger puzzle if you’re unsure about the linchpin. And, unlike yesterday, a 5-1 lead is a far cry from the 7-0 lead that Marco Estrada carried all the way to the ninth.

With both starters finished after five, the two bullpens had to cover four innings each. Of course, their goals were the same: Texas needed to keep the Jays off the board so that the game might still be in reach for their hitters, and the Toronto bullpen needed to preserve the lead and close out the game.

The Jays never threatened against Tony Barnette, who pitched the sixth and seventh innings, Matt Bush, who pitched the eighth, and Sam Dyson, the Rangers’ current closer, who pitched the ninth. Barnette gave up one hit in his two innings, Bush yielded one base on balls, and Dyson retired the side in the ninth. If the Jays were going to win this game, their relievers would have to shut the Rangers down.

When Happ was pulled with a runner on first and nobody out, you knew that it would be Joe Biagini first up, as he has consistently had that role in the latter half of the season. In any close game, if a reliever is needed before the seventh, it will be Biagini. Ryan Rua was started by Jeff Bannister, and moved up to second as Elvis Andrus grounded out to second. Mazara popped out to Darwin Barney for the second out, and Gomez grounded out to short for the third out.

Biagini came back out for the seventh, which again is part of the pattern, and given his consistent record, why wouldn’t it be? But Ian Desmond led off with a double, and now he was in trouble: Carlos Beltran moved Desmond to third with a grounder to second, and the Rangers had a runner in scoring position for their best and most reliable hitter, Adrian Beltre. The infield was playing about half-way. If the Rangers made a base-running gaffe, they’d try for Desmond, otherwise they’d trade the run for an out, cutting their lead to three.

Biagini then received a double gift, a slight baserunning hitch by Desmond, and a great instinctive play by Josh Donaldson. Beltre bounced one sharply to Donaldson, who checked Desmond, turned to throw to first, and caught Desmond out of the corner of his eye hesitating before breaking for the plate. That was all the encouragement Donaldson needed. He threw, a little high, to the plate, Martin made a sweep tag, Desmond was called out, and, finally, confirmed out by the appeal process. The lead remained at four, and the Jays’ manager called for Brett Cecil to pitch to Roughned Odor. As when he faced Chris Davis on Tuesday in the Wild Card Game, though, Cecil walked Odor on four pitches, which meant that Gibbie had to bring in Jason Grilli to face Jonathan Lucroy, who popped out to Edwin Encarnacion in foul territory for the third out.

The problem for Gibbie now was that he used Grilli earlier than he had wanted to, and there still were six outs to go. This was the situation for which Francisco Liriano had been sent to the bullpen, and which he handled so well in claiming the win in the Wild Card Game. After Liriano there would only be Osuna, the unknown quantity. After Osuna would be the abyss.

Unlike Tuesday, though, Liriano started out in the hole: Mitch Moreland ripped one just out of Encarnacion’s reach and ended up with a double. Kevin Pillar came up big with a sliding catch of Andrus’ liner to centre, with Moreland holding at second. Liriano walked Robinson Chirinos who was hitting for Mazara, bringing Carlos Gomez to the plate, and bringing us to the crucial point of the game.

Gomez ripped a line drive back up the middle, and for one long moment the question of who would win the game receded into the background. Acting on pure instinct, Liriano turned his back to the ball, and it glanced so hard off the base of his skull or his neck that it next landed safely in centre field. Moreland scored, but all attention was on Liriano, who was visited by the Jays’ manager and trainer. Liriano stayed on his feet, walked off under his own power, and disappeared into the clubhouse. We learned later that Liriano had at least been cleared to travel to back to Toronto, so beyond that we have to wait until there is further medical information released.

This was the moment that Gibbie had hoped to avoid. Osuna had assured him that he was good to go, but the last thing that Gibbie wanted to do was bring him in before the ninth. T.J. Hoying, running for Chirinos, had gone to third on Moreland’s hit. Bannister started Gomez from first, so when Desmond hit a perfect double play ball to Tulo right at the bag at second, Gomez was already there. There was no inning-ending double play, and the third Texas run scored. But in the single most compelling at bat of the game, Osuna faced down the veteran Carlos Beltran. After Osuna missed with his first pitch, Beltran fouled off four in a row, took another ball, and then struck out on a wicked slider right down the middle that dove under his swing out of the bottom of the zone.

It would be nice to be able to say that Osuna had an easy ninth to finish off the save, but no such luck. The Jays made one of their usual save-situation defensive changes, removing Jose Bautista from the game, shifting Zeke Carrera from left to right, and inserting Melvin Upton in left. It must have been karma, then, that caused Osuna to leave a 1-2 slider up in the zone where Adrian Beltre could square it up and drive it to left. The ball was going to carry to the wall over Upton’s head, but he had a good jump on it and seemed like he had a chance to run it down. But strangely, and much like Ian Desmond in centre the night before, Upton pulled up, the ball hit the wall, and caromed back between his legs. Luckily, with Beltre running, it stayed a double, but the collective “here we go again” from Blue Jays’ fans was as heartfelt as it was loud.

Remarkably, though, almost miraculously, Beltre never advanced from second as Osuna showed what stuff he’s made of, as if we didn’t know. He blew a fast ball by Odor—oh irony—on a 3-2 pitch. Jonathan Lucroy popped up to Barney at second, and Mitch Moreland hit a lazy little short fly to centre that Kevin Pillar exuberantly camped under for the third out.

Let’s hand out the honours here—god knows there’s enough to go around! To whatever scout figured out that Darvish is relying too heavily on his heater these days. To the four bashers for being able to put theory into practice. To Jay Happ for dancing on razor blades without getting a scratch. To Joe Biagini and Jason Grilli for short-term rescue work out of the bullpen. For a courageous stand by Roberto Osuna when a lesser man would have held himself out today. For Kevin Pillar, for diving, and sliding, and squaring up a ball up in his eyes. And yes, finally, to John Gibbons, for pulling the right strings at the right times when the team was in a really tight spot.

Last year Texas came to Toronto and won the first two games of the LCS on the road, but never won another. Is that an omen for us, or just an instructive tale to be pored over for its lessons?

Maybe being up 2-0 coming home is bad luck, but I’ll take sending out Aaron Sanchez to try to win the series in game three at home any day. And I’m sure Texas would, too.

Wherever you are, Bud Selig, come back. Our favourite team, having survived the wild card game Tuesday night, played like champs this afternoon under a bright Texas sun. They have the chops of a legitimate contender. All is forgiven.

I have always thought that, while it was obviously a good thing to expand the baseball playoffs, former commissioner Selig’s creation of the sudden-death knockout game to be played by the two wild card teams was an insult to the players and an abomination to the loyal fans who support teams that fight all year to be included among the best.

To me, the cruelty of sweating bullets for a month or more, hanging on every pitch as your favourite team fought to qualify for the playoffs only to have them dismissed in a “one and done” scenario is something that the league has no right inflicting on the fans of the teams that have to play in the game, and especially it has no right to treat the players in such a cavalier fashion.

Just ask the excellent and very tough Baltimore Orioles, who had to watch a whole season of fine play and courageous effort sail into the left-field stands along with the ball that Edwin Encarnacion crushed Tuesday night, with no recourse to tomorrow’s game, and perhaps a rubber game beyond that. It should be best of three, at the very least, for the play-in teams, or they should just go back to the harsh reality of only four teams making the playoffs, or find some other way of adding teams while eliminating the single game play-in.

And yet. We sweated our own bullets over whether the Blue Jays would hold on to their coveted slot, and rejoiced when they did, getting on to the dance floor primarily on their own merits by going into Boston and taking two out of three at Fenway. And yet. We watched every second of Tuesday night’s wild card game with Baltimore. Sometimes with joy, sometimes with excruciating tension, sometimes with the alert observation you’d use watching a train wreck. And yet. When it all shook down, and Edwin’s shot sailed into the stands, it was all good: we had passed the test, made the team, joined the big boys, and stepped on to the dance floor, even though our dancing partner would not exactly be the gal we would want to wake up next to in the morning for the next forty years.  (“Roughned, for the last time, if you don’t shave off that ugly beard, you’re sleeping in the guest room!”)

And here it is. Not that we knew, as the ninth, tenth, eleventh innings approached Tuesday night, that we would come out on top, but it did seem like there was a thing happening with this Blue Jays’ team, a thing that maybe only finally took shape in the last three games of the season at Fenway.

Oh, sure, we lost Friday night. But that was to none other than Big Papi, who hit what turned out to be the last regular season dinger of his career. Then, on Saturday and Sunday, something happened. No, we didn’t ease our batting woes. That would have been too much, maybe, to ask of the baseball gods. Rather, we embraced our lack, seemed to accept the fact that a little offence, a few well-timed hits, combined with brilliant pitching and steady defence, could be the tickets to success. The season-long question, when will the bashing begin, had turned to a new and infinitely more intriguing one, can we actually win without the bashing?

Tuesday night, in the dreaded wild card game, the game we loathed to play but had to win, the mood seemed to grow, a belief was on the rise, that if this team just kept on throwing the ball really well and fielding it flawlessly something good would happen with the bats. The baseball gods may be capricious, but they know good fundamental baseball when they see it. After all, they’re not the “baseball” gods for nothing—they love the game as we do, only for them it’s more, umm, transcendant.

Baseball is a game where it’s hard to apply the concept of momentum. The fact that the game is for all practical purposes controlled by the opposing pitcher, and what and how he throws, and how the hitters react to it can all vary so widely from game to game, suggests that momentum shouldn’t be much of a factor, except maybe in the mind. A team that’s on a roll tends to sustain that roll over a number of games, as the Kansas City Royals did in locking down their World Series win with a great post-season run. And a team that is in a slump tends to become dispirited, which leads to pressing too hard at the plate and in the field, which inevitably leads to extending the slump. Leading to such phenomena as Toronto’s September Swoon.

So did Edwin’s smash Tuesday night get translated into specific on-field achievements this afternoon? There’s no way of knowing that, but it’s obvious as the bill of your baseball cap (you do wear your Blue Jay cap all the time, don’t you?) that the Jays entered today’s game with their heads and their spirits up, ready to take on the whole world, not to mention a simple matter like the best-record-in-the-league Texas Rangers.

These are the playoffs. No need to spend very much time talking about the relative merits of the starting pitchers. Starting for a playoff team eliminates the question marks, the riff-raff, the reclamation projects, the raw rookies, the guys that used to be somebody, from consideration. Your pitching was good enough to make the playoffs and now you’re down to your four best. After all, after pitching brilliantly against Baltimore last week, Francisco Liriano is in the bullpen for the playoffs, not the rotation. And R.A. Dickey, resident philosopher and elder statesman, didn’t even make the playoff roster. ‘Nuff said.

Except I’d like to take the tiniest moment to address comments made the other night by, I believe, Greg Ross, the sports reporter on CBC. He suggested that it was somewhat of a surprise that Marco Estrada would be pitching the first game, and that there was a lot of consternation on Twitter over why the Toronto manager hadn’t gone to Jay Happ or Marcus Stroman. Well, duh, Greg Ross and all the twits on Twitter: It was Estrada’s turn in the rotation pitching on regular rest, as will Happ and Sanchez and Stroman when their turns come up. And more duh, for ignoring the fact that just because Estrada doesn’t throw hard and has a silly-looking retro windup doesn’t mean that he isn’t still one of the premier starters in the league, with a proven track record of throwing shutdown stuff in big games. Like in Texas last year when our backs were to the wall, remember?

So Estrada was a no-brainer, as was the great lefty Cole Hamels, Texas’ number one starter for most of the year during the long period of the absence of Yu Darvish. So the pitchers are set. Let the games begin!

If Hollywood casting were looking for an actor to play a star baseball pitcher they’d jump at the chance of putting Cole Hamels on the silver screen. Tall, lean, ruggedly handsome, throwing from the port side with an elegant motion, he’d really fill the bill. Not so bad as an American League starter, either, coming into today’s game with a 15-5 record and an ERA of 3.32.

He started the game like he’d been typecast by Hollywood as well. Oh, sure, he walked Josh Donaldson, but that was more a tribute to Donaldson’s annoying stubbornness, as he fouled off three good pitches in a row on a 2 and 2 count before drawing balls three and four. Otherwise, it was popups by Devon Travis and Edwin Encarnacion, and an easy fly ball off the bat of the heavily-booed Jose Bautista. The whole thing consumed 16 pitches.

With Marco Estrada, if he strikes out the first batter, especially looking, or if he retires the first batter on the first pitch, you know somethin’s cookin’. So tonight he froze Carlos Gomez leading off on a 2-2 curve ball, popped up Ian Desmond, and popped up Carlos Beltran to end the inning with seven pitches under his belt. Somethin’ was cookin’ all right!

Hamels continued to roll comfortably in the second, giving no hint of the implosion that was lurking just around the bend. After striking out Russell Martin and popping up Troy Tulowitzki, Hamels allowed a testy grounder into the hole that looked to be the Jays’ first hit, but Elvis Andrus ranged far to his left, flagged the ball down in full stride, and launched one, Derek Jeter style, that barely beat Pillar—if it did—to the bag. Manager Gibbons asked for an appeal, and it would seem that it wound up as standing because it was “too close to call” as the rule has it.

Despite giving up his first hit, a grounder to first that Adran Beltre beat out, Estrada continued to feed the Rangers empty peanut hulls. Roughy Odor flied out to right. Major trade deadline acquisition from Milwaukee and catcher Jonathan Lucroy fanned for Estrada’s second strikeout, and Mitch Moreland nearly beat out a deep grounder to Devon Travis in the shift for the third out. Another 15 pitches, so he was “up” to 22 for two. Hamels wasn’t much higher at 29.

Then came to the top of the third, when the Jays would drive a stake through Texas hearts, with a little help from the locals, and never again be headed.

Hamels’ third inning shouldn’t have gotten away from him like it did, but it started ominously enough. Melvin Upton led off and drove the first pitch the wrong way to right, and right to the wall, where Shin-Soo Choo had to bang off the wall to make the catch. Then Hamels walked the number nine hitter Zeke Carrera on a 3-1 pitch. Devon Travis popped out to third for the second out, and Hamels was that close to getting out of it. But, remembering Ernie Harwell, we know that “it all starts with two outs”. Sometimes. This time.

The Rangers bring to this series a mixed heritage in relation to defence. They’ve had an excellent fielding record this season, but never far from their minds is the famous seventh inning of game five last year, which besides being remembered for the blast and the bat flip, also haunts the team and its fans because of their embarrassing defensive breakdown, featuring two unforgiveably bad plays by the shortstop Elvis Andrus and a third error by first baseman Mitch Moreland, all of which preceded and set up Bautista’s decisive homer.

Catcher Jonathan Lucroy was perhaps the most important acquisition the Rangers made this season. He represents a significant upgrade for Texas, both at the plate and behind it, where his defensive skills are considered first rate. But with Carrera on first and two outs, Hamels spiked a changeup to Josh Donaldson that was scored as a wild pitch, but in a game like this should have been blocked. Nevertheless Carrera ended up on second and the complexion of the inning changed.

If there was a hint that Josh Donaldson was coming out of his recent funk on his first at bat when he worked Hamels for the first inning walk, his recovery was no longer in question when, on a 2-2 pitch, he ripped a ball at third baseman Adrian Beltre, who threw his glove up almost in defence as the ball ripped past him and on into the left-field corner. Carrera scored on the hit, which was hit so hard that left fielder Carlos Gomez was able to make it close at second. Donaldson was called safe, and the Rangers’ appeal of the call was not supported.

Edwin Encarnacion hit one hard back to the box that deflected off Hamels toward short, but there was no play on Edwin and Donaldson went to third. He scored on a single into right centre by Jose Bautista in what may have been one of the defining at bats of the game. Hamels was at 2 and 1 on Bautista when he tried three times to slip a fastball by him, and one changeup as well. Bautista fouled off all four pitches, and then timed the inevitable curve ball and stroked it into the wide open, shift-deserted space in short right centre. Donaldson scored, Edwin moved up to second, and Russell Martin came to the plate.

Despite the fact that there were two outs all along, and Hamels was for all this time one punchout away from sitting down, he just couldn’t do it. Russell Martn walked on a 3-1 pitch, and then Troy Tulowitzki reached out on a 2-2 thigh-high fast ball on the outer half, and powered it into right centre, a high and deep drive.

For the second time in the inning, the Texas defence wasn’t able to live up to the task, and this play pinpointed a serious flaw in what otherwise may very well be an excellent lineup. Delino DeShields had won the regular job in centre field last year, and in fact started all five games against Toronto last year in the ALCS. He started the season as the centre field fixture, but over time his failure to produce offensively became an issue for the Rangers.

Meanwhile, in the off season they had signed free agent Ian Desmond, who came from the Washington Nationals. Considering their whole lineup, Desmond was clearly signed as backup insurance, on a one-year $8 million dollar contract. He had spent his entire major league career playing the infield in the National League. No, wait, I lied. He played seven innings in the outfield in 2009, and one third of an inning in 2010. His pluses were solid defensive credentials at shortstop, where Elvis Andrus was obviously a fixture, a decent batting average, save for 2015 with the Nats, and very good speed.

When the Rangers decided that DeShields was not to be their World Series centre fielder in 2016, they looked around, found Desmond, and announced, presto change-o, that Desmond was a centre fielder, and he patrolled there for Texas for most of the season. But one season a centre fielder does not make. Tulo’s ball was high and fading. It eventually hit the fence at a point that would have been easily reachable, if Desmond hadn’t pulled up, shied away from the ball, and played it on the carom. The hit went as a triple which cleared the bases and gave the Jays a 5-0 lead. It also sucked every bit of oxygen out of the stadium in Arlington, and all of the fight out of the Rangers. (Thank providence for small favours—the last thing we need is the Rangers with some fight in them!)

Hamels finally got the third out, and Estrada after a very long and pleasant rest, returned to the hill to record a ground ball, a strikeout, and an easy fly to centre on twelve pitchouts. What you need after a big offensive inning is for your pitcher to come out and shut the other guys down. Well, how about for the next inning, and the next five besides?

Marco Estrada, bolstered by a good cushion for the first time in forever, gave up a single to Elvis Andrus in the sixth. Martin threw him out on a strike-out/throw-out with Shin-Soo Choo going down at the plate. He gave up a single to Carlos Beltran in the seventh, but Adrian Beltre hit into a double play. That’s it, folks.

After the leadoff infield single by Adrian Beltre in the second inning, Marco Estrada faced exactly the minimum number of batters, twenty-one of twenty-one. Marco Estrada has never thrown a complete game in the major leagues. He still hasn’t. Manager John Gibbons, with the lead now stretched to ten (I’ll go over that, but Estrada’s the story here, all the way) sent him out to go for it in the ninth, but on the very first pitch Andrus pounded the ball to centre and raced around to third for a triple. Gibbie let Estrada go one more batter to see if he could get the shutout. When Choo, hitting next, grounded out to first, Andrus scored, and that was it. Estrada left with this line: 8.2 innings pitched, 1 run, 4 hits, no walks, 6 strikeouts, and 98 pitches.

Ryan Tepera came in and got the last two outs on seven pitches to secure, if it needed to be secured at this point, Toronto’s convincing 10-1 win over Texas in game one of the 2016 ALCS.

The Rangers managed to shut down the Jays’ offense eventually, as Rangers’ Manager Jeff Bannister, now concerned about eating innings as much as about trying to win this game, sent Hamels out for the fourth, but he didn’t survive the inning. Melvin Upton led off by jerking one into the stands in left to up the Toronto lead to six. Zeke Carrera flied out to left for the first out. Then the fielding gremlin popped out of his hole and waved his malevolent crooked stick at Texas again. Andrus, to his utter embarrassment, picked up a perfectly routine ground ball and pulled Mitch Moreland off the bag with his throw. Travis then advanced to second on a passed ball by Lucroy, and scored on a single to right centre to give the Jays a seventh run, this one very, very unearned. That was enough for Hamels, who may have to wait years to unsully his playoff pitching record after tonight’s performance. Bannister brought in Alex Claudio, a soft-tossing young lefty, who quickly got the last two outs of the inning for the Rangers, stranding Donaldson at first.

Claudio went on to give Bannister the innings he didn’t get from Hamels. Helped by two double plays, he kept the Jays off the board while giving up two hits and two walks. In fact, his approach tended to be very similar to that of the Jays’ starter, particularly in respect of initiating soft contact and keeping the pitch count down. In his three and two thirds innings, he only threw 35 pitches, 23 of them strikes.

Tony Barnette pitched the eighth and gave up a hit to Zeke Carrera with two outs, but left him at first when Travis popped out to Moreland at first.

Jake Diekman, the rail-thin left-hander, took the hill for the Rangers in the ninth. He had been very effective in last year’s ALCS against Toronto, making four appearances, pitching 6 innings, striking out 5 and giving up only 1 run. This year so far in the playoffs, not so much. Josh Donaldson led off with a single to centre for his fourth hit of the game. Edwin followed with a single to right. Jose Bautista worked Diekman to a 3 and 2 count, and then ended off the action, for all practical purposes, in exactly the way that the Jose-hating, Bautista-booing, Texas crowd didn’t want to see, by ripping a three-run homer to left, pegging the Jays’ lead, at the time, to 10-zip, and who could ever have projected that?

Tension? Bitter rivalry? Scores to settle? All washed away on the wave of a superb pitching performance and robust hitting abetted by some suspect Texas defence.

Game Two features Jay Happ against Yu Darvish, who has pitched well since returning to the team in late May. The Blue Jays have not seen him this season, but he is all that stands in the way of a shocking turnabout, and the possibility of Toronto returning home with a chance to sweep the series behind Aaron Sanchez on Sunday evening.

Who ever would have thought?

The 5-0 lead handed to Estrada was just what he needed to start dealing as only he can, free, easy, and damned frustrating to the Rangers’ hitters.

A note from yer humble scribe: Last night’s game was beautiful indeed, but long. My story on last night’s game is also long. I hope it does justice to the game. Just in case your interest lies one way or the other, I have taken the initiative of dividing it into two parts. If you are primarily interested in what the game was like, read the first part. If you are primarily interested in how it all happened, read the second part. For the best appreciation of a wonderful game, however, take the time to read the whole piece.

The 2016 American League Wild Card Game: What it Was Like:

From about 11:30 p.m. last night henceforward for the rest of my life if anyone asks me why I love the game of baseball as I do, my answer will always and only be, “October fourth, 2016.”

That, my friends, was a baseball game. That, my friends, was the most beautiful baseball game I have ever seen. That, my friends, may have been the most beautiful baseball game ever played.

Strong words, indeed. Strong words coloured by my passion for the Toronto Blue Jays? Maybe so. What if, say, Chris Davis, or Mark Trumbo, had hit the decisive three-run homer in the eleventh inning, and not Edwin Encarnacion? Would I still feel as I do about where last night’s game stands in the pantheon of all-time great baseball games? I don’t know, but it doesn’t matter, because I will never have to make that call, because it was Edwin hitting it out, and we did win the game.

There were so many brilliant plays, so many tense moments, so much sterling pitching, such courageous clutch hitting to write about in Toronto’s five to two wild-card victory over a very tough and deserving team from Baltimore, that I thought I’d start, not with details, but with images.

There was Tulo diving flat out to flag down a sure base hit. And the marvellous trueness of his hurried throw to first.

There was the baseball dropping into the softly leathery well of Kevin Pillar’s outstretched glove, his body airborne behind it.

There was the exultant fist clench of Josh Donaldson at second in the bottom of the ninth, as he thought that, surely, his leadoff double would lead to a swift and happy end.

There was the almost-frenzied exultation from Steve Grilli as he left the mound after his perfect inning.

There were the Baltimore batters who faced Francisco Liriano in the tenth and eleventh, eating out of his hand like so many docile pigeons, futilely beating the ball into the ground.

There was the intense, but so young and so vulnerable, concentration on the face of Marcus Stroman, as he stepped into the hero’s role he so wanted to play.

And there was the shock of disbelief, of how can this happen, that crossed his face when Mark Trumbo’s two-run homer left the yard and put Baltimore into the lead.

There was the joyful acknowledgement of his god having guided his bat as Ezequiel Carrera rounded first, after driving in Michael Saunders with the tying run of the game on an honest and clean base hit to centre field.

There was the abject dejection on the face of Ubaldo Jimenez, so dominant over the Blue Jays just last week, as he watched Edwin’s tater leave the yard.

There was the intricate choreography of Jose Bautista’s return to the dugout after his first-pitch homer in the second, each dance vignette a personal moment between the hitter and his pumped-up mate.

There was the fatherly concern on the beautiful face of Edwin Encarnacion as he called to the dugout to come out and tend to a suddenly injured Roberto Osuna.

There was, of course there was, the restrained exultation of Edwin, the moment he realized that the ball really was going out. No bat flip for Edwin, but an image that surely will endure just as long: one step out of the box, he stops, he turns to pick up the flight of the ball, and he raises both hands high in the air, bat still clutched around the handle by his right hand. At the peak of his salute, the bat falls harmlessly away, no longer needed.

Above all, there was this: Zeke Carrera and his silly parrot-on-a-bracelet. Nothing can ever so clearly illustrate the essence of the baseball player as joyful man playing a boy’s game, as the happy animation of Zeke Carrera, dancing on the field, waving his parrot around, making sure that his talisman didn’t miss a moment.

Truth be told, I don’t think that parrot missed a thing, including the soaking and splashing of bubbly champagne and stinky beer. The parrot came out to the plate for the welcoming celebration, and I never saw Carrera afterward without it waving around on his arm. I sincerely hope that he is getting a thorough and reverent cleaning as we speak, so that he’s presentable for the plane ride to Texas.

Consider this about Zeke Carrera and his parrot. Zeke is a professional baseball player, and an important cog in the Blue Jays’ machine. The recent contributions he has made to the Jays’ razor-thin securing of a wild-card slot rightly earned him a start in tonight’s wild card game. He has gone long when it was needed, laid down the bunt when it was needed, flown to the plate like Superman when needed, made all the plays in the field with grace and aplomb when needed.

This player, this Ezequiel Carrera, is a lunch-bucket guy. He is not a star, by any means. In fact, his spot on the active roster was in question when Melvin Upton arrived from the Padres. But he has contributed, and more than contributed, this entire season, to an extent well beyond his stature as measured either by reputation or salary.

And tonight we saw the quinessential Carrera. Driving in the tying run. Trying to get things going with his second hit of the game. Patrolling left with assurance and style. A true pro, giving what he could to his team’s marvellous effort. But the quintessential Carrera is also a happy child, playing in the biggest sand box of his life, and loving every minute. He is a fan as much as he is a player, his support and adoration for his big brother shining on his face as he celebrates the undeniable triumph of Edwin Encarnacion.

Oh, did I say that there was a baseball game tonight, a sudden-death wild card game, and the Blue Jays won in the eleventh inning on a three-run walkoff blast by Edwin Encarnacion, and that defying all pessimistic projections they are now off on a wing and a prayer and a whoosh of momentum to face down the fearsome Texas Rangers in their Arlington lair?

Well, there’s that, too.

The 2016 American League Wild Card Game: How it Went Down:

Like every sports decision made in this town, the choice of a starting pitcher was fraught beyond all proportion of its significance. In reality, in a single sudden-death game, the choice of a starter isn’t quite so important as you’d think. The wild card roster is a one-off. The manager can place whatever 25 players on it that might have the most immediate impact on this game. If you win, you reset your roster for the ALDS. So if your starter wavers and your manager isn’t a complete dozer, the starter will be gone at the first whiff of trouble. And you’ve got somebody lined up who can go long and take over as if they were starting. You should even have him warmed up as the game starts.

Frankly, I favoured Liriano over Stroman as the starter. I thought the reasons were self-evident and compelling. First, there’s the veteran cool of Liriano, as opposed to the high emotional investment that goes into every Stroman performance. I realize their playoff experience was equal going in, but still, the veteran . . . Then there were the relative merits of their two starts against the O’s last week. Stroman pitched very well, with some bad luck, but Liriano was dominant, and, crucially, dominant against the left-handed power of the Orioles. There was also the small matter of one more day’s rest for Liriano.

As it worked out, the decision was pretty well the right one, but for the very reasons I cited. There’s no way of knowing if Liriano would have pitched as well as Stroman over six innings, but chances are . . . On the other hand, that very veteran cool of Liriano played astonishingly well out of the bullpen late in the game, in a role that Stroman has never really faced with the Jays. So good on John for seeing that Liriano long out of the bullpen was the way to go. Imagine if the game had gone on to Canada Day versus Cleveland proportions, and Liriano were on the hill!

I was more than a little surprised that Orioles’ manager Buck Showalter went with Chris Tillman instead of Ubaldo Jimenez, and for much the same rationale. Recall that my piece on Thursday’s shutout of the Jays by Baltimore was entitled, “If you can’t hit Ubaldo Jimenez . . .” Jimenez had tied the Jays up in knots and left them muttering to themselves. I would have started Jimenez for the psychological advantage alone. Let the Jays’ hitters spend twenty-four hours obsessing over why they didn’t hit him last week, and what hex he had over them. And like Topsy, the little girl with the curl in the middle of her forehead, when Jimenez is bad he is really bad, and really quickly, so have Tillman hot and the hook ready and take your chances! Added to the mix was the fact that Tillman’s never been a happy camper pitching in Toronto, and the park’s confines have always constituted a major threat to him. Taking it all together, to me it suggests that Buck Showalter’s genius is highly over-rated.

For Toronto fans who cut their milk teeth on back-to-back jacks and other such wonderful offensive phenomena, this business of winning with good pitching, tight defense, just a touch of timely hitting, and a deep and powerful bullpen is a new and wonderful thing. In fact, the last factor, the wipeout bullpen, is so new that we never knew we had it until last night!

From the time Adam Jones stroked Marcus Stroman’s first pitch weakly into short centre field, for three innings the dynamic young right-hander was the best he has ever been. The Jones fly ball, a Hyun Soo Kim groundout, and a Mannie Machado popup took twelve pitches. A Mark Trumbo grounder to short, a lazy Matt Wieters fly to left, and Stroman’s first strikeout, of the strangely hapless and immensely frustrated Chris Davis, took fourteen pitches. A Jonathan Schoop groundout to short, a Michael Bourn caught looking, and a Jay Hardy punchout took nine pitches. Stroman was perfect after three with three strikeouts on only 35 pitches.

Meanwhile, Chris Tillman had equally good results, though with less dominance and control, no more so than on a 3-1 pitch to Jose Bautista leading off the second, which somehow found its way into the 200s in left field, putting the Jays on the board first. One swing from Bautista, and memories of game five against Texas circled the stadium as he circled the bases. Tillman also needed support from right fielder Michael Bourn, who moved over to the line smartly to snag a treacherous opposite-field drive by Troy Tulowitzki. To be fair to Tillman, though, Bautista was the only extra batter he faced in the first three innings, and his count, 41, was nearly as good as Stroman’s.

In the fourth inning Stroman’s nice little perfect game he had going somehow slipped out of cruise control, and the Jays suddenly found themselves on the short end of the 2-1 stick of a Baltimore lead, courtesy of the one real mistake pitch Stroman threw in his entire six innings. First, the free-swinging Adam Jones decided wisely to actually look at what Stroman was throwing before swinging with intent. On a 1-2 pitch he reached across the plate and laid a little line single into right field between Edwin and Travis. Hyun Soo Kim worked Stroman into a full count, and then bounced one to Edwin at first, who took the out himself, Jones moving up.

In what appeared at the time to be the pivotal play of the inning, Mannie Machado, who was so far 0 for 1 with a popup tonight, and who’d done no damage to the Jays in Toronto dating back through last week’s series, hit a looping liner into right centre that seemed destined to drop and score the speedy Jones with the tying run. As Jose Bautista circled over to cut it off and hold Machado to a single, a second fielder, the Superman, Kevin Pillar, raced into the picture, cut in front of Bautista, dove and skidded on his elbows while the ball gently cradled into his glove for the second out. Pillar leapt to his feet and fired the ball in to third to hold Jones at second.

If Stroman could get by Mark Trumbo, the lead would be preserved. But on the first pitch to the major-league home run leader, Trumbo reached down for a low inside fast ball, and golfed it down the line and over the bullpen fence in the left field corner, in an eerie simulacrum of Joe Carter’s series-ending homer in 1993, which landed in about the same spot. In three and two thirds innings, Stroman had given up two hits, but they came together, and one of them was a tater, giving Baltimore a 2-1 lead. Matt Wieters fanned to end the inning, but leaving the hitting-challenged Blue Jays in the hole again.

Unlike Stroman, Tillman’s fourth saw only a base on balls to Jose Bautista, and we went to the fifth inning facing the fact that if we didn’t get this game back to even before the seventh, the back end of the Baltimore bullpen would make a rally difficult in the extreme.

Stroman quickly got the first out in the top of the fifth, fanning poor Chris Davis for the second time, and then the defense came to his rescue again. Jonathan Schoop scalded a one-hopper into the hole between short and third. Reacting instinctively, Tulo laid out in a dive and cleanly backhanded the ball. That was the easy part. He then had to bounce up and throw to first with his weight still going toward third. Astonishingly, the strong throw nipped Schoop by a fraction. Tulo’s play took on greater significance when Michael Bourn followed with a single and stolen base, but Jay Hardy fanned, also for the second time, to strand Bourn at second.

There was something Shakespearean about Chris Tillman’s exit from the game in the Jays’ fifth. Something along the lines of “out too early, but yet too late” comes to mind. Tillman retired Tulo, who led off the inning after making a great play in the field, as the tradition goes, on a short fly to left. Tulo was the last out Tillman recorded. Michael Saunders crossed up everybody, well everybody wearing orange on black, by hitting a fly ball down the left field line, out of the reach of any fielder by miles, and it hopped once into the stands for a double. Kevin Pillar then followed with a much harder liner down the right field line (must have been opposites day) that Bourn got a glove on, but couldn’t catch. Saunders, holding up for a possible catch, was late breaking from second, and coach Luis Rivera wisely held him there while Pillar cruised into second with a double.

With one out, and two effective contacts in a row, in a game like this, you would have thought that Showalter would be ready with a big left-handed strikeout guy, which is what he needed with first open and one out, and what he didn’t really have with Tillman. But he stayed with his starter. Zeke Carrera rose to the occasion yet again and singled to centre to score Saunders, tie the game, and move Pillar to third, where he was also wisely held by Rivera.

Now Showalter came out to get Tillman and bring in Mychal Givens. I admit that I was so caught up in the immediate that I forgot what game we were playing, and was surprised to see Tillman being yanked in a tie game with a pitch count of 74 and the double play in order. But of course he shouldn’t have faced Carrera, and the inability to fan Zeke, who does strike out a lot, in a sense proves that he was past his due date. Mychal Givens, though, was definitely not past his due date, and escaped the inning by throwing one pitch, which Devon Travis obligingly grounded to Mannie Machado at third, who turned it into a rally-killing double play.

Stroman had an easy sixth, retiring the Orioles on three ground balls with only nine pitches, despite giving up an infield hit to Mannie Machado, when his grounder to second behind the bag with Edwin playing so far off the bag in an extreme shift that in effect nobody was able to cover first, though Stroman tried to make it over on time. This sort of anomalous play, so alien to baseball tradition, is going to take some getting used to. In reality it was only a fourth ground ball in the inning, and with two outs came to nothing.

After Givens raced through the heart of the Jays’ order on 13 pitches, striking out both Donaldson and Bautista, we came to the top of the seventh and the new reality of managing in a one-game playoff. After 81 pitches, two runs and four hits, and being in full command save for the Jones/Trumbo outburst in the fourth, Stroman was finished for the night. Perhaps Gibbie had been reading up on the high incidence of first-batter hits on pitchers sent out for “just one more” inning, but he wasn’t going to take a chance on it. Chris Davis, the Knight of the Balky Bat, was due up second, and there was no way Gibbie was going to roll the dice with Stroman against Davis after he’d punched him out twice: Brett Cecil would take Davis, and sensibly Gibbie decided to bring him in to start the inning.

Now, trigger warnings are big deals these days on university campuses and even out in the general public. It seems if someone is going to present something to a group that might be conceivably even remotely traumatic for someone in the group, they have to post a warning, such as, if one were teaching Huckleberry Finn one might be expected to warn victims of child abuse that Huck’s Pap is a pretty mean old sot, and they might want to skip those pages.

For Blue Jays’ fans, bringing Brett Cecil into a close game this year might be the occasion for a sports trigger warning. It could cause us to flash back, for example, all the way to April fifth in Tampa, when Aaron Sanchez pitched a superb seven innings, giving up one run on five hits, walking none and striking out eight. At 91 pitches over seven, Gibbie obviously felt it was time to let the bullpen finish up and protect the 2-1 Jays lead. With the left-handed Kevin Kiermaier up first, the call was to Brett Cecil, who hit Kiermaier with a 1-2 pitch, retired Brandon Guyer on a fly ball, and then gave up the game-winning two-run homer to Logan Forsythe, who was tormenting us even then. Thus was Sanchez’ first superb effort of the year spoiled. Especially in the first half of the year, this scenario was played out far too often, and with far too many relievers beyond just Cecil, who unfortunately became the lightning rod for all the yahoos wanting to weed out the entire bullpen.

Ever since, over the whole year, we Toronto fans have gut-clenched every time a starter has come out of a close game after a good outing, and when it’s been Brett Cecil coming in, fairly or not, it’s been cause for a double clench.

Recently, though, Cecil has done a good job for the Jays, especially in the full inning stint. But tonight, ironically, after retiring the switch-hitter Matt Wieters on a slow roller on which the hard-charging Donaldson made a fine barehanded play, he walked Davis. That brought the manager out, and Joe Biagini in to replace Cecil. Now, sadly for Cecil at the time, Biagini wasn’t the known, trusted quantity in April that he is now. But now, well, how many times this season has he come in and simply stopped whatever was going on, usually with a big strikeout, sometimes with a big play. Tonight it was not one, but two strikeouts, as he disposed of Schoop looking and Bourn swinging on eight pitches.

Little did we know at the end of the seventh that it would be the first of five innings pitched by the Jays’ bullpen, innings that would be scoreless, hitless, and without base-runners, after the one-out walk of Davis in the seventh. Had you asked, say, the June Blue Jay fan if such a stretch was possible, the response would be yeah, that’s a stretch all right—no way!

Here’s the roll of honour: Biagini, the two thirds in the seventh, 8 pitches, two strikeouts. Jason Grilli in the eighth, retired in order, one strikeout, 12 pitches. Roberto Osuna in the ninth, retired in order, two strikeouts, 14 pitches, Osuna in the tenth, one third, five pitches. Here’s the most concerning note of the night: Osuna pulled up sore-armed after the one out in the tenth. Edwin came over to check him, and then called for the trainer. He was pulled, as it turns out, for as they say precautionary reasons, and the later word was that it was nothing serious.

Francisco Liriano, who had been ready for matchup duty for some time, was called in to replace Osuna, and the symmetry of the Jays’ starting assignment was complete. With nobody on base, facing the right-handed Jonathan Schoop and the left-handed Michael Bourn, he said later that he just pretended he was the starting pitcher, and started with two easy ground ball outs on six pitches to end the inning.

Liriano continued his easy domination of the Orioles in the eleventh, inning, inducing his third and fourth consecutive ground balls from Jay Hardy and Adam Jones. His final batter was scheduled to be the dangerous Hyun Soo Kim, but Showalter opted to pinch hit the right-handed Nolan Reimold against the left-handed Liriano. Liriano cared not a whit for the change, and blew Reimold away on three pitches. Little could we imagine then that Reimold’s punchout was the Orioles’ last gasp, and that it ensured that Francisco Liriano would be awarded the win in the 2016 American League Wild Card Game.

The theory was that if this game were close and it got into the bullpens, then the Blue Jays would be toast, or at the very least at a significant disadvantage. Not only did the Orioles have Zach Britton, he of the perfect save record this year, perhaps one of the top three Cy Young candidates in the league this year, but they also had Brad Brach, who made the All-Star team this year as a setup man, Darren O’Day, the intimidating sidearmer, and the left-handed Brian Duensing, their recent pickup from Minnesota, whom the Jays couldn’t solve last week in Toronto.

Well, it will be a matter of discussion for years, but Buck Showalter never used Zach Britton in the game. He didn’t use him in the ninth when the Jays threatened. He didn’t use him in the eleventh, when, having brought in Ubaldo Jimenez to pitch to Devon Travis after Duensing fanned Zeke Carrera, Travis singled to left. He didn’t bring him in when Josh Donaldson singled Travis to third with no one out. He still sat in the bullpen, looking on, as Edwin’s blast sailed into the stands, bringing the game to an end. Let the Hot Stove chatter begin!

Mind you, save for a serious scare in the bottom of the ninth, the relievers Showalter did use did a fine job, right up until the arrival of Jiminez with one in the eleventh. Givens, who is certainly up for bigger things in the future, followed his one-pitch rescue of Tillman in the fifth with a clean sixth and two outs in the seventh before yielding to the left-handed Donnie Hart, brought in to take Michael Saunders out of the game in favour of Melvin Upton. Givens didn’t allow a base-runner in two full innings, struck out three, and threw only 19 pitches.

Hart induced a fly ball to fairly deep left off the bat of Upton, the only batter he faced. This was the play on which an idiot fan in the left field stands made us all look bad by heaving a beer can on the field near Kim as he was settling under the fly ball. At the time of writing, the police are distributing a picture of the miscreant, but he hasn’t been pulled out from the rock he’s hiding under yet. I would have expected neighbouring fans to have assisted stadium staff in identifying the guy on the spot. I would also expect the team to reconsider the sale of beer in cans at the park. We can only hope.

Brad Brach came in for the eighth for the Orioles. With one out, Zeke Carrera had another great at bat that resulted in a ground ball single to right. This brought Devon Travis to the plate. Travis took a shot at bunting for a base hit, not a bad idea with the speedy Carrera on first, but fouled it off. He fouled off another with a full swing, and then . . . grounded into his second consecutive double play.

When Brach came out for the ninth, he survived the best chance Toronto had of putting the game away in regulation. Josh Donaldson led off and worked Brach to 3 and 1 and then pulled a low inside fast ball inside the bag at third and down into the left field corner for a double. As the intense Donaldson reached second, it was clear that he felt that he had set the wheels for a ninth-inning win into motion. Showalter elected to walk Edwin to pitch to Bautista with the double play in order.

Once again, visions of the demons of the recent past arose before us, as Bautista took a 1-2 slider for strike three. Thus was removed the option of scoring the run while making two outs. To score on a sacrifice fly or a deep grounder, Donaldson would have to manufacture a way to get to third. Or Russell Martin would have to get a base hit off side-armer Darren O’Day, who took over from Brach after the strikeout. However, on the first pitch to him, Martin grounded into the Jays’ third double play of the game, and it was off to extra innings.

Having thrown only one pitch to rescue the O’s in the ninth, O’Day returned to the mound for the tenth, and breezed through the Jays in order, retiring Tulo on a foul popup, fanning Justin Smoak hitting for Upton, and getting Pillar to fly out to the centre fielder Jones in right centre.

With Liriano efficiently holding the Orioles down in the eleventh, the Jays returned to the plate hoping to find a way to finish Baltimore off for Liriano. Reimold stayed in the game in left after hitting for Kim, and Showalter brought in Brian Duensing to pitch to Carrera, who must have felt honoured to be the target of a matchup. Not so honoured, though, when Duensing fanned him for the first out. With the only left-handed hitter in the lineup gone, Showalter brought in Ubaldo Jiminez to pitch to the top of the order. Similarly to Francisco Liriano, Jiminez had been assigned to the bullpen after Tillman was chosen for the start. And, like Liriano, he had spent some time in the bullpen this year, but decidedly not because of a traffic jam in the starting rotation. Regardless of matchup considerations, this is the point where it becomes puzzling why Showalter didn’t bring in Britton. Even if he was only used at this point to hold the game at twos, if the Orioles didn’t hold the game at twos their season would be over.

But Jiminez he wanted, Jiminez he got, and he may get awfully tired of explaining why over the course of the off-season. Jiminez, who may or may not have been fully loose when he came in, threw exactly five pitches, but that was enough to send Toronto to Arlington to play the Rangers, and Baltimore home to contemplate their navels over a long and cold winter. Devon Travis took a ball and a strike, and then hit a line drive to left for his first hit of the game. Jiminez’ first pitch to Josh Donaldson was a waist-high fast ball and Donaldson didn’t waste any time hitting it into left field for another base hit. As Travis was rounding second, he could see Nolan Reimold, who had just come into the game, bobble the ball in left, and he boldly broke for third. Reimold’s throw was off line, and Travis was on third with nobody out.

With Edwin Encarnacion at the plate, almost any ball put in play would have a chance of scoring Travis from third and ending the game. Jiminez had but one pitch left to throw. He tried to go inside above the knees with a 91 mph fast ball, but it never got there. Edwin just wanted to make sure that the run scored from third, so he put a good swing on it, and we all know how that turned out.

On reviewing the interminable repeated replays of Edwin’s great moment, it becomes clear that there are two compelling images in view. Edwin completes his swing, starts to take a step toward first, then stops and raises his arms in the air, his bat still held in his right hand, until he lets it drop. The other side of the story is told in the view we have of veteran Orioles catcher Matt Wieters, who, at the very moment Edwin raises his arms, turns to his right, away from the diamond, and starts to walk away.

One exults. The other only wishes to escape. It is always so. But never more so than in Toronto, at 11:33 p.m. on October 4, 2016, in the eleventh inning, when Edwin Encarnacion hit the home run that propelled the Toronto Blue Jays from the 2016 American League Wild Card Game into the American League Division Series against the Texas Rangers.

As we enjoy this wonderful triumph, and look forward to an exciting series with the Rangers, give a thought to the Baltimore Orioles and their loyal fans. They could be going to Texas, and we could be drowning our sorrows in stale beer. There but for the grace of the baseball gods go I.

I have an idea: let’s talk about whether or not the Blue Jays should limit Aaron Sanchez’ innings on the mound this season.

I have an even better idea: let’s never raise that subject again. Note: this means you, idiotic radio call-in guy who no more than two days ago was rambling on about how “fantastic” it would be for the Jays to have Sanchez and Osuna linked in the bullpen for the playoffs.

Now, where were we? Oh, yeah, the playoffs: Hey, we made it!

With Toronto’s spine-tinglingly tight 2-1 season-closing win against the Big Bad Red Sox and their ace David Price this afternoon, the Blue Jays played their way into the top American League Wild Card slot. (Let’s not forget to give a nod to lowly Atlanta for coming up big and sealing Detroit’s fate, as they landed just outside the magic circle.) Toronto will now host Baltimore on Tuesday evening at the TV Dome in the Big Smoke.

Conflicting emotions: Oh, joy! Oh, no! Here’s what I’m going to do at 8:00 Tuesday night while I’m waiting for Marcus Stroman or Francisco Liriano to throw the first pitch to Adam Jones: I’m going to chew two 81-milligram aspirin, and put 911 on speed dial. So far my heart’s been up to every challenge I’ve had to face in life (knock on wood), but a sudden-death (note the eery terminology), one-and-done, winner plays on, loser goes home, wild card play-in game? Best not to take any chances!

Leaving aside the fact that it really would have been nice if we had been sitting on a five-game lead in the division going into game 162 of this long season, it’s hard to imagine a more fitting and perfect climax to regular-season play for 2016 than today’s matchup between Aaron Sanchez and the Toronto Blue Jays, and David Price and the Boston Red Sox.

Love him, tolerate him, or wish him godspeed to anywhere except the home team dugout in Toronto (I don’t include hate him here, because who could really hate the lovable goof?), ya gotta hand it to John Gibbons, ably advised, no doubt, by pitching coach Pete Walker. They could not have handled the rotation any better than to come into this game with Aaron Sanchez on the hill.

The first goal for 2016 for Aaron Sanchez was to determine if he really is a major league top-of-rotation pitcher. Check. The second goal was to ensure to the best of anybody’s ability that his arm would still be strong at the end of the season. Check again. The first two having been accomplished, the third goal was to have him lined up to pitch the most important game of the season. Check, check, and double-check.

Gibbie and Walker utilized the six-man rotation, the off-days, and the judicious skipping or pushing back of certain starts to bring us to this point in the concluding weekend of the season: that Aaron Sanchez, already having established himself as one of the most dominant pitchers in the league, should be available on normal rest to pitch either a wild-card game, game one of a league division series, or, worst case scenario, the last game of the year, if it were needed to cement a playoff spot.

Still needing one win or one Detroit loss to make the Wild Card game, scenario number three, pitch Sanchez in the final game if it is meaningful, came into play. There is an old axiom known to all good kids’ baseball coaches, who play most of their seasons in playoff-type conditions: You have to win the game you’re in. If you make the semi-finals of a tournament, you start your ace there, and let the final play out as it will. It truly is the case of “go big or go home”.

Gibbie went big today, for obvious reasons. So did Manager John Farrell, for perhaps slightly less compelling reasons. The Sox clinched the division last Wednesday. The LDS begins next Thursday. That’s eight days for the manager to align his rotation to get the best possible setup for the playoff round. In the meantime, there was the matter of playing for home field advantage throughout the American League playoffs, a matter of obvious importance to Boston, given the advantages bestowed on the home team by Fenway Park. After yesterday’s games were completed, the Sox still had a chance of securing home field advantage over Cleveland in the first round.

The importance Farrell assigned to this game is seen by his starting lineup, with not one regular missing. It’s also seen in the fact that David Price was on the mound, although with a pitch limitation that Farrell alluded to before the game, without identifying the maximum number. The interesting thing about having Price start this game, so much less significant than game one of the LCS, is that by default the assignment to start the playoff round goes to Rick Porcello, and that’s clearly the way Farrell has planned it. That elicits a big “hmmm” from me, as I think, “so the Red Sox are paying 217 million dollars over seven years to their number two starter??”

For four innings Sanchez and Price traded zeros, but whereas Price managed the Jays, working around base-runners, Sanchez was dominant. Price gave up three hits, walked three, and struck out three, throwing 68 pitches in the process. Sanchez walked one, struck out four, and faced one over the minimum twelve batters, throwing 56 pitches.

The thing to know about lightning strikes is that you just don’t know about lightning strikes. Never know when they’re gonna come, or where they’re gonna hit. So, no, David Price wasn’t throwing a no-hitter like Sanchez was, but as the top of the fifth progressed, he was cruising. Kevin Pillar swung late and hit a short fly to right. Zeke Carrera fanned. With two out, Devon Travis came to the plate. He had been sitting on ten home runs ever since August sixth. But not after this at bat, as a Green Monster shot went for number eleven, and the Jays—and Sanchez—had a one-run lead. Josh Donaldson flew out to left to end the inning.

In the bottom of the fifth Sanchez continued to roll, making up for the slight hiccup of nicking Jackie Bradley with a pitch with two outs by freezing Sandy Leon with one of his signature awesome curves for the third out.

We learned when the Sox came out for the top of the sixth what Price’s limitation was, because he was out of the game, at five innings and 80 pitches. He’d certainly pitched well enough, but very differently from the David Price who pitched for us last year: one run, four hits, three walks, only four strikeouts. The only thing the same was the ridiculous amount of time he took to serve up each pitch.

Heath Hembree threw the sixth for Boston and retired the Jays on 13 pitches while giving up a two-out single to Russell Martin. Robbie Ross pitched the seventh, and managed to strand a one-out double to right by Kevin Pillar while otherwise shutting down the Blue Jays, with the help of Matt Barnes, who got the last out by retiring

Devon Travis on a fly ball to centre.

Meanwhile, Sanchez had another quick inning in the bottom of the sixth, issuing a leadoff walk to Andrew Benintendi, but getting Dustin Pedroia to ground into a double play. Travis Holt flew out to centre, and he was through six with no hits on just 80 pitches.

Sanchez’ no-hitter and shutout bid lasted another two outs into the seventh. Mookie Betts smacked a liner right at Josh Donaldson, and David Ortiz lofted a short fly to centre before Hanley Ramirez wrecked both the no-no and the whitewash with a shot to the foul pole in left.

Boston Manager John Farrell brought in the Sox’ most significant trade deadline bullpen acquisition, Brad Ziegler, for the eighth inning. In three prior appearances against the Jays, he’d been very effective twice, and given up a run in the third. But today Toronto was on a mission, to wrap up that wild card slot. Josh Donaldson started them off with a rush, with a “Fenway single” a hard shot off the wall that might have gone out elsewhere, but rebounded hard enough that Donaldson was held to a single. Edwin Encarnacion drew a walk on a 3-2 count, bringing Jose Bautista to the plate, but Bautista grounded sharply to the third baseman Brock Holt right at the bag, who turned it into a 5-3 double play, erasing Donaldson as Encarnacion moved to second.

That brought Russell Martin to the plate with two outs and Edwin in scoring position. Martin hit a soft grounder, again to Holt at third, and Holt couldn’t make the play on it. Meanwhile, Edwin moved up to third behind him. The biggest lack for the Blue Jays in the last month or so has been the failure to cash runners from third base, either with one out or two. The sac fly, the ground ball up the middle, the two-out base hit, have all been as rare as, as rare as . . . tea party invites in Toronto for Yordana Ventura. (What, you wouldn’t like to have tea with a class guy like that??)

But it’s October, and so far we’re one for October, and looking to make it two for October. Troy Tulowitzki came to the plate and Ziegler’s approach to Tulo was sinkers low and inside. He missed with the first two, way too low and way too inside. The third one he threw low and inside, but in the strike zone. Big mistake. Tulo lined it into centre field, Edwin trotted home, and the Jays had the lead. Only 2-1, and they had to protect it through the eighth and ninth, but still, they had the lead. John Farrell brought in Drew Pomerantz to fan Michael Saunders ending the inning.

At seven innings and 97 pitches, Aaron Sanchez had done his job (one run, two hits, two walks, one hit batsman, and six strikeouts) , and it was time to call to the bullpen and cross some fingers. Gibbie wanted to turn Sandy Leon around, so the first in for the Jays was Brett Cecil. Of course Farrell pinch-hit Chris Young for Leon, and Young hit a single to right. The Jays’ manager left Cecil in for the left-handed-hitting rookie Andrew Benintendi. Good call, because Benintendi tried twice and failed to bunt Young to second, and then took a curve ball low on the inside corner, according to the plate umpire, for strike three. Unfortunately, Young stole second on the pitch.

With Dustin Pedroia and Brock Holt coming up, Joe Biagini came in and extricated his team from the jam. The dangerous Pedroia grounded out to third, while Young had to hold second, and then, in the most crucial at bat of the game to that point, Biagini fanned Holt on a low slider on the outside corner, leaving Young at second.

Pomerantz kept the Jays from adding insurance in the ninth, though he allowed Zeke Carrera to reach base on his own fielding error on a comebacker. But Travis flied out to right and Donaldson lined out to centre, and it was last call for the Bosox, down 2-1. Cue the nail-biting music (again).

After two innings and 26 pitches yesterday for the win, Roberto Osuna was ready to answer the call again. Given the workload for him recently, it shouldn’t be surprising when the young closer doesn’t manage a shutdown inning for the save. More often than not, though, as today, he manages to work out of his own jams, a testament to his sang-froid, so remarkable in a twenty-one-year-old.

Fortunately for Osuna, and for our nerves, he quickly secured the first two outs before wavering. Facing the meat of the order, Osuna got Mookie Betts to ground out to shortstop on a 2-2 pitch. David Ortiz, in his last regular-season at-bat at Fenway (unless he changes his mind and messes everybody up!), dribbled one in front of the plate that Russell Martin pounced on; Ortiz was an easy out at first, and left the field to thunderous adoration on the part of the Sox faithful.

Ah, but then Hanley Ramirez worked a walk on a 3-2 pitch. Zander Bogaerts lined a single to centre, moving Ramirez to second. This brought Jackie Bradley to the plate, Bradley, who has really struggled since the All-Star break. And on an 0-1 pitch he completed his regular season as it had been going, by grounding out to Josh Donaldson to end the game.

Suddenly, the rag-tag September Blue Jays had turned into the tight and taut October Jays, winning two tense one-run games bearding the Red Sox in their own lair. They had secured their spot in Tuesday’s Wild Card Game in Toronto against the Orioles, and they had done it on their own hook.

Suddenly, thanks to good pitching, perfect defence, and just enough timely hitting, Toronto had turned the forecast for October from gloomy and foreboding to sunny and warm. And they would be going into the fearsome sudden-death format on a positive roll, with every hope that the wheels would continue to turn on Tuesday.

Beyond Baltimore await the Texas Rangers, and we know what that means for Toronto!