Now that was a pitchers’ duel!
Tonight’s game (actually, last night’s when you’re writing after midnight) in Houston between the Astros and the Blue Jays went fourteen innings, and was absolutely dominated by the pitching. We had a pretty good matchup on Sunday afternoon between Chris Tillman and Aaron Sanchez, but this, this my friends, was the real deal.
Marcus Stroman threw his best game of the year. Doug Fister, who started for the Astros, nearly matched him pitch for pitch. It was a reincarnation of sorts for both pitchers.
Stroman’s well-documented struggle to get back to where he was at the end of 2015 was still not quite finished as he entered last night’s game. Even his last start against San Diego, when he went six and two thirds innings and gave up only seven hits and a walk while striking out seven, had been marred by a monstrous three-run homer by Padres’ rookie Alex Dickerson.
Fister, a guy of whom Rocky might have asked, “Didn’t he used to be somebody?”, has never quite regained the heights of achievement he enjoyed when he was with the Tigers, despite a decent record so far this year with the Astros. From mid-2011, when he joined Detroit from Seattle, he had a record of 32-20, with ERAs respectively for 20ll with Detroit of 1.79, for 2012 of 3.45, and for 2013 of 3.67. By last season, with Washington, he was down to 5-7 and 4.19, his starts and innings pitched down significantly from previous years due to some forearm problems that had him on the DL for about a month in the early part of the season
Right from the first inning you could tell that it would be the pitchers on centre stage today. Fister struck out one and retired the side on ten pitches. Stroman gave up a leadoff single to the talented George Springer, but struck out the rookie Alex Bregman and Jose Altuve, and got Carlos Correa on a grounder to second.
Similarly, Fister gave up a looping single to left by Michael Saunders to lead off the second, then firmly shut the door. Both pitchers had a “moment” in the third. Devon Travis hit a two-out double to left on a ball that Preston Tucker really should have caught. In the bottom of the inning, Tyler White led off with a sinking liner to centre that ended up, as so many do, in the outstretched webbing of the glove of a death-defying, diving Kevin Pillar. With two outs Stroman walked Springer, but left him there.
As the strikeouts kept mounting, this was the tally, through five: the Astros had two hits and a walk off Stroman, and he had already struck out nine. Fister had given up four hits but no walks to the Jays, and he had set down five via the strikeout. The Jays had two runners reach second; besides Travis’ double, Edwin Encarnacion had singled to lead off the fourth, and daringly took second after the catch on Michael Saunders’ deep fly to centre. Only one Astro reached second, and that was courtesy of Stroman himself. In the fifth, with two outs Tyler White hit a squibber off Stroman’s glove that deflected toward third. He pounced on it and tried to make a hopeless, rushed throw to first, which was way off line and went down into the right-field corner, letting White advance to second.
In the Jays’ sixth, which would prove to be Fister’s last, he walked Jose Bautista leading off, and then fanned Encarnacion, Saunders, and Martin to go out on a high note, to say the least. With a pitch count of 98, he would not come back for the seventh, having given up no runs on four hits, walked one, and struck out eight. As Stroman took the hill for the bottom of the sixth, with his pitch count at only 77, it looked like he had a good chance to outlast Fister by an inning. He did, but not before his one mistake in the game gave the Astros’ bullpen a chance to save a win for Fister.
He caught George Springer looking for the first out, and got the rookie Bregman to fly out to centre.
But you had to know that Jose Altuve was not going to continue eating out of his hand.
And Stroman knew it as well. He had caught Altuve looking in the first on a cutter, and in the fourth on a fastball. According to PitchTracker, Altuve did not see a Stroman curveball in the first two at bats. That had to be in the back of his mind. And Stroman and his catcher Russell Martin had to be leery of going back to the same pitches that had worked before, so they decided on a curveball too. Unfortunately for Stroman, Altuve won the guessing game and lined that curveball over the fence in left. The Astros were up one-nothing, and it was easy to imagine that it could end that way, despite the departure of both starters.
Stroman finished the sixth by throwing a ground-ball out to Carlos Correa, came back for the seventh, and struck out the side for the second time in the game. But for that one curveball, Stroman’s performance was Cy-high today: one run, 3 hits, one walk, 13 strikeouts, 111 pitches.
Naturally enough, the bullpen approach of the two managers differed from this point in the game, for the simple reason that the Astros were pitching on the lead and the Jays from behind. In the end, after 14 innings, the Houston bullpen had prevailed, but they needed a lightning bolt from above, a rookie named Chris Devenski, to pull it off.
Astros’ Manager A.J. Hinch went immediately to his situational lefty followed by his highest leverage arms, to try to close out the game through three innings. He brought in the lefty Tony Sipp to turn Justin Smoak around to lead off the seventh, and then replaced him with the quirky and imposing Pat Neshek to face the right-handers. That was all good. He brought in Ken Giles to pitch the eighth, less quirky but more imposing than Neshek, and he struck out the side in a wild and wooly sort of way, with a walk, a hit, and a couple of wild pitches just for fun.
Still all good, as it was time for Will Harris, the newly-designated Houston closer, to do his thing in the ninth, but, he didn’t. Russell Martin patiently waited out a three-two count leading off, fouled off a couple, and then poleaxed one that jumped out of the park to left mighty quick. Finally the Jays were on the board, with new life. Harris got the next two hitters, but when he walked Darwin Barney, Hinch had had enough. But what to do? He still had a chance to walk it off in the bottom of the ninth if he got the third out, but he’d used up all his big guys.
As luck would have it, Chris Devenski was hiding in a corner of the bullpen. Well, not really hiding, at least not as far as the Astros were concerned. This young man was drafted by the White Sox in 2011, and came to the Astros in 2012 as, you guessed it, a player to be named later. He worked his way up in the Houston organization, and made the Astros out of spring training. His record is really good so far: 2.21 ERA in 29 appearances with four starts, one save, 73.1 innings pitched, 64 strikeouts, and a WHIP OF .98. I think he would be deemed “major prospect capital” in any trade deadline talks, that is, he’d have to fetch a good return to be traded.
So A.J. Hinch needed someone who would get that last out in the ninth, and be able to come back for the tenth and beyond if Houston didn’t walk it off in the ninth, because all of the bullpen “names” had already been used. Well, Devenski was the answer to Hinch’s prayers. It took him two pitches to strand Barney at first after the walk by Harris to close out the Jays’ ninth. When the Astros couldn’t muster anything more than a two-out walk against Joaquin Benoit, it would be up to Devenski to carry the freight for as long as possible.
And boy, did he ever! Feast your eyes on this performance: he pitched four and one third innings. He did not allow a baserunner. He struck out seven Blue Jays, all in a row, coming within two of the MLB record. He retired the other batters he faced with three grounders, one fly ball, and two popups. What this did, of course, was it kept the Astros in the game while they gradually emptied out the Blue Jays’ bullpen, since the Jays didn’t choose to use Joe Biagini for more than two innings, and their new guy, Scott Feldman, who will be used as a starter if needed, has been doing a long relief role for Houston, and was in a Toronto uniform last night, but wasn’t really available because he had gone two full innings and thrown 38 pitches just the day before when the Tigers had blown out the Astros.
The Jays’ pen held on for as long as there were arms available, and with admirable success, though not as spectacularly as Devenski. Bo Schultz threw three straight ground ball outs in the eighth. Joaquin Benoit walked and stranded one in the ninth. Biagini pitched the tenth and eleventh, and gave up one hit but struck out two. Brett Cecil looked very sharp with one strikeout in the twelfth. Roberto Osuna, ironically, had a most adventurous thirteenth, giving up both a hit and a walk, but striking out two. So, in all, six innings, two hits, two walks, and five strikeouts from five pitchers. What more could you ask for?
How about a curfew after thirteen, since the Blue Jays were officially out of pitchers once Osuna was burned? Mind you, Devenski was finished at the end of thirteen as well, but Hinch still had arms left, and brought in Michael Feliz, a young right-hander with another very live arm. He set the Jays down in order, with two strikeouts.
So going into the bottom of the fourteenth, the game was basically lost to the Jays, as their pitching choices were Jason Grilli, who was supposed to be off the board because of his recent workload, Feldman, and R.A. Dickey, tomorrow’s starter, who had gone down to the bullpen “just in case”. Manager John Gibbons rolled the dice and came up with Feldman, who had to face Houston’s three, four, and five hitters, all formerly friendly faces, now offering nothing but menace.
In four pitches the game was over. Jose Altuve singled to left, and Carlos Correa, who had gone hitless in four at bats, doubled to right and Altuve scampered around to score easily from first base.
I started by saying this was a real pitchers’ duel. It turns out that it wasn’t Stroman versus Fister, but the Toronto staff against the Houston staff. There were 81 outs recorded in the game. Forty of them came via the strikeout, 22 for the Jays, and 18 for the Astros.
At least R.A. Dickey is still good to go for tomorrow.
Leave a Reply