The biggest issue to be examined about tonight’s dreadful shellacking of the Blue Jays by the Tigers won’t really be resolved until tomorrow night’s second game of the series at Bank Park in Detroit. That, obviously, is the question of how they will rebound after what happened tonight. The biggest measure of any team or athlete in any sport is how they respond to adversity. It’s relatively easy to break on top, stay on top, and coast home already cooling out, but most games or competitions don’t offer that kind of luxury to the aspiring champion. Even the Golden State Warriors had to scramble from behind to eliminate Oklahoma City and reach the threshold of their second straight NBA championship this spring.
Let’s delay the sorry story of what went on in the game tonight to consider for a while the venue, and the city. As readers will know if they have glanced at my bio, I am a native Detroiter who cut my baseball teeth on the dreadful bottom-dwelling Tiger teams of the nineteen fifties. My earliest memories of the Tigers start with listening to the sonorous voice of Van Patrick doing play-by-play on the radio. And for those of you who aren’t aware of it, yes, there was a well-known radio voice doing the Tigers before Ernie Harwell arrived on the scene.
When I was old enough, a special treat of the summer, two or three times each year, was to go to the ball game with my father. My father took us to games not so much as a father/kids bonding experience, a concept foreign to us back then, but as an excuse to go himself. I was the last of a large family, and probably got to see more games with him, if only because by the time I was old enough to go the older kids were mostly out of the house, and it was cheaper to take just me than a whole horde of kids ten years earlier. So, we went more often.
Visits to Briggs Stadium (more on the name in a minute) were marked by three special experiences. The first was stepping into the opening for your section and seeing the brilliant green field laid out below. The second was the tangy smell of cigar-cum-peanuts-cum-hot dogs with mustard that existed only there, and was reinforced by the smell of my father’s fresh cigar, a special treat he reserved just for ball games. Finally, there was the awe that I felt gazing out into right field, and thinking, “That’s Al Kaline standing there. It really is.”
Now, Briggs Stadium. You may have noticed that when I remember to do it, I refuse to use the corporately-sponsored names of today’s stadia. Thus the TV Dome in Toronto, and as above the Bank Dome in Detroit. (Must go back to stories from Tampa and change stadium name to Juice Field, and familiar references from “the Trop” to “the Juice”.) The now sadly departed Tiger Stadium was Briggs Stadium from 1935 until 1961 when new owner John Fetzer renamed it after the team. Briggs Stadium took its name from long-time owner Walter Briggs, and ironically, at least for me, the name was an early example of corporate stadium-naming. Walter Briggs made his millions from—wait for it—toilets. His Briggs Beautyware company was one of the largest manufacturers of porcelain bathroom fixtures in the American midwest. I guess the name of the stadium doesn’t bother me because it’s actually a person’s name, and does not reference the related product for more overt advertising purposes. It’s a good thing that the current practice didn’t exist back then, or we might have been watching the Tigers play in the Toilet Bowl . . .
I had wanted to write also about the current park’s location in the city, the vistas it presents, and its relation to the current state of Detroit, but I see now that I’ve spent too long on the old days, and if I carry on with my original plan, I might never get to tonight’s game, and that wouldn’t be a bad thing, would it? But then those of my readers who really need the nitty-gritty of the game would be disappointed, wouldn’t they? So I think I’ll leave further ruminations on the team, the stadium, and the city for a supplementary article. Watch for its appearance in the Articles and Ephemera section.
I’ll just segue back to the game by means of one further observation about the setting for tonight’s action. It had rained earlier in the day in Detroit, a real, lowering thunder-banger from the looks of it. By game time, the sun was out, but the big dark clouds were still there, casting that eerie-but-beautiful yellow glow over the field. The final touch, and a nod here to the designers of the new park for leaving the view of the city open beyond the centre-field fence, was that lovely light illuminating what’s left of the stunning Art Deco Detroit skyline. The final, final touch was the rainbow that appeared over the skyline as the Tigers put the game out of reach. Maybe God isn’t a Blue Jays fan after all.
On the face of it, the pitching matchup looked more like a mismatch. Jay Happ has been a rock in the Jays’ rotation, with the exception of the one early exit, while the Tigers were sending out Michael Fulmer, a young prospect they leveraged away from the Mets last year at the trading deadline for Yoenis Cespedes. If it pans out for them, the young pitching stock that the Tigers got in return for Cespedes and David Price last July could be the heart of their rotation for years, though I worry about how injury-prone Daniel Norris seems to be. A look at Fulmer’s stats disabused me of the notion of a mismatch pretty quickly, though. He came into the game with an ERA under three and a 5-1 record in eight starts, and had flirted with a no-hitter into the late innings in his most recent appearance.
Fulmer lived up to his record thus far. He went six innings, giving up two infield hits, walking three, and striking out five. He wasn’t pulled after six for his pitch count, which was only 88 at that point, but for future considerations. Tiger Manager Brad Ausmus saw no point to letting him go further after the Tigers had padded their lead to 9-0 in the bottom of the sixth. Better to save a few pitches for later in the summer. Fulmer has heat, good stuff, and poise. The two hits he gave up were both infield singles by Darwin Barney, Now, not that Barney’s hits weren’t legit, but there’s not a lot of mobility in the Tigers’ infield, and I can certainly see that as a problem in a game when they’re not roasting the opposing pitcher on a spit.
In fact, the only ball that was a threat to Fulmer in the least was the shot that Edwin Encarnacion hit to the warning track in right with two on and two out in the third, when the game was still in reach, sort of, at 4-0. Fulmer escaped that one with his shutout intact when right fielder J.D. Martinez finally untracked his clumsy self and made a lucky stab to corral the ball for the out. A word about names here: I shorten names where possible in my game notes, and had to come up with a way to distinguish between Victor Martinez and J.D. Martinez. I settled on following the ARod example, and designated them as VMart and JMart . It’s a good thing the Tigers don’t have a Kevin Martinez . . .
So, Fulmer handled the Jays lineup fairly easily, and the relievers who followed mowed down our dispirited birds equally easily. The only gasp for the Jays was their last, a two-out triple to right in the ninth by Michael Saunders, followed by a four-pitch walk to Justin Smoak. However, the chance of a glorious two-out, eleven-run Jays’ rally went a-glimmering when Josh Thole, inserted into the game to give the increasingly frustrated Russell Martin a much-needed break (more on this in a moment), grounded out to second to end the sorry affair.
I earlier mentioned Jay Happ’s one problematic start so far this season. Well, make that two. For a second time in three games one of the Jays’ premier starters took his team out of the game early, though this time Happ did hang on to work five helpful innings before departing with a 6-0 deficit. The story of this game was writ early on, and both teams could have mailed it in after the third inning. For his part, Fulmer walked the leadoff batters in both the first and second, but escaped unpunished for his sins. In the second, Michael Saunders moved up on a deep fly and a right-side grounder, and so died at third. It’s quite a night for the Jays’ batsmen when their biggest achievement is Saunders dying at third. Twice.
For his part, Happ looked okay in the first, working around a one-out walk to Cameron Maybin, on only eleven pitches. Then came the fateful second, whose events might have been inspired by Macbeth’s three witches lurking around in the thunderheads above. With one out, Nick Castellanos hit a liner straight at Kevin Pillar in centre. For once, ever, it seems, Pillar broke wrong, taking a couple of steps in before realizing the strength of the carry and the strength of the wind blowing out. He frantically backtracked, but the ball was over his head and all the way to the wall, and by the time he’d retrieved it, Castellanos had a triple. Happ then issued his second walk of the night, to Justin Upton, which shouldn’t have been such a bad thing, with the slow-moving catcher coming to the plate. But Upton spiked that plan by promptly and easily stealing second, to take the double play off the table. No problem, though, because James McCann, the catcher, was hitting a buck 76. Which didn’t stop him from golfing a low, inside slider on a 1-2 pitch into the left-field seats. No, it didn’t stop him at all.
Now, there’s lots of commentary floating around about how Pillar’s misplaying of the line drive was the start of all the problems for Happ and the Jays, and there’s probably something to the notion that Happ finishes the inning off okay if Pillar makes that second out. But let’s have some perspective, folks. First of all, that ball was stung, and that’s on Happ. Secondly, if the inning does play out the same, which no one can know, then the Castellanos run gives the Tigers one less in an 11-0 win.
Be that as it may, the weirdness only got weirder before the inning was out. Happ got shortstop Jose Iglesias on a liner to centre that Pillar did catch, turning the lineup over to leadoff hitter Ian Kinsler with two outs. Kinsler prolonged the inning with a single to left. Then Happ, worried about his stunting around first base, solved the problem by balking him to second. Then Russell Martin missed a pitch that careened away from him, sending him to third, whence Happ obligingly wild-pitched him home by spiking one in the dirt. The Tigers extended the inning when Maybin singled to left, but it mercifully ended when Miguel Cabrera flied out to centre, Pillar carefully squeezing the third out.
Now, if you were Happ, or one of his team behind him in the field, wouldn’t you just pack it in after a farce like that? They might as well have, because, if possible, it was all downhill from there. After the Jays’ one shot at glory from Encarnacion died at the track in the third inning, Happ gave up a two-run shot to Justin Upton in the home half, and if you were able to eavesdrop in the dugouts after Upton’s homer you would have heard a lot of ball players making dinner plans for after the game. This one was in the books.
What’s left to say about it? Gavin Floyd had a terrible inning, wild as a march hare. I mentioned Russell Martin’s frustration earlier. Bad enough that he was all over the place in the third with Happ on the mound, but Floyd’s sixth was just as bad, including two wild pitches and a walk. Floyd kept missing so far outside that Martin took to snapping his glove out at the ball, when he could actually reach it, as his annoyance boiled over. After Floyd’s performance added three to the Tigers’ lead, Manager John Gibbons decided to call off the (sleeping) dogs, and put in some subs for the Tigers’ seventh, first and foremost Josh Thole behind the plate, getting Martin out of the line of fire just in time.
More effective out of the Jays’ pen was newcomer Jason Grilli. Though he gave up a double to James McCann, now Mr. buck 91, and an infield single to poor Jose Iglesias, who had been left out of the hit parade up till now, he struck out the side with some impressive pitches to strand the two runners he’d allowed. Drew Storen then did his bad cop routine in the eighth, allowing the last two Detroit runs of the night.
My summary of my game notes was the shortest one all year: “Ew-w-w-”, I wrote. (Is that how you spell it?) Now let’s look to Aaron Sanchez to help us brace up tomorrow night. He’ll be going against former Jay prospect Matt Boyd. The last time Boyd started for us last year, he didn’t get out of the first inning. We can only hope.
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