Long Ball Stories

After the mess and the drama of the last three nights, this should totally have been Marcus Stroman’s night. Unfortunately for Stroman, the ugly hangover from last night’s game and the off-field repercussions today of what went down then took most of the oxygen out of the world of Toronto baseball long before the game started.

We found out what Kevin Pillar said to Jason Motte in the seventh inning last night, and it wasn’t pretty. In fact, given the incredible popularity of the feisty centre fielder with Toronto’s fans around the country, it couldn’t have been worse.

It’s been a frustrating week losing three sloppy games to the rebuilding Atlanta team, and emotions were at a peak after Aaron Loup had hit Freddie Freeman on the wrist and, as we subsequently learned, put Freeman out with a broken bone. Then Atlanta pitcher Mike Foltynewicz delivered some payback to Devon Travis in the top of the seventh.

At the end of the Jays’ seventh, Motte struck out Pillar with a caught foul tip, but Pillar thought Motte had quick-pitched him, and lost it in the worst way possible. He shouted something at Motte, but we only found out later that it was some version or other of calling Motte a “fucking faggot”.

From all reports it was immediately apparent that Pillar realized that he had put himself into a really bad spot with his outburst. His immediate response after the game was that he was appalled that he had lost control of himself. He reported that he had already conveyed his apologies to Motte and the Atlanta organization, and he had made a passionate declaration that this was not who Kevin Pillar was, and that he had lost control out of frustration in the heat of the moment.

The only problem was that he didn’t directly address the essential awfulness of what had come out of his mouth in his moment of frustration. In 2017 in western society, regardless of what retrograde infant has managed to bamboozle his way into the White House, there is a huge difference between calling someone, for example, a “fucking asshole”, and using the homophobic slur used by Pillar.

Had he said in his immediate comments something to the effect that “what bubbled to the surface in my moment of frustration was a reflection of the casual verbal homophobia that I have not yet been able to expunge from my private persona. My embarrassment over this having happened in such a public way will inspire me to make a real change not only in the way I express myself about other human beings but in the way that I actually feel about them”, he would have hit the mark, and, along with accepting whatever punishment was meted out to him, would have gone a long way toward defusing the storm that raged around him for the next twenty-four hours.

But, he didn’t manage all of that in his first comments after the incident. Perhaps it’s not surprising that he didn’t. He is, after all, a ball player, a young guy who has devoted his life to perfecting his craft on the field, not to perfecting a public relations strategy that would enable him to handle successfully any and all problems that might arise in his public life without the aid and guidance of advisers wiser than he.

By the next day the story had changed. His formal response, his public statements, and the team’s response had all been brought into alignment to make the best out of a bad situation. General Manager Ross Atkins, who had booked a quick flight to Atlanta (he wasn’t travelling with the team, not even on their first visit to Atlanta’s new stadium?) presumably spearheaded the rescue operation when he arrived.

A most proper public apology, including a specific reference to what he said, was issued. “I had just helped extend a word that has no place in baseball, in sports or anywhere in society today.” He went on specifically to add “most importantly” the LGBTQ community to the list of entities to whom he was apologizing.

In comments to the press that I heard on the radio, he expressed the odd but extraordinarily humbling acceptance of whatever treatment would be meted out to him by the public. In essence what he said was “I have been given the opportunity to be made an example of how not to show respect to a valued segment of society, and I embrace that opportunity to be made an example of.”

Now, I’m a retired high school teacher, as you might have guessed. One of the more onerous experiences that all teachers have had to endure from time to time is to have to sit and pretend to accept a faux apology leveraged out of a misbehaving student who feels no remorse whatsoever over what she or he has done, and has no intention of actually apologizing. This situation would always result from the administrator recognizing that she or he had no other choice than to pretend to support the teacher but actually not being willing to risk evoking a complaint to either a superintendent or a trustee from a student backed by parents not willing to concede the error of the student’s ways.

As you can imagine, the “apologies” I have been pressured to “accept” in my career ranged from the almost real to the laughably inadequate. The worst, or funniest, depending on your point of view, was the hand-written note I received saying “Sir, I’m sorry for you thinking that I was rude to you but I wasn’t.” Whatever vice principal was involved in that transaction assured me that it was a perfectly acceptable apology. Maybe that’s why I retired early . . .

After consultation with whomever he met on Thursday, the statement issued by Pillar was spot on. If its essence had been delivered spontaneously by Pillar the night before, it would have gone much farther to defusing the situation much more quickly.

In addition it was announced that Pillar would serve a two-game suspension starting immediately, a suspension imposed by the team, not MLB headquarters. This was done, it was said, after consultation with the player, the team’s manager and coaches, the offices of MLB, and the players’ association. Kevin Pillar would not appear in tonight’s series closer with Atlanta, nor in Friday night’s series opener in Baltimore. The fact that the team imposed the penalty rather than MLB makes it appear to be very proactive, but there was something self-serving about it as well.

In short, if the league imposes a suspension on the player, the team has to play with a short bench for the duration of the suspension. If the suspension is imposed by the team, the playing roster remains at 25.

The Jays called up Dwight Smith Jr. to fill the roster spot vacated temporarily by Pillar. When the lineups were finally released for tonight’s game, though, Smith was on the bench, Zeke Carrera in left, Jose Bautista in right, and Darrell Ceciliani, who had been recalled recently from Buffalo to help cover the shortage caused by the injury to Steve Pearce, in centre. With Dalton Pompey still in rehab from his spring-training concussion, it was easy to imagine the Buffalo outfield being patrolled by an army of yellow rubber duckies.

There are some advantages to being behind in my reporting. I’m actually writing this piece on Sunday morning, I blush to admit, and the news has just come out that Ryan Getzlaf of the Anaheim Ducks, currently playing in the Western Conference Finals of the Stanley Cup Playoffs, has been fined $10,000 by the league, but not suspended, which says something about the National Hockey League, for uttering a homophobic slur at a referee.

I just caught an interview clip in which Getzlaf was “manning up” and “taking responsibility”, and the contrast was interesting. The best Getzlaf could say about taking something positive forward from the incident was that it showed that “we all have to show a little bit more respect”. This sounds a little closer to some of my old high school students. Respect toward whom? Refs, or the LGBTQ community? A little bit more? What, softer homophobic slurs? More inclusive ones?

Sorry, hockey fans, I’ll take Kevin Pillar’s response, scripted or not, over Ryan Getzlaf’s any day.

So with that last sentence I’m at nearly 1400 words, and not a word about the first game of the two games that would be played without Pillar in the lineup. I’m sorry, Marcus Stroman, it’s not often that your exploits take a back seat to anything.

And tonight they shouldn’t have taken a back seat to anything on earth. Oh, it wasn’t like he mowed Atlanta down or anything like that. Oh, well, in one respect he did: he went five and two thirds innings, that’s seventeen outs, fanned six, and got ten ground ball outs. So what he did on the mound today was to deliver the very best Marcus Stroman performance that he could. He did it with electrifying stuff, mesmerizing to watch from behind the hill as his slants darted, dived, hooked, backed up, and went any which way but straight.

So, why the quibble about his performance tonight at the beginning of the last paragraph? Simply enough, these Atlanta hitters just don’t go down quietly, and he not only gave up seven hits in his five and two thirds, he did not have a single three-up, three-down inning in the entire stint. Which also would explain why he ran up his pitch count to 103 to get those seventeen outs.

I’m not complaining, mind you; it can be highly entertaining to watch a talented pitcher dodge bullets (not literally at him, but situations, right?) through an entire start, and get away with it.

It also didn’t hurt that his team-mates posted a three-spot for him in the top of the first, before he even took the hill, and never looked back.

Julio Teheran had the start for Atlanta, a guy the Blue Jays have handled reasonably well in a few encounters in the past. He’s a lanky, right-handed Cuban with really good stuff but a tendency to be all over the place.

However, after the innocent Zeke Carrera, leading off in lieu of Pillar, skied out to right, Teheran had to fine-tune his aim, er control, a little, to settle a matter that was palpably hanging over the game. In the midst of all the controversy about Pillar’s outburst and suspension, it hadn’t been forgotten that there was unsettled business between the teams.

Not only Pillar’s words, but Freddie Freeman’s broken wrist bone and Jose Bautista’s unnecessary (in the circumstances) bat flip were all still in the ledger book, and one thing yet was needed to balance things out in the cockeyed world of baseball logic: Bautista had to feel the sting of a baseball on a fleshy part of his body.

Maybe Teheran really does have control problems, because it took him two shots to hit Bautista in the thigh, putting him on with one out. Baseball logic’s one thing, but putting yourself in the hole is another. Somebody should do a study of what happens after a payback pitch is made. You wonder how many times the hit batsman comes around to score, and/or it leads to a rally.

I don’t think it’s ever a great idea if the payback is made by a guy who doesn’t really know where his next pitch is going to go. In Teheran’s case, with Bautista on first and one out, we only know what happened to the last pitch to each of the next three batters: it touched green, and Toronto had a quick and satisfying three run lead. Kendrys Morales singled to left, bumping Bautista up to second. Darrell Ceciliani, the callup hitting cleanup, pulled a double into the right-field corner, scoring Bautista.

When Chris Coghlan’s hitting fifth, you gotta know the lineup’s depleted. With all the other injuries, and Pillar out, and the pitcher hitting, this is what you get. But he’s got some pro chops, this Coghlan guy. He was with the Cubs last year, you know. Instead of being an automatic out, Coghlan hit one the other way for a second consecutive double, plating Bautista and Ceciliani. I certainly hope the Atlanta players and coaches felt vindicated by their retaliation against Bautista. I imagine it didn’t bother him all that much.

While Stroman bobbed and weaved his way through the fearsome Atlanta batting order, Teheran managed a quiet second, and then got rocked again in the third. It was another quick-strike attack. Bautista led off with a double (maybe Teheran should have aimed for his butt again), Kendrys Morales singled down the left-field line, showing a continued penchant for hitting hard opposite the shift while hitting from the left side, and callup cleanup man (I just like writing that) Ceciliani drilled one over the right-field fence and it was 6-0.

Bizarrely, in this season of injury after injury, Ceciliani, at the moment of his first real triumphs at the plate for Toronto, six total bases and four RBIs, became likely the first Blue Jay in Toronto history to put himself on the disabled list by hitting a home run.

As soon as he left the batter’s box after putting a tremendous swing on the ball, Ceciliani grabbed his left shoulder, and held it all the way around the bases. After being gingerly greeted by his mates in the dugout, he disappeared down the tunnel, and did not return. The rookie Smith would end up making his MLB debut under less than positive circumstances. We later learned that Ceciliani’s left shoulder had been dislocated.

So, back at the baseball game, once again Teheran settled in and retired the side, now down 6-0. At this point, clearly, the intention on the part of Atlanta manager Brian Snitker was to raise the white flag, in the sense of leaving Teheran out there to absorb whatever, while saving the rest of his pitching staff.

But after Stroman’s realitively easy bottom of the third inning, in which he only had to pitch around a walk to Brandon Phillips, Toronto forced Snitker’s hand and drove Teheran from the game.

The Jays employed the most unlikely of all weapons to finish off the Atlanta starter, Luke Maile’s first home run as a Blue Jay, after previouslyarnering only two base hits, both balls dropping in the outfield after bouncing off charging fielder’s gloves. And then—wait for it, as if you didn’t already know—Maile’s blast was followed by Stroman’s second at bat of the game, his third of the season, during which he delivered his second base hit, his second extra-base hit, and his first major-league home run—to the opposite field.

Were it not for the Kevin Pillar story, surely the story of this day would be the Maile-Stroman back-to-back jacks. But, life has a way of interrupting . . .

Brian Snitker, who may have a bit of sadist in him, didn’t even pull Teheran after Stroman took him downtown. Oh, no, he let him pitch to, and walk, Zeke Carrera before taking him out for left-hander Sam Freeman, who is not related to Freddie Freeman. To add insult to injury, Freeman proceeded to give up base hits to Bautista and Morales, the latter of which brought in Toronto’s ninth run, also charged to Teheran.

Atlanta relievers Freeman, Josh Collmenter, and Ian Krol managed to keep the Jays off the board for the rest of the game. Ryan Tepera picked up Stroman in the sixth inning and pitched the seventh. Joe Smith pitched the eighth, and Jason Grilli the ninth. Notably, Smith struck out the side in the eighth, putting down Nick Markakis, Matt Kemp, and Tyler Flowers.

So this day that started so badly for Kevin Pillar and the Toronto Blue Jays ended on a positive note for Marcus Stroman and his team-mates, but if we look back on this day and try to remember why it was significant, while we may remember Marcus Stroman’s home run, it will be far overshadowed by what happened off the field in the Blue Jays’ family.

Maybe it had to happen sooner or later. We’ve all taken Joe Biagini far too much for granted. No matter how talented someone is, no matter how comfortable they seem in their own quirky skin, there has to be hidden, somewhere in the inner recesses of their being, a vulnerable child half of the man-child that plays this children’s game as an adult on display for the world to see.

How else to explain what happened to Joe Biagini tonight? No need to fill in much of the back story here: Rule 5 success story, rock of the bullpen last year, future rotation fixture, all the tools, quirky personality, gives good interview. Not to mention that he’d been well nigh untouchable in his first two starts once thrust into the rotation this year because of injuries.

But there he was standing off to the side of the mound, shoulders sagging, shaking his head, obviously beside himself. We’d never seen him in such distress before.

After the two awful—I used the word “disgusting” at the end of yesterday’s game report—games in Toronto with Atlanta, the Jays needed some good news in a big way tonight, and it seemed right that Joe Biagini would be getting his third start on the mound. After the success of the first two, the prospects were pretty good that he could help turn things around.

But after Atlanta pitcher Mike Foltynewicz stranded a one-out Zeke Carrera single in the top of the first, it took very little time for the wheels to fall off Biagini’s wagon, in a most personal yet most public and most unusual way.

Leading off for Atlanta, left-handed-hitting centre fielder Ender Inciarte reached out in his aggressively insouciant National League kind of way and slapped a 1-2 pitch that was way outside, into left field, through a shift-abandoned, unmanned left side of the infield. After this rude little introduction, though, Biagini got just what he wanted, a nice one-hopper right back to him, ripe for turning two.

Biagini picked it, whirled, and, shock of all shocks, because among the many things Biagini does well, fielding his position is one of the best, he uncorked a high throw to second that pulled Devon Travis off the bag. All hands were safe on the throwing error charged against the pitcher.

And there he stood for a moment, to the first-base side of the mound, back to the plate, wondering, along with all of us, what had just happened.

And this is where we all—Blue Jays’ fans everywhere—failed Joe Biagini. No big deal, we thought, he can fix this. He’s Joe Biagini. He’s a pro. He’s the best. Strikeout, popup, easy fly, he’ll be out of there in no time.

But we forgot. Not that Biagini is a kid, because he’s not. He’s 26, played college ball, and is in his sixth year of pro ball. It’s just that he’s so good, that we forget that in almost every interview he does, he takes a moment to remind us all that he can’t believe his luck, that he can’t believe he’s landed where he has, in the middle of the big leagues, pitching meaningful innings for a powerful contending team.

We forgot that he is in many ways a wide-eyed every man, more like us than many of his team-mates, and potentially more vulnerable than most, though he’d never shown it yet.

Back on the hill, his world came crumbling down. He walked Freddie Freeman on four pitches to load the bases. He walked Matt Kemp on a 3-2 pitch to force in Inciarte. Nick Markakis lofted a teasing opposite-field fly ball to the left-field corner. Zeke Carrera, handling his first ball hit in anger in this brand new left field in this brand new ball park in the early evening lost track of the ball and it fell in safely as he twisted himself into a pretzel trying to see where it was. Because the ball was catchable, Kemp had to hold up and only got to second, so Markakis stopped at first, but Phillips and Freeman scored for a 3-0 lead. Then catcher Kurt Suzuki rounded on an 0-1 fast ball right down the middle and hit it out of this hitter-friendly new yard, over the left-centre field fence.

Six batters, four hits, 1 error, six runs, and nobody out.

To his credit, Joe Biagini did what few adults could ever manage being able to do when faced with such shocking adversity. He took a deep breath and started all over again. In eleven pitches he had retired the side. Two ground balls and a line out to centre, and he was able to escape the mound that had become his personal chamber of horrors.

When a starting pitcher takes the ball for his team after his staff has been beaten up pretty badly for a couple of games in a row, there’s a certain onus on that starter to, as they say, suck it up, no matter what, and try to put in some innings to take some of the heat off an overworked bullpen. Joe Biagini knows that. All starting pitchers know that. When Manager John Gibbons didn’t get anybody up in the bullpen, didn’t pull Biagini after the homer, he was sending him two messages: first, we need you, son, so get to work out there, and second, we trust you to find a way.

Joe Biagini could have come into the dugout a beaten man, but he didn’t. As a near-rookie fill-in, he knew his role, and he knew what he had to do. In the kind of fluke that can only happen in baseball, he got a form of do-over in the second inning. Since he had gone through the lineup exactly once in the first, giving up six runs and recording three outs, there was Inciarte at the plate again to start the second.

This time, Joe Biagini made no mistakes, and retired the Atlanta batting order, nine up, nine down, on 31 pitches, after throwing 36 in the traumatic first inning. Counting the three batters he retired to end the first inning, Biagini retired twelve batters in a row on 42 pitches, and showed his team-mates, the Atlanta team, and the world of major league baseball, that Joe Biagini can pitch.

In fact, were this not an inter-league game, at 67 pitches total he certainly would have gone out to pitch the fifth, but with his turn in the batting order coming up second, and his team down six to two, it was time for the manager and everyone in the dugout to shake hands with Joe on a brave stand and a job well done, and send Darrell Ceciliani up to hit for him.

Speaking of Biagini hitting, by the time of his first at bat in the third inning, not only had the irrepressibility of his spirit returned, but also his consummate professionalism. You couldn’t help but mark his eager grin as he grabbed his bat and headed for the on-deck circle. Then, when Luke Maile reached on a fielding error by shortstop Danby Swanson, Baseball Joe came out to play as he laid down a pretty fine sacrifice bunt to move Maile up to second.

Mike Foltynewycz, who’s filled a lower rotation spot with Atlanta for the last couple of years, with accompanying numbers you’d expect from a four/five starter on a rebuilding team, was the beneficiary of the Atlanta outburst in the first, and he did a decent enough job of protecting the lead. He escaped a small bullet in the third after Biagini’s successfull sacrifice. Kevin Pillar had followed with a nubber back to the pitcher that allowed Maile to advance to third with two outs, and Zeke Carrera hit one right on the nose, but right at Freeman at first for the third out.

In the fourth Toronto started to measure him and cut two runs into the early Atlanta lead. Jose Bautista, who is looking more like Jose Bautista, and not some pale (not really) imitation every day, led off with a hard liner to left centre that didn’t get to the wall but that he hustled into a double anyway. Justin Smoak followed with another blast to right for the Jays’ first two runs of the night. Devon Travis followed with a base knock for three hits in a row off Foltynewycz before he settled down and induced a fielder’s choice and a double play.

Biagini might have had some hope of getting off the hook for the loss as the Jays picked up another run in the fifth, when he was pulled for a pinch-hitter. In fact, only an egregious base-running error by Carrera kept them from the possibility of creeping a little closer. It’s not like they were bashing it around, though.

Luke Maile led off with a bloop single to left that ticked off Matt Kemp’s glove. (No, Kemp’s glove wasn’t really mad.) That’s Maile’s second hit as a Blue Jay. Both have ticked off outfielder’s gloves. Ceciliani, hitting for Biagini, grounded weakly to second. Phllips had no play on Maile so it served as a bunt. (The grumpy part of me says “hell, Biagini coulda done that and stayed in the game!”) Kevin Pillar grounded out to short and with a smart bit of running Maile timed his break and made it to third. It’s always good to get yourself to third base with two outs, because the pitcher might throw a wild pitch or something, which is what Foltynewycz did, allowing Maile to score.

With two outs the Jays continued to put pressure on Atlanta, until a bizarre and unfortunate baserunning mistake by Zeke Carrera took the Jays out of the inning in one of those turning points that you recognize as such right on the spot. After the wild pitch, the Atlanta pitcher finished off the walk to Carrera, and Bautista followed with his second of three hits on the night. This brought Justin Smoak back to the plate amid rising tension that something really big might happen. Instead, Smoak bid for his first infield hit of the year, hitting a dribbler off the end of the bat down the third-base line. Third basman Jace Peterson, stationed toward shortstop, had to go a long way to field it, and wasn’t going to get Smoak at first or a force at third, which would have loaded the bases. Except that Zeke decide to dance the meringué with Peterson and got called out for interference for the third out. Smoak later said that he was really mad to lose the infield hit, because he’d kicked it into high gear going down the line when he could smell the base hit. Right, Justin.

With Inciarte hitting first and Freeman hitting third in the bottom of the fifth Manager John Gibbons naturally brought Aaron Loup in to pitch. He got Inciarte to ground out, but then gave up a ground-rule double to Brandon Phillips. Phillips, remember, thus became the first Atlanta hitter to reach base since the Suzuki homer off Biagini in the first. This brought Freddie Freeman to the plate, and us to the moment when the entire game took a terrible turn.

In the first game of the series in Toronto the Jays had recorded a not-very-admirable new record of hitting five batters. Never was there any intent, and the Atlanta players knew this. In fact, the first three were by the breaking-ball specialist Mike Bolsinger, whose curve ball couldn’t break a pane of glass, let alone a bone in somebody’s wrist. In fact, there is probably not a case in recorded baseball history of a pitcher intentionally hitting a batter with a curve ball: In fact, how do you even do that?

But Aaron Loup is another story. Not that he’s a headhunter, or even a particularly aggressive guy. It’s just that he throws a lot harder than Bolsinger, for sure, and some of his most effective pitches come sweeping across the plate from a dropped arm angle. And there’s no way that Loup would have been throwing at Freeman, a left-handed hitter he was supposed to get, with Phillips on second and the Jays trying to claw back into the game.

But hit him he did, and the sound of the ball off his back wrist was so loud that at first everybody thought it was a foul ball. But Freeman’s reaction made it clear that it was no foul. His wrist was attended to on the field, he was escorted off, and Johan Camargo came in to run for him. I’ll cut to the chase here, and jump ahead to the fact that Freeman indeed suffered a broken bone, and the hottest hitter in the National League is going to be sidelined for a minimum of eight to ten weeks. I do this because Atlanta knew it was bad, the Blue Jays knew it was bad, and the tenor of the game and the series changed instantly for the worse.

With the righty Matt Kemp coming up and Loup likely too shaken to go on, John Gibbons brought in Dominic Leone, who fanned Kemp, and then got Markakis to ground out to end the inning.

Foltynowycz came out for his last inning, the sixth, with a message for Toronto, hitting Devon Travis on the thigh, if I remember correctly, with an obvious intent pitch on his first pitch of the inning. He then settled back to business, but benefited from a strange double play initiated by shortstop Dansby Swanson grabbing and dropping probably intentionally a sharp liner by Ryan Goins. Travis, of course, held first, so Swanson tossed to Phillips for the force, and Phillips threw on to first to complete the double play while Travis and Goins convened at first like they were meeting up for a coffee. Foltynewicz then finished up for the day by getting Darwin Barney to ground out, completing a workmanlike line of 6 innings pitched, three runs, six hits, one walk, one strikeout, and one statement hit batsman, on 102 pitches.

Leone returned to the hill for the Atlanta sixth, and if the Jays had any hopes of working their way further back into this one they were dashed by more weirdness that benefitted the home team. Kurt Suzuki, whose dagger had put the finishing touches on Joe Biagini’s nightmare first, hit a simple bouncer toward third. Barney went behind the bag to time a hop and toss out the slow catcher. But the ball hit the base and bounded over Barney’s head into the corner for a double.

If the Jays had been somewhat unhinged by Biagini’s start, this finished them off. Leone walked Jace Peterson. While receiving a pitch to Swanson from Leone, Luke Maile thought he saw enough daylight at second to take a shot at Suzuki—he didn’t belong there anyway. But Maile made a bad throw, the ball ended up in no man’s land, and Suzuki and Peterson advanced. Leone fanned Swanson for the first out, but former and mostly unremarkable Blue Jay Emilio Bonifacio, hitting for the pitcher, hit a sacrifice fly to right to score Suzuki, who of course shouldn’t have been there.

Gibbie turned to the lefty J.P. Howell to face Inciarte, which worked out just great . . . for Atlanta. Inciarte singled to right to score Peterson, and advanced to second when Bautista mishandled the ball in right. Phillips drew a walk before Camargo, hitting in Freeman’s spot, grounded into a fielder’s choice to end the mini-agony. With the score now 8-3, and everybody’s mind on something else, there wasn’t much likelihood of a Toronto rally.

But that didn’t mean the fireworks were over. Both teams were helped in the seventh by sparkling plays in the field, Inciarte making a leaping grab of Ceciliani’s deep drive in the top of the inning off Jason Motte, Ryan Goins making a very fine backhand stop, spin, and throw to get the no-longer-very-fast Kemp, and Howell making a nice pick on a sharp hopper to get Markakis.

But the inning, the night, the remainder of the Toronto stay in Atlanta, and the rest of the “news cycle” as they say on CNN, was dominated by something else that happened in the seventh that would not show up in the box score. With two outs and nobody on, Motte struck out Kevin Pillar, with Suzuki holding on to the foul tip. But Pillar, frustration obviously boiling over, thought Motte had quick-pitched him, and shouted something out to him as Motte headed for the dugout. Motte started to veer back towards Pillar and the plate, but plate umpire Brian O’Nora ordered him back to the dugout, some sullen shuffling around took place, and Pillar returned to fetch his glove while order was restored.

But unfortunately Jose Bautista sometimes doesn’t have the greatest sense of timing. After the Freeman injury, after the payback to Travis, after the unpleasantness directed toward Motte, with lefty Eric O’Flaherty pitching and one out, Bautista capped off his solid day at the plate with his third hit, a rocket no-doubter over the left-field wall. Then he chose to resurrect the Bat Flip in a modified way. Bad choice, wrong time. As Bautista rounded first, Peterson, who had moved over to first when Freeman came out, jawed something at Bautista as he passed, and by the time Bautista reached the plate the benches had emptied somewhat; again, to no great mayhem.

The game ended uneventfully, as the Jays went quickly after the Bautista homer, Danny Barnes took only ten pitches to mow down Atlanta in the eighth, and the Jays went very meekly against Jim Johnson on thirteen pitches with two strikeouts.

It was almost as if both teams were really eager to get into the shower and wash the stink of this one away.

Lost in the mess of the end of the game was the tragedy and redemption of Joe Biagini, which should have been the only story of the night. Instead, in the story of this season, if the Jays’ now-stalled recovery from their bad start never gets going again, we may point to this night as a key moment in the incipient tragedy of the 2017 Toronto Blue Jays.

A note from yer humble scribe: what follows is a truncated version of a very nice piece that I wrote about a very bad ball game that took place on Tuesday night. Somehow I chose a Mac “command” key that I didn’t know existed and sent over 2200 words tumbling off into cyberspace. I have tried not to recreate the piece verbatim, but to preserve its themes and reflections, and I hope that it will serve as a useful, if not complete, place-holder in the chronicle of the season. As for my careless computer work, I have been chastened. Bigly.

It would have been easy to dismiss Monday night’s dismal Jays’ performance as a one-off, an inevitable slack night after a run of really good ball. Besides, with a fill-in pitcher going for the Jays, and so on . . .

So tonight, the monkey of the streak off their backs, and the redoubtable Marco Estrada on the hill for Toronto, our boys would surely revert to their recent sterling play and winning ways.

Too bad nobody told these pesky Atlanta guys, wallowing as low in the standings as we are, but who are able to put up a two-through-five batting order of Brandon Phillips, Freddie Freeman, Matt Kemp, and Nick Markakis that’s awfully robust for a team that’s supposed to be in the depths of a complete rebuild.

So although it was disappointing, it wasn’t surprising that Atlanta jumped on Estrada for two quick runs in the top of the first, matching their start on Monday night, and introducing a game sequence that ended up being remarkably like Monday’s: Atlanta would jump ahead, the Jays would claw back, Atlanta would put a little more distance between them, the Jays would almost get it back to even, and so on.

So cue all the clichés, like too little too late, like Sisyphian task, even harken back to good old Lenin’s “One step forward, two steps back”. It was so much the pattern, that in the course of these last two games, once the first pitch was thrown, the Blue Jays never once had a lead, and only once, in the sixth inning of tonight’s game, did they tie it at 5-5, only to have Dansby Swanson hit a home run leading off the seventh to restore the Atlanta lead, which was only relegated to a tie for the duration of one commercial break.

Like his previous start when he gave up a first-inning two-run homer to Nelson Cruz of Seattle, Estrada again had trouble in the first, only to settle in and cruise through to the fifth, by which time the Jays had scratched it back to a 3-2 deficit. But in an uncharacteristic display for Estrada, he faltered again in the fifth, giving up a double to Phillips followed by a home run by Semi-Canuck-but-Totally-All-Star Freddie Freeman. Then he settled back in for the sixth, to finish in a breeze, though he’d given up five runs.

In the meantime lefty Jaime Garcia plowed through the Toronto lineup like a farmer tilling his field, at one point inducing 9 consecutive ground ball outs. Eventually, though, as is his pattern, Garcia started to get reachable, and the Jays had managed to package doubles by Kevin Pillar and Devon Travis around a walk to Justin Smoak in the fourth to get back into it.

In the bottom of the sixth, the Jays finished off Garcia and touched up his successor Jose Ramirez, utilizing another walk to Smoak, another double by Travis, an RBI single by Darwin Barney, and an RBI groundout by Zeke Carrera to bring the team briefly to the heady pinnacle of a 5-5 tie.

Mention should be made of the fact that throughout these two games the Atlanta lineup has shown a remarkable ability to deliver the two-out base hit to score runs, and interestingly some of the Jays started to emulate this lovely practice. Their first three runs had been delivered with two outs, the first two on the afore-mentioned Travis double in the fourth, and the third on a solo two-out homer by Pillar in the fifth.

For some reason Toronto Manager John Gibbons, aka Old Lackadaisical, decided to wake up and start managing the Jays in the top of the seventh. They shoulda let him sleep.

First, he reasoned that at 93 pitches over six innings it was probably wise to call it a night for the free-and-easy-throwing Estrada, who looked on this night as if he could go on forever. Perhaps Gibbie was covering his own buttsky here, figuring that if he sent him back out there and he got touched up, the criticism would be worse than if he pulled him. So, pull him he did, replacing him with the usual solid Danny Barnes, and Barnes immediately (well, almost, it was an 0-1 pitch) served up what turned out to be the game-winning home run to Dansby Swanson, future star who is currently hitting below .200.

Then, fast forward to the bottom of the eighth, when for once Gibbie correctly to mind my mind resorted to the bunt, but then stuck with it when it was past its due date. So Devon Travis, two doubles in his trophy bag already, was at the plate with nobody out, Darrell Ceciliani on second running for Kendrys Morales who had led off with a single, and Justin Smoak on first with his third walk of the night. (Yes, this is the same Justin Smoak of old, but these days not the same hitter at all.)

Despite Travis’ success earlier in the game, the law of averages has to catch up with him, and I can imagine Gibbie didn’t want to have to listen to the howls of Mike from Mississauga and his ilk after the game, so the bunt was on. But Travis’ first attempt was dreadful, against the reliever Arodys Vizcaino. At this point, I would have let him loose and taken my chances. “Nevertheless”, like Elizabeth Warren, “[Gibbie] persisted.” With two strikes on him and the bunt off, Travis went down on strikes.

The Jays weren’t quite done yet. Darwin Barney, frequently Mr. Clutch for Toronto, came up and blistered one that 99 times out of a hundred would have split the outfielders in right centre and gone all the way to the wall. But Brandon Phillips at second leapt up, snared it in his glove, and caught the dead duck Ceciliani two steps off the bag at second for a double play. It was just one of those dreadful, up-and-down, “eek-uk” moments.

So at this point job one was to keep the deficit at one to give us a chance in the bottom of the ninth. Manager Gibbons tabbed Joe Smith to do it, and after giving up two singles leading off the Atlanta ninth he seemed fair to be getting out of when he got Phillips to hit into a double play. The next move was to walk Freeman (great idea, that), leaving Smith with runners on the corners and two down.

Then Gibbie lost his nerve with Smith and brought in Roberto Osuna, who never pitches as well when he comes into an inning in progress, to face Matt Kemp. It didn’t go well. A Kemp double to left scored the two runners, and then Mr. I-spit-on-your-Toronto-face Nick Markakis singled home Kemp with the last, two-out coup de gràce, giving Atlanta a soul-destroying three-run lead.

After that, the air, and no doubt most of the fans, went out of the stadium.

If tonight’s game was an audition for Mike Bolsinger to stay in the rotation for a while, I don’t imagine he’s too hopeful of a call back any time soon.

There’s a spot for Bolsinger, or someone, at least until one of Jay Happ or Francisco Liriano comes back. It’s a given now that Joe Biagini has call on the last fill-in position, considering how well he’s done in his first two starts.

Bolsinger had a pretty good first outing, when he only had one bad inning out of five, giving up two runs in the second inning of a subsequent 6-0 Cleveland win in which he took the loss. Manager John Gibbons had to have hoped he might get at least a similar outing this time.

But Bolsinger, a control pitcher with a great curve ball, had all kinds of location problems tonight. Though he lasted four and two thirds innings, he gave up five earned runs on eight hits with two walks and three strikeouts, and, bizarrely, 3 hit batters. It’s a good thing he doesn’t throw very hard and they were all breaking balls or there would have been mayhem on the field. So there’s an open start in the rotation when Bolsinger’s number comes up again, but it’s an open question, or at least it should be, as to whether he gets that start.

But to be fair to Bolsinger, there was lots of other blame to be apportioned for this one, from some sloppy play in the field, to Leonel Campos grooving one late to Freddie Freeman for an extra three runs, to Manager John Gibbons, even, for giving up on this one too soon and letting Campos pitch to Freddie Freeman in the sixth inning.

And some of the blame has to go in the form of credit, to an Atlanta lineup that is relentless in attacking the pitcher, and fearless in facing down the pressure of two outs and ducks on the pond.

Right from the beginning, it seemed like Atlanta had to get down to crunch time before doing its damage. In the first inning, Bolsinger caught leadoff hitter Ender Inciarte looking on a 1-2 pitch. After the Inciarte strikeout, Bolsinger’s breaking ball riding in and hitting Brandon Phillips seemed innocuous enough, especially when sometime Canadian (kudos to him for donning the red for the World Baseball Classic) Freddie Freeman hit into a fielder’s choice from third for the second out.

But going up there with two outs was like catnip to Matt Kemp, whom I’m sure the Jays wanted to stuff in a (very big) locker by the end of the night. On an 0-1 pitch Kemp stroked a single into left. Freeman, who plays with brio, was going first to third almost from the crack of the bat.

If a first-inning mistake costing a run can be said to be a soul-destroying turning point, then a terrible throw by the normally sensible Zeke Carrera on Kemp’s ball was certainly one such. With the play in front of him, and no obvious chance of getting Freeman at third, Zeke decided to go for it anyway. Fair enough, but as he sometimes does, he airmailed it to the bag. The ball sailed over the cutoff man and of course Kemp sailed into second.

No problem. Two outs. Just get the hitter. No, big problem. Two outs is show time for these guys. And who was at the plate? None other than Nick Markakis, who spent a career wearing out the Blue Jays when he was an Oriole, and why did the Orioles let him go?

If I’m Mike Bolsinger, and in the position he’s in regarding the rotation, it bothers me a lot, a whole lot, to scuffle a bit in the first inning against a good-hitting team and come out down 2-0, rather than 1-0. So when Markakis inevitably grounded a base hit up the middle scoring two (it was remarkable how many ground ball base hits Atlanta seemed to be snaking through the infield, as if Toronto’s positioning was always just that one step off), it had to put Bolsinger in a hole in terms of his confidence, even if he did pop up Tyler Flowers to end the inning.

It didn’t exactly help Bolsinger that 43-year-old geezer Bartolo Colon whipped through the bottom of the first on ten pitches, as if he were facing a high school team.

And he sure didn’t help himself when he pinged off* right fielder Adonis Garcia on a 2-1 pitch leading off the second. Next thing you knew he was on third, stolen base to second, took third when Luke Maile’s throw ticked off Ryan Goins’ glove, and then off Devon Travis’. Well, third base and one out, since Jace Peterson struck out on the stolen base. So Dansby Swanson plated him with a sac fly, and it’s 3-0 Atlanta. Bolsie walked Ender Inciarte before getting Brandon Phillips to sky to centre.

*”Pinged off”: kid ballplayers in Toronto and area always used this term for getting hit by a pitch when I was coaching. Is it used generally, or is it local?

Maybe the baseball gods do distribute some justice, because Colon did a bit of showboating to retire his fourth straight in the bottom of the second. Kendrys Morales hit a hopper back to him, he picked it, took it out of his glove, and pretended to be counting the stitches or something while Morales laboured down the line. Finally, he roused himself from his torpor and tossed over for the out. That was immediately followed by Justin Smoak hitting one over Freddie Freeman’s head at first and into the corner where a fan touched it for a ground rule double. The outfield for Smoak was playing straight up despite the shift again. Don’t get it.

Then Devon Travis hit one deep to centre that one-hopped over the fence for back-to-back ground-rule doubles, and the Jays’ first run. Too bad they gave up the Garcia run. Too bad Zeke missed a cutoff man. Too bad it’s not 1-1 instead of 3-1 . . .

In the top of the third Bolsinger settled in and retired the side with eight pitches, though he had to throw a double play ball to Markakis to erase a Steve Kemp single. The Jays missed a chance in the bottom of the third to creep closer when Freddie Freeman made a really good snag of an errant throw from Danby Swanson at short to retire Kevin Pillar for the second out. The rushed throw was well off line and one-hopped Freeman, but he dipped way back into foul territory with his free foot to snag the throw for the out. Thing is, Colon then walked Zeke Carrera and gave up a single to right by Bautista that, with two outs, surely would have scored Pillar from second, but for Freeman keeping him off the bases. Still 3-1.

Another hit by pitch let Atlanta get another runner in scoring position to be cashed, making it 4-1, so that when the Jays answered in the bottom of the inning it was still a two-run deficit. Hard to play catchup when the other guys running away from you.

The Atlanta run was tinged with luck, but were it not for a great throw and tag by Bautista and Goins it could have been even worse. Catcher Tyler Flowers hit one off the end of his bat into centre for a single leading off the fourth. Adonis Garcia promptly replaced Flowers’ lack of speed with his own quickness by grounding into a fielder’s choice. Then Bolsinger hit the eight hitter Jace Peterson, his third hit batsman, pushing Garcia to second. Sigh. Of course the nine hitter Swanson hit one into the right-field corner to score Garcia, though he tried for two and Bautista and Goins combined for a nice throw and tag, while Peterson died at third.

So when Swanson returned the favour by throwing Travis’ infield single down the line allowing him to reach second, whence he scored on Mike Ohlman’s first major league hit and RBI, a single to centre, Toronto was still two down.

The fifth did Bolsinger in, not that you could see it coming. He quickly disposed of Phillips on a strikeout and Freeman on a lazy fly to Pillar, using only eight pitches, but then he hit the wall, and couldn’t finish the inning. You can thank Kemp and Markakis for that. Kemp waited out seven pitches then doubled to left. Markakis of course promptly singled him home for a 5-2 Atlanta lead. Bolsinger then walked Flowers. Pete Walker came out to talk to him, presumably because lefty J. P. Howell wasn’t ready. Too bad for everybody, because Garcia ticked one off Goins’ glove into centre that scored Markakis. Then Howell came in and got a groundout from Jace Peterson to end the inning, but it was now 6-2 for the visitors.

You can imagine, then, that when Kevin Pillar led off the bottom of the inning with a single and eventually came around to score on a double by Jose Bautista, it kind of felt like too little too late, and small potatoes at that, since Smoak walked with two outs after the Bautista double, but two-out base hits only seemed to be in the cards for Atlanta, as Travis grounded out to third. 6-3.

In the sixth John Gibbons sent Howell back out there, but in quick order he gave up a double to Swanson and a bunt single to Inciarte, and Gibbie came out with the hook. Strangely, with four innings left to hit and down only three runs, he brought in the least experienced member of the bullpen, the newly-returned Leonel Campos, who fanned the first batter he faced, Brandon Phillips, bringing up Freddie Freeman.

In bringing in Campos, and allowing him to pitch to Freeman, did Gibbie think based on one good inning that he was the right guy for the job? We’ll never really know why him, but we sure know what happened, as he coughed up a three-run homer to Freeman that iced the game for Atlanta.

I worry here that the Toronto manager is starting to think in rigid terms about how to use his bullpen. Tonight, Ryan Tepera and Dominic Leone, who might have filled this role in the sixth, weren’t available for sure because of significant stints on Sunday against the Mariners. But Danny Barnes was last used on Saturday, and Joe Smith on Friday. Could it be that Campos was the choice because it was the sixth inning, and not time for the seventh-inning guy Barnes, and not time for the eighth-inning guy Smith?

When I coached, I learned quickly in tournament situations that you have to win the one you’re in, and you can’t worry about the semifinal until you’ve actually arrived there. Saving your best pitcher for a final that you didn’t make would qualify as a kids’ baseball version of Showaltering Zac Britton. If you don’t put out the fire in the sixth, the rest of the game doesn’t matter.

In any case a 6-3 deficit faced by a team that’s starting to score runs in bunches was turned into a blowout because arguably the best hitter in baseball at the moment was allowed to hit against an inexperienced callup.

Once the homer had been hit, it made sense to leave Campos in and have him eat some outs if he could, since the game was out of hand. After Freeman’s blast Campos gave up a run of his own, yielding a double to Matt Kemp, hitting Tyler Flowers, the fourth Toronto hit batsman in the game, and seeing Kemp score on a little (two-out, of course) flare to right by Adonis Garcia. 10-3 Atlanta.

From this point it hardly mattered that the Jays scored in the bottom of the seventh when reliever Ian Krol got two quick outs, then walked Morales and Smoak before coughing up Travis’ second double of the night to score Morales.

It should be noted that amidst the dreary dregs of this game Aaron Loup, who came on in the eighth to pick up Campos, while going about his business hit Nick Markakis with a pitch. The five hit batsmen by Toronto pitchers set a new franchise record for a single game.

There was one last bittersweet moment in the bottom of the ninth, when after Jose Bautista led off with a single against Josh Collmenter and Kendrys Morales flied out to left, Justin Smoak who continues to surge as the team’s leading power source hit a no-doubt blast to right that made the final score 10-6. The most bittersweet aspect, of course, being that if you subtract the extra run in the first caused by Carrera’s bad throw, Garcia’s run in the second after being hit by a pitch, stealing second, and advancing to third on a throwing error, Garcia’s run in the fourth after he’d been moved into scoring position when Bolsinger hit Peterson, and add the run the Jays didn’t score because of Freeman’s great scoop that killed an infield hit by Pillar, the game was tied. And we’re not even talking about whether Smith or Barnes would have given up the Freeman home run.

Ah yes, if wishes were horses . . .

After this great run lately, we were due for a stinker. This one was stinker enough for two streaks, so let’s start another tomorrow. Please.

There’s a line from the Gilbert and Sullivan operetta The Gondoliers that comes to mind after today’s game. In its silly plot (trust me, G and S operettas all have silly plots) one of the flower-market girls has to put on a blindfold and is spun around by the other girls and dropped off by chance in front of one of the handsome gondoliers, who will then become her beau. When she takes the blindfold off and sees that he’s the one she’s been pining for, she exclaims, “It’s too much happiness!”

That’s my reaction to today’s walk-off 3-2 Toronto win over the Mariners for the Blue Jays’ fifth straight win, bringing their record back to within four games of .500 after that dismal start in April.

If I had actually seen Lunch Bucket Boy Kevin Pillar’s walk-off homer with two outs and nobody on in the bottom of the ninth off Seattle closer Edwin Diaz, I would probably not just have exclaimed my line, but croaked from excitement afterwards.

But, it was another conflicted day for me. On the weekend of an art-gallery show, Friday night is the opening and Sunday afternoon is the tear-down and pickup, not to mention the awarding of the “People’s Choice” award, voted on by the show’s attendees, and awarded to the painting that receives the most votes. I mentioned the voting in my Friday night game story.

We had to meet someone at the gallery at three, thus the truncated report to follow, which will address only the first part of the game, and then comment briefly on its outcome.

The wait from three to four, when we could take our paintings down and the award would be announced was intermittently filled with chatting with friends from the gallery, snacking, and checking in on the game—yes, the dorky DeWalts were in service again—and it was excruciating. I wouldn’t compare it with the tension of watching the Wild Card Game last October, but there are definite points of similarity.

For some reason the gallery official who was counting the votes did it right in the room where the show was hung, and the process was so-o-o-o slow. But when she was finished, she turned around and said to my wife, “Oh, it’s really nice that you’re still here, because the People’s Choice painting is your ‘Three Little Bums from School’.” Amazingly, both she and I had voted for another painting of hers, so her total could have been higher.

It’s a 36 by 18 (that’s right—go big or go home, just like the “old Blue Jays”) painting based on a photo of our grandson and two of his JK friends, taken from the back, as they hang on a wooden fence waving at a passing fire truck. The title? Oh, it’s a coy adaptation of another G and S thing.

Is there anyone else chronicling the Blue Jays who has a not-so-secret penchant for Gilbert and Sullivan?

So, on to today’s game, which of course was marked by Mothers Day recognition and the return to the hill of Aaron Sanchez.

The opening pitch was thrown to Marco Estrada by his lovely mother, and if you don’t know the story by now, and haven’t seen the family photos published by Steven Brunt, you need to do that. Now. It’s okay. My story will still be here when you’re finished.

Then Sanchez took the mound for the top of the first. And what an exciting return to the fray it was.

Jean Segura (who else?) beat out an infield dribbler to Devon Travis to lead off the game (what else?) On the first pitch to Ben Gamel, the pesky but supremely talented Segura took off for second and appeared to beat, barely, a strong throw from Luke Maile, who, remember, had gunned down Guillermo Heredia on Saturday. The throw was right on the bag, and Ryan Goins’ snap tag hit the back of Segura’s hand as it reached the base. Apparently. And according to umpire Ted Barrett.

But the review overturned the call, based, no doubt, on one of the most stunning video views I have yet seen from the slow-motion close-up cameras. You can clearly see, and it’s posted on MLB.Com on the GameDay wrapup for this game, that Segura’s reaching hand was slightly above the ground as he slid into the bag. You can also clearly see that the tag, slapped onto the back of his hand from above, smacked the palm of his hand firmly into the dirt before his fingertips touched the bag. Out! Wow!

Sanchez proceeded to fan Ben Gamel on a 2-2 pitch after a tough 9-pitch at-bat. He then walked Nelson Cruz, which is a good thing, and retired Kyle Seager on a deep fly to Steve Pearce in left to end the inning. An infield hit, a walk, a strikeout, and 19 pitches for Aaron Sanchez in the first inning. Well, okay then.

The M’s started Ariel Miranda, a left-handed 28-year-old Cuban import, whom none of the Jays had ever seen. He came into the game with a 3-2 record, but an ERA of 5.20.

This was going to be a tricky assignment at best. Nobody comes out of Cuba and makes it to The Show who doesn’t have at least some serious baseball chops, and that certainly includes Mr. Miranda, who of course being left-handed came in at a disadvantage facing the Jays, considering that Jose Bautista is on the march, and a lefty turns both Kendrys Morales and Justin Smoak around to their more potent side.

And Miranda did not disappoint Manager Scott Servais. He threw a lot of pitches, true, going five innings plus a batter, and accumulating 100 pitches including three walks. But the rest was all good: one run, three hits, and eight strikeouts.

The one run that he gave up was the one batter he faced in the sixth, when he walked Jose Bautista. Scott Servais then called in James Pazos, a curious decision. Pazos is a burly, heat-throwing lefty, but another lefty would keep the next two batters, Morales and Smoak, still on the starboard side. It may be a measure of the serious problems Servais has with his pitching staff that he would go to a known quantity, throwing absolutely from the wrong side, instead of risking another call-up coming in. Not to mention that both teams had already gone through a lot of arms in this series.

In any case, Pazos got by Scylla—Morales—by striking him out, but he couldn’t get by Charybdis, Smoak. Now, I am reconstructing here, because I was at the gallery, but I heard the radio call of the Smoak at bat. The Jays were down 1-0—I’ll tell you about that in a minute—with one out and Bautista on first. The broadcaster thought Smoak had hit one to the wall in left centre, and absolutely did not do a home run call. But the hit was a true rope, and it maintained enough elevation, apparently, to carry over the fence when it did not look like it would. One run charged to Miranda, one run to Pazos, and Toronto had the lead.

Aaron Sanchez was good, very good when he had to be, but occasionally struggled with command. There were moments when the broadcasters thought he might be bleeding a bit onto his uniform from his troubled middle finger, but he certainly never went full-tilt Trevor Bauer on the mound. His line: 5 innings pitched, 78 pitches, one unearned run, five hits, two walks, and four strikeouts. The reports after the game were that his finger never bothered him, and from what I saw there may have been some problems with the location of his breaking balls, but certainly not with their crispness or bite.

The unearned run off him was a real ouchy. Veteran catcher Carlos Ruiz, 38 years old and built like a fireplug, five-ten and 215 pounds, topped the ball so slowly to third, Darwin Barney coming in and firing to first, that he may or may not have been safe. First base umpire John Tumpane called him out, but the call was overturned on review.

I won’t tell you who was next up, but Mr. Perpetual Annoyance ripped one into the right-field corner. Bautista made a perfect play off the wall involving a complete spin, and fired the ball dead on line to second, where the batter was hustling for the bag. Safe or not at second, the lumbering Ruiz was not going past third in any eventuality, except the one that happened. The throw hit the sliding runner and bounced back past Devon Travis toward short right field. The batter was safe with an earned double because you can’t anticipate a close call, Ruiz trotted in to score, and Bautista was automatically charged with, on the face of it, a very unfair error, but correct according to the rules, making the run unearned.

The Seattle run in the top of the fifth was the last action I saw live.

Then came the Smoak homer putting the Jays in the lead in the bottom of the sixth, leaving Dominic Leone, who had relieved Sanchez for the sixth, the pitcher of record, giving hime the chance to be the garbage man for a second game in a row. It didn’t take him long to divest himself of that status, as he served up an 0-1 gopher ball to Jarrod Dyson, who was leading off the seventh.

Leone got the next two batters, and then John Gibbons called on Ryan Tepera to replace him. This was one time when Toronto got tremendous mileage out of its relievers. Leone went one and two thirds albeit having given up the tying homer, and Tepera got the last out of the seventh and then finished up. Without having seen it, you just know that Tepera was fabulous. Just check out his line: two and a third innings pitched, two strikeouts, just 23 pitches. That’s it.

Sometimes justice prevails, because Tepera finished off the top of the ninth for Toronto which meant he was the beneficiary of Pillar’s dramatic blast and took the win.

As for Seattle, Scott Servais also got good ‘pen after Pazos gave up the homer to Smoak. Nick Vincent pitched a clean seventh, former Jay Mark Rzepczynski (pronunced “Shep-ynsky”) and Tony Zych (the Polish Cavalry?) kept Toronto off the board in the eighth, with Zych picking up a bit of a mess from the lefty Rzepczynski and cleaning it up.

Then Servais made the very reasonable decision to bring in his young slender closer Edwin Diaz to shut the door on the Blue Jays in the ninth and he did it until he didn’t, grounding out Ryan Goins and Luke Maile before Pillar put the game in the win column for the Jays.

I’ll close with an amusing anecdote from Jerry Howarth. One of the disadvantages of watching the game like a hawk on our new 4K is that I don’t get to hear Jerry’s stories.* When Rzepczynski came on for Seattle, he recalled that when he first came to the Blue Jays Jerry had gone to the Jays’ media rep and said that he was confused, because he couldn’t find Rzepczynski in the media guide to see how to spell his name. The response from the media rep was, “Have you looked under the ‘Rs’?” Jerry recounted his answer: “Why in the world would I do that??”

So, thanks to more solid pitching, only one earned run over nine innings, almost perfect defence (I haven’t mentioned Pillar’s back-to-the-plate catch on Valencia in the fourth, but you should look up the video) and Pillar’s game-ending heroics on the other side of the ball, the Jays have now won five in a row, and climbed within four games of

.500. After their 2-11 start to the season, they have won 15 out of 25. That’s a .600 pace, folks.

*Anyone who suggests muting the TV and listening to the radio crew has never tried it. The radio broadcast is closer to “real time” than the TV transmission. If you’re listening to Jerry et al, you will know that so-and-so struck out before you see the pitch thrown. I hate that. Even the TV transmission that comes through the Rogers OnDemand box is actually a beat slower than the TV transmission coming through the simple, free digital box. We have the former in our sun room, and the latter in the kitchen, and they’re only ten feet away from each other, but I can hear the home run call on TV from the kitchen when the ball hasn’t reached the batter yet. Technically probably explainable, but esthetically terrible.

Where to start about today’s game? I’m torn between:

One: Maybe we should start listening to Papa John Gibbons when he drawls, “No, I’m not worried about [Bautista/Tulo/Martin/whoever]. He’s a pro. We know what he can do. He’ll come around.”

And two: It’s well past time to recognize how much the “lunch bucket” guys, Pillar, Carrera, Goins, Barney, now Maile and maybe Travis, but especially Kevin Pillar and Zeke Carrera at the top of the order, have done to change the culture of the Toronto Blue Jays in the wake of all the injuries to the “go big or go home” contingent in the team’s makeup.

Obviously, either approach would provide an appropriate entrée for addressing the Jays’ fourth straight win this afternoon, a tight but satisfying affair that ended up with the same score as Thursday night’s series opener, 7-2 for the good guys.

Let’s start with Jose Bautista, since he was the one who iced the game. How natural it seemed that it unfolded as it did. Kevin and Zeke—they’ll get their due anon—had manufactured a run for Toronto in the third. Marcus Stroman’s flair for the dramatic, that is, multiple baserunners followed by multiple strikeouts, protected that run until the fifth, when an maddeningly scratchy run by the Mariners tied the game.

Then the sixth saw the Ms take the lead in more traditional fashion with three solid singles, putting Stroman on the hook for the loss until Kendrys Morales, newly returned to the lineup after a few days on the shelf, took him right back off the hook with a rousing blast to right, putting the game in the hands of the Toronto bullpen.

Seattle’s bullpen, sadly, had been in play since Ryan Weber, to all appearances a fine young pitcher, became the next in a long line of Seattle starters to develop arm trouble, and had to pull himself from the fray after three and two thirds innings.

So the seventh inning dawned with that exquisite Toronto tension in play: would the bullpen continue to dazzle? Would the lineup manage to come up with a run or two to put the game away?

Of course, back in the heady days of the Blue Jays Bombers, circa pre-September last year, we didn’t worry about such things, did we? At least one decisive blast off the other guy’s relievers was just a given; you never had to worry about the runs, just the bullpen.

Now it’s almost exactly the reverse: can we scratch out a run while the bullpen stays strong?

So the dance of the end game started. Today, it wasn’t as easy for the Jays’ relievers as it has been. It took the combined efforts of Jason Grilli, Aaron Loup, and Dominic Leone to suppress a dangerous Seattle threat in the seventh, in most dramatic fashion, and keep the game even.

Boy, did this inning have moments. Grilli started with a bit of bad luck. No, I’m not talking about the fact that he had to face Jean Segura, but what happened when he did. Segura topped a teasing little hopper down the third base line. Darwin Barney would have been lucky to get Segura with a perfect play, but he lost the handle, and Segura was across with an infield hit.

Then came one of those dramatic moments that don’t appear in the box score, and seldom make the game reports. Ben Gamel lashed one deep to centre that stayed in the park, allowing Kevin Pillar to draw a bead on it. Now, I haven’t mentioned this, but besides all of his other talents, Segura is plenty quick. He tagged up on the ball, and broke for second with the catch. But then he stopped to admire the Pillar weapon that’s seldom mentioned, his sterling arm. From the deepest confines of the park, Pillar threw a bomb, all the way in the air, that Ryan Goins caught at his knees while standing on the bag at second.

Then Nelson Cruz fought off a pitch and barely muscled an opposite-field single to right, with Segura stopping at second. Considering the damage Cruz could have done, this wasn’t a bad outcome, but it brought John Gibbons out to bring Aaron Loup in to match up against Kyle Seager. Loup got Seager all right, fanning him for the second out, but there was the little matter of the wild pitch he threw during the at-bat that let the runners move up. Then it was Dominic Leone’s turn to face Danny Valencia, who, remember, was let go by the Jays in the middle of 2015 in favour of keeping Chris Colabello, and just might have been feeling a bit of extra motivation. It only took Leone two pitches in induce an easy grounder to third from the still-dangerous Valencia, to end the inning. Keep that number, two pitches from Leone, in mind, okay?

Wait a minute, you might say, aren’t you taking a long time to get around to Jose Bautista. Fair enough, but his moment is right around the corner.

After Grilli, Loup, and Leone did their thing in the top of the seventh, Scott Servais brought in Nick Vincent, who has been one of his rocks in the bullpen, to keep the game level.

But with one out Pillar singled to centre for his third hit of the game. Zeke Carrera then hit a grounder off Segura’s glove for an infield single. This brought Bautista to the plate for the key at-bat of the game. But wait: isn’t there supposed to be a different thread here about the “lunch-bucket guys”? That’s okay, in the seventh the two story lines converged as Pillar and Carrera were the ones who got to ride home on the strength of Bautista’s blast to centre that broke the game open.

Zych got the last two outs in the seventh, but it was a bit late, eh? So as of seven, that set up to Tony Zych to take the loss, and let’s see, who was it? That’s right, it was Dominic Leone, remember him? Two pitches to end the Seattle sixth, and now he was in line for the win. No wonder they sometimes refer to middle relievers as “garbage men” for picking up a win here and there like vultures with tasty road kill.

With the three-run lead, John Gibbons reverted to his close-out protocol and brought in Joe Smith, who escaped damage in the eighth despite giving up a single and a walk. In fact, he left only one man on base, because Luke Maile, lunch-bucket guy, combined with Ryan Goins, lunch-bucket guy, on a great throw-down and tag out of Guillermo Heredia trying to steal second after he singled off Smith.

Then the lunch-bucket guys manufactured a couple of neat add-on runs in the bottom of the eighth, but this wasn’t their first contribution to the afternoon’s festivities, so let’s go back a bit and see what else the guys from the poorer part of town did to make their mark on this game.

Ryan Weber had started the game by retiring eight of the first nine batters he faced, having given up only a double to that other guy, Bautista, in the first. But there were a number of hard hit balls that made you wonder about when something was going to start shaking down for Toronto.

The eight out of first nine retired naturally brought Kevin Pillar back to the plate with two down and nobody on in the third. We’re starting to have a thing here with Pillar, and I’m going to start watching it, and that’s how often he seems to get something going that pays off when he comes up with two down and nobody on.

So this time he chipped in the Jays’ second hit when he ripped a line single over the outstretched glove of the leaping Taylor Motter at second. With Zeke Carrera at the plate and not much to lose, Pillar took off and swiped second. Like they do, Zeke’s eyes lit up a bit when he saw the duck out there on the pond, and he whacked a grounder to Motter’s glove side that just got under the shaggy second baseman’s dive, bounced into right, and brought Pillar home with the first run of the game. Poor Motter: over his glove, under his glove, he didn’t know what might come next.

Lunch bucket guy (let’s call them the LB Boys, okay?) Ryan Goins did a fundamental baseball thing in the fourth inning that gave Toronto another scoring chance, even though it didn’t pay off. What was that fundamental? Put the flippin’ ball in play! Two outs and nobody on again, and the Mariners into a shift for Goins that put Danny Valencia on the outfield grass down the first base line, Goins hit a hard grounder down the line. It didn’t have double written all over it, and it was the kind of ball that Justin Smoak gobbles up, but Valencia mis-timed a hop, maybe off a seam, and butchered it; Goins ended up on second. The only reason he died there was because LB Boy Darwin Barney, who was making Jarrod Dyson run all over the place in centre field all day with nothing to show for it, drove him into right centre where he made a (nother) nice running catch to end the inning.

In the fifth it was LB Boy Pillar who doubled over Gamel’s head in right (going the other way) with two outs and nobody on (again), but he died there when LB Boy Carrera flew out to (where else?) Dyson in centre.

In the sixth, with one out, after Morales’ home run had re-tied the game, Justin Smoak finally got away with pulling a hard grounder into the shift. All he had to do was hit it so hard that it went off the glove of Segura, shifted into short right, for a single. This brought LB Boy Goins to the plate for one of the cheekiest moments of the game. I don’t know whether it came from the bench or not, but didn’t they put on a hit-and-run, with dump truck Smoaky at first!

Time for some baseball 101 here: Let’s keep in mind here that the hit and run is more properly the run and hit, and is intended to get a guy from first to third on a base hit, with the secondary accomplishment of staying out of the double play. With a hitter at the plate who has a sharp eye and good bat control (good luck finding one of those around these days!) a runner who might not otherwise be a threat to steal breaks for second with the pitch, triggering the middle infielders to have to cover the bag. Generally, and they arrange this before every batter, if not every pitch, it would be the opposite field guy to the hitter, so if it’s a lefty at the plate, the shortstop covers. The hitter, seeing the shortstop breaking for the bag, slaps the ball toward where the shortstop was, but now isn’t. The runner, with a full head of steam, makes it to third and the hitter’s got a base knock to boot. When it works, it’s a thing of beauty.

So when reliever Tony Zych committed to the plate, Smoak took off, Jean Segura broke for the bag to take a throw, and Goins bounced one right past the spot where Segura had been stationed before he broke for the bag. In this case, Smoak had to stop at second because, well, he’s Justin Smoak, and also because the hit-and-run doesn’t work quite as well when there’s a lefty at the plate and the hit is to left, because the left fielder is so much closer to third base. But the secondary goal was met: if Smoak hadn’t gone with the pitch, it was a dead cinch double-play ball to Segura. Associate LB Boy (not sure if he qualifies yet, but he’s working on it) Travis ended the threat by popping out to Motter at second, but still, it was a moment.

Then in the seventh, as we’ve seen, LB Boys, Pillar and Carrera set the table for Bautista’s game-winning home run.

So now we come to the bottom of the eighth that I mentioned before, after LB Boys Maile and Goins had teamed up to gun down Heredia’s attempted steal in the top of the eighth.

So by now we’ve Jose’s second consecutive decisive blast, after Friday night’s two-run shot, and we’ve got a three-run lead, and the bullpen’s been golden so far. It’s still nice to tack on a couple of extras though, even if only to take a little pressure off your closer.

The big lefty James Pazos, who brings plenty of heat, got the call from Scott Servais to pitch the eighth. (Wish the announcers would pronounce his name right—they keep calling him Scott “Service”. ‘Course, that’s probably how he pronounces it. Americans. Sheesh.) Maybe Servais went with a lefty because LB Boy Ryan Goins was leading off.

Wow, is this a trend?

Anyway, Goins did it again and lifted one softly over the left side of the infield for a single. After LB Boy Barney fanned, aspiring LB Boy Devon Travis bounced a slow one towards second, where Taylor Motter was ready to gift the Blue Jays with an extra out. It was on his glove side, and he went in and picked it, and really only had the play at first. But he looked at second because Goins had to stop to let the ball go by, and made a late decision to try for a force on Goins. In his haste to turn and throw, his feet slipped out from under him and he embarrassingly spiked the throw into the ground. Everybody safe on the error and no place to hide for Mr. Motter.

With LB Boy Maile at the plate, Pazos, his back to third as a lefty, had a mental lapse and didn’t check Goins who easily stole third. Maybe rattled, he hit Maile on a hand with a pitch to load the bases. Long pause while we all thought, OMG, another injury, Mike Ohlman’s the starting catcher! But Maile shrugged it off and took his base.

With the lineup turned over that brought up LB Boy Pillar, who hit a sac fly to left that not only scored Goins but allowed Travis to move up to third, setting up what came next.

Would you believe a delayed double steal, with Zeke Carrera at the plate? Maile, of all people, broke for second when Pazos went to the plate. Travis broke down a bit from third and stopped. Catcher Carlos Ruiz stepped out, fired to second, and Travis broke for the plate. Motter, covering second and with his team down four runs, correctly ignored the easy out on the incoming Maile, and fired back to Ruiz. Unfortunately for him his throw took Ruiz a bit up the first-base line, and Travis slid across safely with no review even considered. My kids used to do that all the time in Peewee, but you don’t see it too often in the big leagues any more.

Okay, after that display we have to add Devon Travis to the LB Brigade, full patch member!

John Gibbons had both Roberto Osuna and the new guy Leonel Campos warming up for the ninth, but when they picked up the extra two runs, Campos got the call, with Osuna standing by.

Of course Jean Segura was leading off, and of course he shot a double into the left field corner. Campos, who was unable to match Thursday night’s performance, walked Ben Gamel on four pitches. In fact, the only strike he threw was the one Segura hit, which was on a 1-0 count. So, best laid plans and not taking any chances, Campos was out and Osuna in after all, probably because he was already hot, and also because he was maybe a little better rested than anybody else left in the ‘pen.

Well, that was the ticket. Osuna produced the final three outs on six pitches without letting in a run. Nelson Cruz hit into a highlight-reel double play featuring LB Boy Travis and LB Boy Goins, and a great scoop by Bomber (i.e., not LB Boy) Smoak at first. Travis picked it, fed a nice underhand flip to Goins who did an Ozzie Smith leap over the sliding Gamel and unloaded a low throw to first that Smoak scooped with panache. Kyle Seager, who was almost totally neutralized in this series, lifted a fly ball to centre on an 0-2 pitch, and this one was in the can. Easy-peasy.

So, we take three straight from the Angels, win our fourth in a row, and climb to within five games of five hundred, through a happy threesome of six good innings from Stroman plus two good innings from the bullpen, a big bash from a resurgent Jose Bautista, and lots of great old-timey style baseball from our very own Lunch Bucket Boys.

This is getting fun!

And Aaron Sanchez returns to the hill tomorrow on Mother’s Day. Yay!

Tonight the Blue Jays’ pitching staff continued its dominance of the theoretically potent Seattle lineup for the second night in a row, registering a crisp and clean 4-0 shutout.

The Mariners, who put four legitimate .300 hitters in the lineup even with Robinson Cano sidelined by a nagging leg complaint, have racked up seventeen consecutive goose egg innings against a scrambling and injury-riddled Toronto pitching staff.

In fact, they haven’t touched the plate since Nelson Cruz wasted Marco Estrada’s last “warmup pitch” in the first inning of Thursday night’s game.

Let’s get this out of the way right now: everybody loves Joe Biagini. He’s funny, insightful, inarticulate in an amazingly articulate way, and irrepressibly affectionate. Who else would ever even think of giving Jose Bautista a great big hug after one of Jose’s monster shots?

But we have to be honest, too. We wouldn’t love him quite so much if he wasn’t such a skilled, cracker-jack hurler. After all, as much as Muni Kawasaki made us happy, and still does, even as he recedes into memory, we still kind of cringed when he came up to the plate with the game on the line, even if he did come through in memorable fashion a couple of times.

So as we watched Joe Biagini grow into his important bullpen role last year, it quickly grew in the backs of our minds that we were looking at an important part of the future of the Toronto starting rotation. Well, folks, it’s pretty obvious that given the opportunity offered to him by the shocking rash of injuries suffered by our rotation, now three-fifths down, which is not as bad as BlackHawk Down, but getting there, that the future is here.

Two starts: nine innings pitched, one unearned run, six hits, no walks, seven strikeouts, 120 pitches, four innings against the pesky Tampa Bay Rays, and five innings plus a batter for his first win as a starter against these same potent (did I mention that?) Mariners.

‘Nuff said on Biagini. Welcome to the bigs, Joe, you’re ready.

Not quite enough said. There was a quintessential Joe moment after the game. Arash Madani was doing the post-game with him, and he asked him a silly question, really, whether, if the coaches came to him and asked him to join the rotation for the rest of the year, he would agree to it. And a perfectly straight-faced Biagini’s response was, “Well, first I’d come to you and ask you, and if you said it was okay, well, I’d do it.” Madani did not have an answer for that.

I have to talk about journalistic scruples now. When I write a long form story about a Blue Jays’ game, I have watched every inning of that game. I feel very strongly about that. If I didn’t see it, I don’t write about it. I’m so scrupulous about journalism that if I were in the White House press corps I would have been pitched from the first daily press briefing Sean Spicer ever gave.

I only saw the end of tonight’s game, from the bottom of the seventh on, so that’s all I’ll write about below. The intro stuff about Joe Biagini pitching tonight, you’ll notice, includes nothing about his actual performance, or the Jays’ taking a lead they never yielded, so that was fair game.

I had to make a choice tonight. My wife, who is an accomplished oil painter, working from family photos to portray striking moments in the life of our family, had three paintings in an art gallery show that opened tonight.

Now, baseball’s baseball, and it does consume a big part of my life, but loyalty to your wife of nearly 49 years is a pretty important thing, too, and besides, you know, someone had to take some pictures of this important event.

But I wanted to keep in touch so at the last minute I tossed my “ball game” radio into the bag with the camera.

Now we have to talk about my radio. We were having trouble pulling in 590 The Fan around the house early last season, because of that stupid weak AM signal they put out. Are they ever going to carry the Jays on a nice clear FM frequency? Probably not. I wasn’t writing daily stories yet, but as always I needed to hear the game, even if I was out gardening.

So I started looking for some 2016 version of the good old transistor radio with earphones that we used to have, a wearable earbuds radio that had an AM band. Well, guess what? There ain’t hardly no such thing out there. Any little unit with earbuds and a radio receiver only had FM. Really.

I did find something, though, and since it was the only thing out there, I ordered it. You wouldn’t believe these things. They are, in fact, industrial strength noise-suppressing earphones, which happen to be equipped with an AM-FM unit, so that your lawn maintenance guy or your flight line baggage worker can listen to the radio while he/she is on the job. They’re huge black things, with a bright yellow stripe around the earphone cups, presumably so that the airplane you’re guiding to a parking space on the tarmac doesn’t run you over in the dark. They’ve even got a stamp on the head band labelled “Work Tunes”.

The sound quality’s not all that great either. Look, these things aren’t from Bose, and they’re not from Blaupunkt, either. They’re actually produced and sold by DeWalt, the power tool giant.

So it was my seriously dorky ball game headphones that I packed off to the art gallery where my wife’s work was being shown.

The gallery is a magical place in a magical spot, hidden away in the northwest corner of Toronto in an amazingly natural setting running down to the banks of the Humber River. There are two main studios connected by a path through a little garden area tricked out with some picnic tables. When they do a showing, the first studio, closer to the road, is where they set up the customary coffee-and-treats station, and the second one is where the show is hung.

My role at these openings is to be a charming and supportive spouse, take pictures as needed, and (this is most importance), give serious consideration to all the lovely pieces on display before voting for one of my wife’s works for the “People’s Choice” award.

My presence is not required every minute of the opening, and my kind wife understands my dilemma, so it was okay to slip away once in a while and check in on the game. My plan was to slip my dorky ‘phones out of the camera bag, kind of hide them behind my back, slip out of the studio, and perch at the picnic table from time to time and check in on the game.

I wish I had a picture; I must have been quite the spectacle. To compensate for my utter aged ordinariness, I try to sport sort of an older, faded, semi-hip, faux European vibe. Grey hair, trim grey beard. Top this with the dorky DeWalts, and, well, you get the picture.

So, here’s what I got from the DeWalts: after the end of the first there was no score. There was still no score in the bottom of the second, but things were promising. As I tuned in, Ryan Goins had just snaked one up the middle for the back half of leadoff back-to-back singles. Add to the picture above my exuberant fist bump when Darwin Barney laid down a perfect sacrifice bunt on the first pitch (Small ball! Yay!) A woman and her husband walking down the path to the gallery pretended not to notice me. When Devon Travis followed with an up-the-middle groundout to score Pearce, I thought, “we’re good now”, and went back inside as things got busy with speeches and such.

I tried to listen to the game on the car radio on the way home—my wife was driving—but the animated conversation of three very creative artists on a night out was a bit too much for “listening quietly and not shouting”, as I had been requested, so out came the DeWalts again, through which I learned that Jose Bautista had hit a two-run dinger to make the score 3-0, and that Biagini had been really effective again. Christian Bregman for the Mariners a little less so, as witness the Bautista jack, but not bad.

By the time we got home, I’d listened as the bottom of the order produced another small ball run in the sixth to push the Toronto lead to four. Goins led off with a single, went to third on a single to right by Barney, and trotted in on Travis’ sacrifice fly to left. Nice and easy. Five moments like this in April, and Toronto would be only a game under .500. C’mon, guys, it aint’ rocket science.

So what did I see when I did watch baseball tonight? I saw the tidy wrapup to a tidy Toronto win. I saw “big Jean” Machi go two and a third innings to help out the exhausted and depleted Seattle pitching staff. He gave up the Travis sac fly in the sixth, and stayed on into the eighth, when he retired Steve Pearce for the first out, and then yielded the mound so that an extraodinary event could take place.

As Ryan Goins strode to the plate, here came Manager Scott Servais, with one out and nobody on, to summon Zac Curtis, a lefty, to match up with Goins. Even I, the unelected president of the Ryan Goins Fan Club, and the sole proprietor of the Write Ryan Goins in as the All-Star Shortstop web site (which I just made up), did not see it coming that an American League manager would actually hold up a ball game to play the percentages on the left-handed hitting Goins. Can it be anything other than onward and upward from here for our favourite cue-ball-shorn infielder?

Finally, I saw Roberto Osuna, in the non-save situation, chew through the Mariners in the top of the ninth as if they were a nice soft tortilla con queso that his mom had just whipped up for him: 14 pitches: a Danny Valencia groundout on the first pitch, a Guillermo Heredia punch out, a Taylor Motter strikeout.

Oh, and I also saw that Roberto and catcher Luke Maile have choreographed their own little victory celebration that we can enjoy until Russell Martin returns and brings back the Knock-Knock Play with him.

So there you have it. It was a great night all around. Biagini moving on up. A beautiful gallery opening in a bucolic setting. A Blue Jay shutout. And some serious respect for Ryan Goins. What more could you ask?

How ’bout Marcus Stroman on the hill tomorrow afternoon, with the Jays looking for their fourth in a row. And no, you’re not dreaming. And neither am I, I don’t think.

That Marco Estrada, he’s such a funny guy. He’s always got to have us over on whether he’s got it or not.

Look, he’s a fly-ball pitcher, though his strikeout totals are climbing with his age, quite an impressive accomplishment. So naturally when he looks in at somebody like a Nelson Cruz, early in the game, when his precision instruments, location, change of speed, and more location, aren’t quite precise yet, you can imagine that somebody like, say, a Cruz, might hit a fly ball that’s a bit, erm, prodigious in the scale of your ordinary fly balls.

So naturally when Cruz, casually reaching down in the zone with his mighty thunderstick and pounding a too-easy fast ball high and deep over the centre-field fence on a 1-2 pitch in the first inning, you weren’t all that surprised. You know that thunderstick bit is a metaphor, right? Nobody wields a thunderstick any more.

The problem, though, was that doggone Jean Segura, standing out there on second, just waiting to trot around in front of Cruz; the inevitable bomb cost Estrada two runs, not one, and there we were, down 2-zip in the top of the first again.

Let’s talk about this Segura guy for a minute. When I scored some good seats for my wife and adult son and me for a game at the Cable Dome last August, the Diamondbacks were in town with their eerie camo road uniforms, like the commandos come to town.

Now, I admit I don’t pay a whole lot of attention to the National League. Like our parliamentarians in Ottawa, who only ever refer to the other chamber (Commons or Senate) in terms such as “that other place”, I usually think of the National League as “that other place”, though when I catch a glimpse of an NL game once in a while I do find myself becoming a little wistful over the manifestation of “real baseball”, i.e., sans the designated hitter.

So to my shame I had never heard of Jean Segura. He was just some chap playing shortstop for Arizona against the Jays. But, and I promise this is true, a couple innings in, after two at-bats, some baserunning, and some sharp play in the field, I turned to my family members and said, “Damn, that Segura guy is one hell of a ball player. Where has he been all my life?”

And of course it was with mixed feelings that I heard about his trade to the Mariners in the off-season. On the one hand, I’d get to see him a little more often, but on the other hand he’d be plying his trade against my home town team.

So it wasn’t the Cruz homer that upset me, not at all. It was the casual way that Segura put the wheels in motion, waiting forever until he got what he wanted, and then making a silk purse out of a sow’s ear. Leading off, he’s up 2 and 1 on Estrada, and then he fouls one off for 2-2. Then he fouls off three more, three of Estrada’s best. Over here, down there, up here, no matter. A casual wave and another one spoiled. Finally he got one to his liking, and lifted an ordinary little single into short left centre.

But the cheeky Segura was having none of it. He was going for two all the way. When Kevin Pillar had to reach up to grab a tricky high bounce off the turf, the way was clear and he was in to second with a flourish. Later on in the game when Pillar was on second they had a little chat, and you just know Pillar was saying that Segura wouldn’t get away with that one again.

Well, look, Segura came in hitting .364 and came out hitting .369. Estrada only gave up two more hits after the first—we’ll get to that in a minute—and one of them was another double to Segura. Let’s just be thankful that this Seattle lineup isn’t filled up with Jean Seguras, as if a talent like that could be cloned.

So, like I said, Estrada sometimes needs a bit of a warmup. Maybe when he’s throwing his last pitches on the mound before the game starts, he should have one of his team-mates stand in at the plate and pound one into the stands, just to get it out of the way.

It’s not like Estrada was home free after Cruz pulled the trigger, either. Left-handed-hitting Kyle Seager came up next and pulled the ball into a natural deep second-base position, where, in the logic of the shift, tonight’s third baseman, Chris Coghlan, was stationed. The ball was hit hard, I’ll give you that, but Coghlan had a pretty good reaction with his glove, and the ball kind of clanked off it into right centre for what was definitely a single, but a ball that might have been catchable with a good grab.

A little aside here on the Jays’ infield situation as I see it with both Donaldson and Tulowitzki sidelined. They’ve got four players covering three positions, three of them flexible, and Travis only at second when he’s in the lineup. Now, Ryan Goins is non pareil wherever he plays, and Darwin Barney is pretty reliable, though the sidearm flip from third makes me a bit nervous. If you read my reports, you will know that I’m not convinced that Travis is up to making either the tough plays or the crucial ones. And Coghlan—here’s my point—who’s made 12 starts at third and one at second, and been subbed in 4 times at third, has 4 errors in 28 chances, a not great fielding percentage of .857. I like Coghlan’s hustle, I like his look; he’s all scrappy little infielder. But I’m not convinced he can handle the hot corner. In fact, if you look at his record, he’s spent most of his career in the outfield, overwhelmingly in left.

No error for Coghlan tonight, but I think Estrada lost an out on Seager’s hit. With Seager on first our old friend Danny Valencia mis-hit one of Estrada’s funny ones, and hit a short fly to left for Steve Pearce for the second out. Then Pearce had to get on his horse and go back hard to his glove side to haul down a wicked shot by Taylor Motter in a good running catch, even if it looked a little awkward and improvised. (Hey, I just noticed that Taylor Motter is just one letter off from the Taylor, Mottel in Fiddler on the Roof. Is this a thing, or not?)

Marco Estrada threw 27 pitches in the first inning. Three went for base hits. One left the ball yard, counting two runs. He struck out Ben Gamel, and gave up a really loud out to Motter.

This is what he did in the next five innings: he threw 80 pitches. Gave up no more runs. Yielded one more hit, Segura’s second double in the third, but you already know about Segura. Walked three, and yes his control was a little snaky tonight. But fanned seven more. Best of all, he hung on just long enough, and a bit more, for his hitters finally to solve rookie Chase De Jong, putting up a big five-spot in the fifth so that when he exited after six he had a 6-2 lead, and what a king he must have felt with riches like those!

Just to finish the story line of the Toronto pitching, the bullpen did another fine job of holding the fort for Estrada. Aaron Loup, interestingly, pitched the whole seventh, facing righty/lefty/righty/lefty, retiring catcher Tuffy Gosewysch and the two lefties, Jarrod Dyson and Ben Gamel, while perhaps wisely walking our friend Mr. Segura.

Jason Grilli looked much better this time out in pitching the eighth, though he did give up a leadoff double to right by Nelson Cruz that Zeke Carrera would have corralled but for banging into the wall and having it go off his glove.

As I used to say about Big Papi last year with the Red Sox, the thing about these aging crushers is that if they don’t hit it out and you need runs, they kind of hold you back, unless they produce the RBIs themselves. If the game had been closer at that point, now 7-2 for the Jays, I have no doubt that Manager Scott Servais would have run for Cruz, but behind by five his faint hope would have been that Cruz might come to the plate again in a rally.

But here he was on second base with nobody out. Kyle Seager flew out to Pillar in centre, but there was no thought of advancing. Danny Valencia shot a liner to left for a single, and here was Cruz jogging into third. I’m not saying he was dogging it, it’s just that it was a foregone conclusion that he wasn’t going to be sent. Motter then shot another liner to centre, his second loud out of the game, and Cruz stayed rooted at third while Pillar fired the ball in to the plate from medium depth. And there he stayed while Grilli fanned Mike Freeman, the second baseman, for a boffo finish to the inning.

Now, who was that warming up for the Jays in the ninth? Leonel Campos? What? Wasn’t he up for a cuppa in April? What’s he doing here now?

At this point I have a confession to make. Sometimes I turn Buck and Tabby off. For the whole game. A, I don’t need them, most of the time. B, their inanities are really distracting. C, my wife, who kindly indulges my passion for the Jays, is a lot more appreciative of a silent ball game than one “narrated” by our intrepid TV guys.

If something’s going on that I don’t get, I turn the sound up, otherwise, maybe not. It never occurred to me that the camera was spending a lot of time on Francisco Liriano tonight, until I turned it up to find out what Campos was doing there, only to learn that Liriano had been put on the DL just before game time, and Campos brought up from Buffalo.

Well, that explains why Liriano has been struggling so much. And it sure clarifies the Mike Bolsinger situation. After his good first fill-in start, he ain’t going nowhere folks, because we need him in the rotation, right now.

So, back to Campos. With a five-run lead, Manager Gibbons could afford to check out Campos and see what he has. And the short answer is “a lot”. He popped up catcher Tuffy Gowewysch on the first pitch, fanned Jarrod Dyson with Luke Maile making a really nice snag of the foul tip, and got Jean Segura to ground out to short. On 8 pitches. Sign this kid up!

The Mariners, who have four—count ’em, four—starters on the disabled list started former Jays’ prospect Chad De Jong tonight. This kind of thing always makes me a little nervous. Last year’s version of the Blue Jays made a big hash out of chances to go up against rookies or call-up pitchers. Cleveland’s Ryan Merritt, anyone? They might miss an early chance to put up numbers, but sooner or later they’d look like they were facing the reincarnation of old Cy himself.

So after the Cruz homer spotted the Mariners a two-run jump start, young Mr. De Jong came out and found it a little difficult, shall we say, to find the plate. Okay, a lot difficult. He was like the little girl with the curl right in the middle of her forehead. When his pitches were good, they were very good—check out that curve ball, you curve-ball sucker Torontos—but when they were bad, oh, my!

Kevin Pillar didn’t wait around but took a swipe at the second pitch from De Jong and smacked one toward Segura that took a wicked short hop and handcuffed him for an infield hit. Zeke Carrera went to three and two on two called strikes and three wild ones before dumping a Texas Leaguer, again, into left. Pillar, who had been set in motion on the pitch, made it around to third. Jose Bautista passed on three hairy balls before lashing the first one in the zone, but right at Kyle Seager at third.

Sticking with that hitter’s count theme, Justin Smoak went to three and one before lofting a soft liner over Segura’s head in short right field—of course he was in the shift—to score Pillar and cut the Mariners’ lead to one. Then De Jong caught a break as Steve Pearce turned a 1-0 pitch into an around-the-horn double play.

After rhe first the expected happened, and the Jays settled in to admiring De Jong’s mixture of breaking balls, so much so that they forgot that they needed to put a little pressure on the rookie before he ran out of gas. He faced only two over the minimum from the second into the fifth, stranding an infield single in the second and a walk in the fourth while retiring 11 of 13 batters he faced.

So there was no sense that much was amiss when he issued his second walk of the night to Kevin Pillar, with two outs already in the fifth. But in a classic example of the old expression “It all starts with two” (outs, that is), Zeke Carrera followed with a base hit to left about which there was nothing Texas-ish, or even Oklahoma-esque. Then De Jong’s troubles really started. He threw four straight bad ones to Bautista, maybe sort of intentional, maybe not. This brought up Justin Smoak with the bases loaded and nobody out. Smoak didn’t waste any time at all before knocking the first pitch from De Jong back up the middle into centre for two runs, a Blue Jays’ 3-2 lead, and all 3 RBIs for Smoak.

Next came Steve Pearce to the plate, in another one of those “oh, no!” moments for yer ever-gloomy humble scribe. But this time he didn’t disappoint, and hammered a 1-2 pitch into the centre-field seats for a three-run homer and a 6-2 Toronto lead.

Manager Scott Servais let De Jong finish up, what with his severely depleted pitching staff, and he got Ryan Goins to ground out to first to end the inning. So if De Jong could just have gotten that third out in the fifth, he would have had a tidy 2-1 lead, but his line ended up 5 innings pitched, 6 runs, 7 hits, 3 walks, and 1 strikeout, on 88 pitches.

This time the rest, they say, was denouement. You already know that the Jays’ bullpen was wipeout after Estrada finished up, and Seattle’s was almost as good. Zac Curtis pitched the sixth and retired the side with one strikeout after hitting Chris Coghlan frighteningly on the hand.

Then Seattle brought in Sam Gaviglio, a big, tall right-hander to make his major league debut. Gaviglio is not without high-stakes experience, though, having made a couple of appearances for Italy during the latter team’s rather exciting run at this spring’s World Baseball Classic.

Gaviglio had himself a mighty nice debut: two innings pitched, one hit, one run, no walks, and four strikeouts on 30 pitches. He fanned Zeke Carrera, the first batter he faced in the seventh, making a nice moment for tossing the keepsake ball out of play. Oh, the one hit and the run? Couldn’t blame Gaviglio for that one. In an odd display of bad ball hitting, Justin Smoak went after a high (shoulder-high) hard one on the outside corner and blasted it over the centre-field fence. Oh, well. Tant pis.

So, in the immortal words of Tony Soprano, whaddaya gonna do? Oh, yeah, that was when somebody got whacked. No one getting whacked here these days. Toronto’s pitchers made one mistake in nine innings. Young Mr. De Jong hung on by his fingernails until he couldn’t any more, the Jays’ surging hitters caught up with him, and we’re looking at another nice, solid win, against a good team that’s really suffering at the moment.

Tomorrow night it’s Joe Biagini, and I can’t wait.

You had to feel sorry for Francisco Liriano. Really, really sorry.

There he was all alone out there on the mound, three batters into the game, and he must have felt like he’d landed in some alternative universe, some topsy-turvy place where nothing, absolutely nothing, is the way it should be.

Where was Liriano’s Svengali, his archangel, his dramaturge, the saviour of his career, Russell Martin? Sitting on the bench nursing a sore left shoulder, that’s where.

And there in his place behind the plate was the newly-arrived-and-suddenly-promoted-to-first-string Luke Maile, shucking and jiving, dipping and diving, desperately trying to corral the wild and crazy slants of his pitcher.

Hadn’t he put all this behind him, after his horrendous start to the year?

Jason Kipnis was standing on second, having just delivered a ringing opposite-field double to left to plate Carlos Santana, who had walked on a 3-2 pitch, and Francisco Lindor, who had moved Santana up to second with a single to right that deflected off the glove of Justin Smoak at first. And who was coming to the plate but our dear old Edwin.

Well, let’s be thankful for small mercies. Edwin flied out to Kevin Pillar in centre, with Kipnis moving into scoring position with one out. Then Jose Ramirez rammed one hard on the ground to Devon Travis at second, too sharp for Kipnis to score, for the second out. And Brandon, Hit Me, Please, Guyer managed to avoid being plunked again and popped out to short to end the inning and leave Kipnis hanging at third.

Two runs in, 24 pitches from a very unpromising Francisco Liriano, and missing, let us remember, Josh Donaldson, Troy Tulowitzki, Russell Martin, and now Kendrys Morales, Manager John Gibbons hopefully, perhaps even wistfully, sent his diminished cohort out to face the slants of the formidable if a bit unpredictable Mr. Danny Salazar.

Well, what’s a bunch of lunch-bucket schmucks to do, but go out there and retake the lead before Salazar had even recorded an out? Kevin Pillar walked on a 3-1 pitch. The only ball that was even close was the 3-0 cripple that he maturing Pillar disdained. Zeke Carrera, our smiling little troublemaker, wasn’t so patient, looping an 0-1 fast ball that had nothing to recommend it, pitching-wise, into centre, where it dropped in front of Abraham Almonte for a good old-fashioned Texas Leaguer. By the way, I have decided to revive this charming term, which seems to have fallen into disuse for no good reason that I can discern.

In today’s sans-Morales world, this brought Jose Bautista to the plate. Now the cynics might think, oh, yeah, just because he finally broke off his oh for twenty streak last night with a solid base hit, he was getting rewarded by being dropped into the three-slot. But what was John Gibbons to do? As they say, ya gotta dance with the one that brung ya, and Jose has brung us an awful lot in the last five years. And, by the way, who else was gonna hit third, Steve Pearce? Devon Travis? No offence, guys, but Jose was it, and this time he was it, fer sure.

Salazar’s approach to Bautista had the mark of a guy desperate not to walk the bases full. Five pitches away, down and away. Every one of them. One was called in the zone. Bautista offered at another. The rest he laid off, as he will. So Salazar either made a huge mistake or basically said “here, I hope you pop it up.” And threw it 96, inner third, waist high. Boy, did Jose pop it up. He creamed it, and the only question was whether he hit it hard enough for it to stay straight and fair. He did, and it did. The drought was over for Jose, he now had as many home runs as Ryan Goins (!) and the Jays had a 3-2 lead.

Salazar, his demons exorcised by Bautista, fanned Smoak and Pearce, but Goins, believe it or not hitting sixth in this more than decimated* lineup, gave a little hint of things to come, by going with another fast ball up, and hammering it into left centre, where Abraham Almonte, playing Goins straight up with Salazar on the hill, was able to haul it in for the third out.

*Most misused word in the English language—it has never meant wholesale loss, but literally a loss of one tenth. The Romans took every tenth soldier, one tenth of the cohort, as hostages against cowardice by the rest. The way people use it, the victims of whatever terrible atrocity could only wish they had just been “decimated” rather than much worse. Sorry. Rant over. Back to baseball.

An apparently rejuvenated/relieved Liriano came out for the top of the second, and retired the side on 11 pitches. Groundout, fly ball, fly ball. To be fair, with the loss of Rajai Davis to free agency, and the temporary loss of Michael Brantley, whose ankle sprain Terry Francona doesn’t want to risk on the Dome’s turf, Cleveland’s lineup is also a little deprived after their famous five have had their ups.

I know it’s in retrospect, but in light of what happened in the Cleveland third, it’s really interesting to look at Liriano’s pitch chart on Yan Gomes’ leadoff at bat, in which he grounded out to second on a three-two pitch. If you look at the first pitch and the fifth, the fifth, a called strike, almost perfectly covers the first, called a ball. Both are on the black at the bottom middle of the zone. Hold that thought.

I’m not saying there’s a connection, but Cleveland handed Toronto’s Devon Travis a big gift leading off the home second, but Travis handed it right back. The Jays had a great shot at another good inning off Salazar, and it came to nothing. Maybe this turn of events spooked Liriano, but he never got an out in the Cleveland third as things got way out of hand.

Travis hit a solid but catchable drive to left, but Yandy Diaz, filling in for Brantley, took about six different routes to the ball, and then haplessly watched as it hit the turf and jumped over the fence for two bases. Darwin Barney, who I hoped would be bunting (curse you, John Gibbons, haven’t you ever watched a National League game?) was down 0-2 to Salazar, and then, as he so often does, he pulled a rabbit out of the hat, hitting a grounder in the hole that Francisco Lindor barely got to on his backhand, and had to have been an infield single. Except that Travis, broke from second, and stopped, deer in the headlights, five steps off the bag, looking at Lindor, who was holding the ball, and, I bet, smiling like the cat heading for the cream. Travis was trapped and run down, Barney’s hit became a fielder’s choice, and with number nine who can bunt (remember, Luke Maile came up in Joe Maddon’s system) coming up with a man on first instead of first and second and nobody out.

So whoosh, Salazar got his mojo back, fanned Maile, and then fanned Kevin Pillar. I hate to beat up on poor Devon Travis, but we’ve seen this exact same film before, at least twice last year, in the heat of the pennant race. What part of his baseball makeup doesn’t get not running into the first out after hitting a double?

Liriano came out for the top of the third, and with the customary nod to Yogi, it was dejá vu all over again. He walked Santana on a 3-1 pitch. Lindor singled to left, this time off the glove of Ryan Goins. Kipnis let down the side by just hitting a single to right, scoring Santana with Lindor moving to third.

Hang on, here, let’s go back to the Santana walk. Vic Carapazza was behind the plate. Vic is well loved by the folks here, after the horror show he put on last year on Canada Day, during the fabled 19-inning Toronto-Cleveland clash won by the visitors. His zone was so bad that he enraged Edwin, as if that were ever possible, to the point that he had to eject him. Then he pitched Gibbie for protecting Edwin. Later in the game, he pitched Russell Martin after a dispute over the strike zone, when Martin was actually walking away from him.

Now, Carapazza was also the guy who pitched Gibbie the other night over the obstruction call on Devon Travis. Well, guess what? From Canada Day to tonight, those four Blue Jays are the only players in all of MLB that Carapazza has ejected. Why is he on a crew covering Toronto at all?

So back again to that walk to Santana. 3-1? Really? We can’t get inside the ump’s head, so all we can do is look at the graphics so generously provided by MLB, which also of course hires and oversees the umpires. According to the chart, pitch two, called a ball, was clearly in the black. Pitch five, called ball four, was clearly touching the black. Ya wonder why a pitcher gets annoyed with the strike zone?

So after the Kipnis single ties the game, Liriano walks Edwin on 3-2. No beef with the zone this time, because he was losing it by now. But it loads the bases, and Pete Walker comes out to buy time and calm Liriano down. As he returns to the dugout, he detours a little toward the plate, and appears to say something mildly to Carapazza. Zing! He’s gone! Pete Walker! Who looks and acts like your courtly uncle who flew Spitfires in the Battle of Britain, but went to his death too dignified to ever make much of it.

Jose Ramirez hits a grounder through the right side that scores Lindor with the lead run and keeps the sacks loaded, and that’s the end for Liriano, two innings plus five batters pitched, 7 runs (because Brandon Guyer’s double off Dominic Leone will clear the bases), 5 hits, 3 walks, no strikeouts, on 53 pitches.

After Guyer runs himself into an out at third to let Ramirez score, Leone gives up a double to Gomes, but then shuts down the Cleveland side without further damage.

You can just imagine how the Jays felt coming off the field after the top of the third, their exciting 3-2 lead turned into a 7-3 deficit.

The rest of the game would see them acting out the old adage, don’t get mad, get even.

Before going any further, tribute must be paid to the Toronto bullpen, which stepped up yet again. When Ramirez scored the seventh Cleveland run with nobody out in the third, who could have imagined their offence would be stonewalled the rest of the night?

Leone threw an uneventful fourth, Danny Barnes bent but didn’t break, giving up three hits but no runs in the fifth and sixth, Ryan Tepera retired the side and fanned two on 17 pitches in the seventh, Joe Smith gave up a hit and fanned two in the eighth (how about those two, eh?), and Roberto Osuna, pitching in a tie, whipped through the ninth in 11 pitches with a strikeout, looking more and more like the Osuna of yore (can a 22-year-old even have a “yore”?) So, no runs, six hits, no walks, eight strikeouts over seven innings of relief.

Now, the Jays have nothing on Cleveland’s bullpen, which is the best in baseball. But funny thing about bullpens: sometimes when you have to make the call early, the pattern gets disrupted; strange things happen. You have to go to some of those other guys, who don’t quite make the 7-8-9 lineup. Like the ones that stood up for Toronto tonight.

The thing is, Danny Salazar didn’t make it out of the third either, against the depleted Toronto lineup, and that changed everything. After Zeke Carrera grounded out to short, Salazar walked Bautista, who still gets his bases on balls no matter what. With Smoak up against the righty, Cleveland went into the usual shift, but I have a question: if you’ve got the infield defense skewed all the way around to the right, why is the right fielder playing straight up on Smoak. So he hits one down the line and it goes for a double even with Smoak “running”, Bautista stopping at third. Steve Pearce hits a sac fly to centre to score Bautista, and here comes Smoaky, truckin’ on to third. No problem, eh? Next comes Ryan Goins with two away. Easy peasy. ‘Cept Goins confidently smacks a 1-2 pitch out over the plate into left centre to score Smoak, and it’s 7-5.

That was the end for Salazar, who outlasted Liriano by two whole outs despite the gift lead, and gave up five runs on five hits, walked two and struck out four on 69 pitches. Dan Otero came in to retire Travis, and after three innings it was 7-5 Cleveland with both starters out of the game.

We already know that the visitors stalled at seven, but the Jays had a few more tricks up their sleeve, most prominent a couple of secret weapons that are getting a good airing these days, Zeke Carrera and Ryan Goins. After Leone cruised the Cleveland fourth, Darwin Barney led off by turning a single into a double on sheer chutzpah. It looked like he was going to die there, as Luke Maile grounded out to short, though he did move up on Pillar’s nubber to third that went for the second out.

Then that wild and crazy Carrera decided to cross everybody up and actually pull the ball, right over the right field fence, and just like that the game was tied and everybody in the yard, and at least one old guy at home, went bonkers. Whimsical stat of the night: with their homers tonight, Bautista and Carrera both pulled into a tie with Goins with three homers on the season.

From that point Otero, Nick Goody, Boone Logan, and Brian Shaw kept it clean for Cleveland, taking us to the ninth, though Shaw had to skate around two hits and a walk in the seventh and eighth.

It’s now the fashion that you use your closer in the ninth in a tie game (are you listening, Buck Showalter?), so just like John Gibbons ran out Osuna in the top of the ninth, Terry Francona tabbed his closer Cody Allen, with awesome numbers so far this year, for the bottom of the ninth. (A friendly tip to Pat Tabler: the current Cleveland manager is Terry Francona, who never made much of a dint as a player. Tito Francona was Terry’s dad, and he was a pretty exciting ball player in his day.)

Funny with closers: sometimes they have a bad outing, and when they do, it can be a real stinker. And tonight Cody Allen limburgered the place up right and proper. Maybe he’d had too much rest, but he was overcranked and wild. He went 3-2 on Pillar leading off before the latter flied out to centre. He went 3-2 on Carrera before he hit a Texas Leaguer to centre. (There, I said it! With Carrera it’s easy, he does it all the time.)

Then he got a little breathing space by fanning Bautista on a 2-2 pitch. Let’s face it, that particular lightning wasn’t going to strike twice, was it? Ah, but then he went 3-2 on both Smoak and Pearce before losing them, loading them up for our newly-minted number six hitter, Ryan Goins.

Now Goins is nothing if not a sharp observer. He’d watched Allen throw 31 pitches, but only 15 for strikes. He knew that Allen was going to be desperate not to fall behind, or worse, bury one in the dirt with the game on the line. So Goins went up looking heater in the zone, and that’s what he got, 94 and up and in, but on the black, almost right on the corner. He put a good swing on it and ripped a vicious liner past Santana into the right-field corner, and the ball game was over. He was robbed of a double and a couple more ribbies because the game was over, but he had a ticket to ride, and he din’t care . . .

So you start out in a hole, a malevolent presence behind the plate helps dig the hole a little deeper, and then a bunch of unlikely heroes like Zeke Carrera, Ryan Goins, a badly slumping Jose Bautista, and Joe and Roberto and a whole bunch of other unheralded joes in the bullpen put their backs to it, and whattaya got?

One damn satisfying win.

Not to mention taking our first series from the blankety-blank Clevelands Who Shall Remain Nameless until They Scrap their Ugly and Offensive Logo. Begone, Clevelands! Your “tribe” is definitely not our tribe!

And how ’bout this: Let’s write in super-sub Ryan “Go-Go” Goins for the all-star team. He outplayed the vaunted Francisco Lindor in this series, didn’t he? Oh, yes, he did!

On the face of it, this looks like a candidate for submission to one of those short-short story contests; you know, the ones where they’re complete in one page, or one paragraph, or even, god help us, in a tweet:

“Carrasco pitching against Bolsinger. Cleveland won 6-zip. Move along folks. Nothing more to see here.”

But on the face of it, you’d be wrong.

Oh, sure, Carlos Carrasco stonewalled the Jays for seven innings, and the Cleveland bullpen sucked all the air out of the stadium in the eighth and ninth. And why wouldn’t they? Carrasco came into the game with an ERA of 2.18, and came out at 1.86. And before tonight’s added two scoreless innings by the Cleveland ‘pen, their combined ERA since April twentieth was 0.200. Yeah, read that again, that’s one-fifth of an earned run allowed per nine innings. Yup. And of course they were pitching against the hot-hitting Jays, right? Um, not.

But damn, this Mike Bolsinger pitched his heart out tonight, didn’t he? Not only did he give Manager John Gibbons a much-needed five and two-thirds innings, but he did it while allowing two earned runs on three hits against the defending American League champions, whose top five spots in their batting order, let me remind you, are pencilled in every night, like this: Carlos Santana, Francisco Lindor, Jason Kipnis, Edwin Encarnacion, Jose Ramirez. Don’t trust the reports that they’re having trouble scoring runs; it’s a subterfuge.

Let’s just get the Jays’ lack of offence tonight out of the way before going on to talk about Bolsinger’s debut with Toronto.

So Carrasco goes seven innings, throws 97 pitches, gives up three hits, and no walks, and fans seven. The three singles are scattered. Zeke Carrera bounces one up the middle in the first, but is erased on an inning-ending double play. Darwin Barney reaches out and smacks a nice liner to right for a hit leading off the third, but dies at first. In the seventh, Jose Bautista, hallelujah, hits a hard liner to left for a single with one out, and even steals second when Carrasco ignores him, but Justin Smoak leaves him out there when he goes down on strikes.

In the seventh, with the score only 3-0 Cleveland, Terry Francona has Andrew Miller up in the pen to do the eighth, but then Yan Gomes hits the three-run homer off Aaron Loup to ice the game. Well, what can Francona do? He’s got Miller hot in the ‘pen, but doesn’t need him any more. Best to add insult to injury and bring him in anyway, so he comes in and shrugs off our heroes on 8 pitches, getting the lefties Ryan Goins and Chris Coghlan to swing late and ground out the wrong way, while Darwin Barney makes himself the hitting star of the game by actually lofting one to fairly deep centre for a loudish out.

Sitting 6-0 going to the ninth, Cleveland closer Cody Allen can just sit down and work on his dinner reservations for after the game. Extra arm Nick Goody comes in instead, and despite giving up a single to the never-say-die Kevin Pillar, he mops up in good order, getting rookie catcher Mike Ohlman, making his major league debut, on a popup to first before Pillar’s base hit, and then converting Zeke Carrera’s sharp comebacker into a game-ending double play.

Now, about this Bolsinger guy. Drafted by the Diamondbacks in 2010, he stayed in their organization through 2014, making his big league debut in 2014, 10 appearances, 9 starts, 1-6, and a 5.50 ERA. This didn’t impress Arizona too much, so he was sold to the Dodgers after 2014.

He had a decent year with the Dodgers in 2015, going 6-6 with a 3.62 ERA in 21 starts, but he fell off in 2016, spent some time in the minors, and was only 1-4 in 6 starts with an ERA of 6.83 when the Dodgers traded him to Toronto for Jesse Chavez. To Toronto fans, it was a great trade: nobody had a clue who Mike Bolsinger was, but Jesse Chavez was going the other way, so it was all good for Mike in Mississauga and his hoser buddies.

Bolsinger never made an appearance with the Jays last year, and he spent most of the latter half of the season kind of hidden on the disabled list. It seemed like a good place to park a guy they didn’t need in the rotation, and weren’t going to throw into a pennant race in any case.

So, the guy’s 29, and this is his first American League start, against Cleveland. Now Mike Bolsinger’s not going to blow anybody away with any heat. He’s got a good curve ball and he relies on that, plus spotting what he can with his fast ball. If it works, it works okay.

In the first inning, it worked. His first pitch to Carlos Santana was up and away. The second one was up and in, and Santana lined a little chip shot to Darwin Barney at third. Then Bolsinger threw seven straight strikes to Francisco Lindor, the last one a fast ball up in Lindor’s eyes that he laughably swung through. Then he threw seven straight strikes to Jason Kipnis, the last one a curve ball in the dirt that the rookie catcher Ohlman had to track down and throw down to first.

Mike Bolsinger threw 16 pitches in the first inning. 15 of them were strikes.

When he came out for the second inning, Bolsinger threw two more strikes (that’s 17 of 18, if you’re counting), and then must have given himself a shake and realized where he was: facing Edwin Encarnacion after having mown down Cleveland in the top of the first. He threw four straight balls to Edwin, and four straight balls to Jose Ramirez, putting the first two batters on with nobody out.

Of course, Cinderella is just a fairy story, and we know Bolsinger didn’t throw a shutout, but those two walks both scored, that was all he gave up in the game, and if the Jays hadn’t been so hopeless at the plate tonight it just might have been enough.

Lonnie Chisenhall followed with a double to left centre, the first of three hits Bolsinger would give up. That scored Edwin with Ramirez stopping at third. Yandy Diaz grounded to Ryan Goins at short and Chisenhall wandered off second, getting himself caught in a rundown that allowed Ramirez to score the second run. Justin Smoak alertly raced, if we can put it that way, to second base to keep Diaz at first. Two popups later and the inning was over, and so were the Jays, though they didn’t know it yet.

And Bolsinger sure didn’t know it, because he recovered his composure and pitched his heart out for another three and two thirds innings, going out as the pitcher of record for the loss, but still down only 2-zip.

Starting with the popups in the second, he retired nine in a row, a string broken off by a Yan Gomes one-out single in the fifth, which he stranded with two quick outs.

In the sixth he came to the end of the line, as Manager John Gibbons, supremely grateful for the work he got from Bolsinger, wasn’t about to push him too far. It’s not that the rails actually came off for the fill-in right-hander. After all, he got Kipnis on a ground-out leading off before walking Edwin and then fanned Ramirez for the second out. That brought Lonnie Chisenhall to the plate, whose double in the second had cashed Bolsinger’s first walk. And didn’t he hit another double, the third and last hit off the Toronto starter, down into the right-field corner, with Edwin stopping at third. That was it for Bolsinger’s first start for the Jays.

Dominic Leone came in and got a fly ball to right from Yandy Diaz to close the books on the starter. Cleveland added another run in the seventh, once again taking advantage of a one-out base on balls by Leone to Yan Gomes, who eventually scored on Lindor’s ground-rule double to left off lefty J. P. Howell. Howell got Kipnis to pop out in foul territory before yielding to Jason Grilli, who came on to fan Edwin in another emotionally-charged at-bat to leave Lindor at third.

So going to the eighth, it was still close enough to think that the Jays could get Bolsinger off the hook for the loss, but as we were saying, they never did find the good bats they needed to get it done.

And just to make sure that they didn’t jump up and bite Cleveland’s bullpen in the late innings, Aaron Loup came in for an inning of work and helped the visitors put the game out of reach, though, truth be told, it might have stayed at three-nothing if Gomes hadn’t decided to practice his golf swing on Loup and loft a three-run five iron out of the park against his long-ago mates.

Loup had actually just about extricated himself with a clean inning when the roof fell in, in the person of human baseball target Brandon Guyer. After Ramirez led off with an infield single, Loup induced a smooth 6-4-3 double play before facing Guyer, who makes a tidy living getting various uniform parts brushed by moderately inside pitches. This time it was his left knee, or was it his right foot? Nobody could tell, even with the review, so in the absence of countervailing evidence he was awarded a decidedly cheap base. Abraham Almonte followed with a clean single to right, Guyer stopping at second, and that set the stage for Gomes’ Tiger Woods moment at the plate.

So when you look at the final score of 6-0, and who pitched for each team, it all looks like a forgone conclusion.

But it definitely wasn’t for most of the way. Just ask Mike Bolsinger.

He’s now given the Jays’ management a bit of a problem. What do they do with him, out of options, when Aaron Sanchez comes off the DL for a weekend start, especially with Joe Biagini already lined up for a second, longer start this weekend as well?

If I were a Jays’ reliever with options left, I think I might consider packing my bags for the shuffle off to Buffalo, because Mike Bolsinger just showed us all that he deserves to stay on this team, at least for now.