Check out these pitching lines against Toronto in the last two games of the Red Sox series last weekend:
David Price: 5.1 innings pitched, 1 run, 5 hits, 3 walks, 6 strikeouts, 93 pitches
Drew Pomeranz: 4 innings pitched, 3 runs, 5 hits, 5 walks, 6 strikeouts, 103 pitches
The question is, did Toronto win one or both of these games to win or sweep the series?
The answer, which is no trick and no joke, is: Neither.
And that’s because even after the thrilling Friday-night twelve-inning walkoff, the Toronto offence only mustered five runs in total in the succeeding two games of the series.
They couldn’t put away Price, who spent all of his time on the mound trying to throw junk at the outside corner against right-handed batters, most of which missed the mark and just looked weak.
They couldn’t put away Pomeranz, who spent all of his time on the mound trying to avoid throwing the next pitch. (If I hated what I do as much as he seems to, I’d find something else to do with my time, wouldn’t you?)
I wonder if there’s anybody still out there who thinks the Blue Jays should have made a serious bid for David Price. He has not been a happy camper in Boston, and he certainly hasn’t given them the performance that they expected when they signed him.
His rocky relationship with the organization and the fan base got a little rockier when he had to miss his last start, in the “crucial” series with the Yankees, because of a “mild” carpal tunnel problem.
Without getting too far into the details, one reporter had written a story recently about how many of the Red Sox players, Price chief among them, spend a lot of off-hours playing a particular video game. After Price was scratched from his start on May ninth against the Yanks because of the carpal tunnel issue, a Boston Globebaseball writer, Dan Shaughnessy, wrote a column in which he linked the earlier story to Price’s reported injury.
Much discussion and denial ensued, and Price had to go very much on the defensive about the whole issue, making the rather shaky medical suggestion that because he’s played video games his whole life and this is a new condition there can’t be a connection.
Yeah, and a guy who eats and drinks and smokes to excess for forty years and has a heart attack when he’s sixty isn’t going to blame it on his bad habits because the heart attack just happened and he’s been overindulging all his life and getting away with it. Duh.
So, should Toronto have shelled out in excess of 217 million over seven years to David Price to get him to stay after 2015? Nah, don’t bother to answer. Boston can have him, right?
So he started for the Sox on Saturday,
Did pretty well for the first couple of innings, one baserunner, a walk to Josh Donaldson in the first, and striking out the side in the second. But here’s the thing. I thought he was throwing a lot of soft stuff, and when I counted it up he threw only 8 fast balls in 28 pitches.
The other thing was that starting with the strikeout of Anthony Alford to end the second, he was throwing a lot of pitches away, and not hard (on Alford it amounted to five pitches out of six).
In the third, after the Sox put up a three-spot on Marco Estrada, Price escaped a bullet, a bullet hit by Donaldson. He fanned Luke Maile leading off on a 3-2 pitch, then gave up base hits to Gio Urshela, playing shortstop on Saturday, and Teoscar Hernandez. Donaldson came up and hit a bullet right to the glove of Xander Bogaerts at short. Urshela, with a normal leadoff at second, was a dead duck for the double play.
But it was the fourth inning that skewed any chance of Price going deep in this game. He only gave up one run on two base hits, but he walked two and went deep into too many counts, and threw 28 pitches.
Even pitching with a lead, Chris Sale he is not. He got through the fifth quickly, but only lasted two batters into the sixth, as Justin Smoak greeted him with a monster home run, and after he retired Kevin Pillar on a foul popup to first that Hanley Ramirez made a nice catch on, he was finished for the day.
The problem with Toronto in this game, in fact in both games, is that the Jays’ starters continued to struggle, and just could not contain the get-on-base-and-run game that the Red Sox used both days, as they did all last year, to extend their early leads.
And as the Toronto hitters continued to fail to take advantage of opportunities off a not terribly impressive Boston bullpen (excepting Craign Kimbrel and Joe Kelly, who of course can’t take every inning, especially when their starters can’t get out of the fifth or sixth inning), Boston would continue to capitalize on leadoff walks and leadoff base hits.
On Saturday as soon as they turned the lineup over the first time on a hitherto effective Marco Estrada, the gloves came off. Mookie Betts and Andrew Benintendi hit back-to-back doubles and Ramirez hit one out.
The Jays got one back in their half of the fourth on the RBI single by Anthony Alford that cashed in Price’s walks that had put a runner in scoring positon.
But then the Sox extended in the sixth on a quick double by Bogaerts followed by a base hit by Rafael Devers, so when Smoak hit his shot Toronto were still two behind.
Any hope of tying it up with a bloop and a blast in the ninth was washed away when Betts and Beni(intendi) struck like lightning against Ryan Tepera after he’d retired the first two batters. A Betts double and a Benintendi single and it was 5-2.
Kimbrel came out for the save with fire in his eye. A comebacker and two punchouts over ten pitches and it was in the books for the Bosox, which left the Blue Jays looking to Joe Biagini versus Drew Pomeranz on Sunday for a series win.
Which was like waiting for rain that would never come.
If there are two pitchers in all of baseball more deliberate and reluctant to throw to the plate, I can’t imagine who they might be.
And yet, Sunday’s script was pretty much a carbon copy of Saturday’s.
Biagini gave up a two-run dinger to J.D. Martinez in the first, but still got through the first two innings on only 28 pitches with three strikeouts. You could almost think that, one bad pitch aside, we were on to something.
Then he came out for the third. And threw 41 pitches. He only gave up one run, if you can believe it, on one hit, but those three walks, well . . .
So we were down 3-0 and there was little hope that the next inning, or two at the most, would be any different for Biagini.
And the only thing that changed was the rhythm, for a moment. He had a quick ten-pitch fourth, but couldn’t get out of the fifth, finishing at four and two thirds, four runs, only four hits, but three walks and three strikeouts on 90 pitches.
Drew Pomeranz was no better than Biagini. He needed 26 pitches and a great play by Brock Holt at second, who flagged down a would-be base hit by Yanvergis Solarte with a runner at second, to get out of the first inning.
In the second he buckled down and struck out two after letting the first two on. The third inning was particularly puzzling to watch, as Pomeranz meandered his way through 32 pitches while allowing only a four-pitch walk to Smoak. How do you even do that? By comparison his last full inning was a breeze, only 16 pitches to take him to 84 for four innings and set him up for his early exit in the fifth.
Though the Jays finally pushed Pomeranz out of the game in the fifth inning, the three runs they scored off three hits and a walk at the top of the inning, and a subsequent RBI single by Russell Martin off reliever Hector Velazquez were all they got, as the Sox bullpen wobbled but didn’t break over the last four innings.
Once again the Sox picked up an insurance run in the eighth inning off Sam Gaviglio, who put Benintendi on with a leadoff walk, had him steal second and move to third on a sharp base hit by Martinez.
Tyler Clippard came in to try to hold the Bostons at bay, but he dropped a bouncer back to the mound that was a pretty sure shot for a double play and Benintendi came in with the fifth run while Clippard took the out at first and berated himself.
With a two-run lead Kimbrel finally got a break after pitching in the last two Yankee games and the Saturday game in Toronto. Joe Kelly came in to pick up the easiest save in the history of saves*, retiring the Jays on four pitches.
*I don’t know if it was, actually, but you could only go one pitch better, right?
Chris Sale aside, and remember that the Jays eventually won his start, Boston has very mediocre starting pitching at the moment as some of its stars continue to underperform, so it’s a measure of how poorly the Jays have been hitting in recent games that they could only take one of three from the Sox.
Off to see the Mets in Flushing, but we hear it’s going to be wet.
Flushing? Wet? Sorry.
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