As the cameras panned around the beautiful Baltimore home grounds at Camden Yards, the only thing more striking than the amount of Blue Jays’ paraphernalia visible was the proliferation of equally royal blue empty seats in the ball park.
I wrote about a month ago that I believed the division race would end up being between the Blue Jays and the Red Sox, because the Orioles, who at that point had led the division for most of the season, did not have enough quality starting pitching to remain in the race. Since then, of course, things have gotten worse. Chris Tillman is on the disabled list. The only starter they picked up at the trade deadline was Wade Miley, not exactly a blue-chip acquisition. (In fact, going into his start against us tonight, Miley’s record since joining Baltimore is one and two, with an ERA of 8.18.) And at the start of tonight’s action, the Jays were two games ahead of Boston and three ahead of the Orioles.
Tonight’s attendance, 15,532, in a game between rivals and divisional contenders, would be embarrassing in Toronto, especially since at least twenty per cent of the crowd had to be Toronto fans. So is the poor support being shown for the Orioles at home a direct result of my prescience? Have the O’s fans packed it in because I told them their team was toast? Okay, no, no one in Baltimore is reading me; they’re just savvy baseball fans who know what’s what. They aren’t interested in turning out to see their team lose to Toronto.
Which is exactly what happened tonight, a cool, calm execution of the same game plan the team employed throughout the sweep of the Minnesota Twins in Toronto this weekend: Pitch well enough to keep the opposition in sight until you get the measure of their starter, and then score enough to get the lead and turn it over to a bullpen that’s suddenly way better than all the dopey phone-in fans seem to think it is.
Marco Estrada had the start tonight, and was suddenly, brilliantly, his old self again, after a number of tentative starts dating back to the struggles with his back that had affected him since mid-season. Those of us who thought it was an absolute lock that Dioner Navarro would catch Estrada tonight were more than a little surprised when the lineup came out to see that Russell Martin would get the start behind the plate, and not Navarro. It didn’t matter to Estrada, apparently; he was probably just so happy to see his old partner in crime that it picked up his game no matter who was catching him.
This was vintage Estrada tonight, if a guy with his career arc can be said to have had a “vintage”. He’s 33 years old, and this is his second year of being seriously in the spotlight with the Jays as one of the pitchers with the best combined stats in all of baseball over the last two years. Yet his stardom is of an “adult-onset” nature: in only his final three of five years in Milwaukee did he have a regular place in the Brewers’ rotation, and even then he only went 19 and 17, and only threw as many as 150 innings once, in 2014, his last year in Milwaukee.
But there’s no need to repeat what has happened to his status in the upper echelons of starters in the majors in his two years with the Blue Jays. Which is why there was no end to the concern felt by Toronto’s fans over the quality of his last several starts. In his last seven starts his ERA was 4.50, while he pitched only 40 innings, less than six per game. There’s no point in mentioning his won/loss record in this stretch, since he has continued a long-standing pattern of not getting many decisions because the offence just doesn’t produce runs for him.
Tonight, though, we saw the Marco Estrada that we had come to rely on before his recent fall-off. Overall, his line was seven innings plus one batter, one run, four hits, one walk, and four strikeouts over exactly 100 pitches.
Through the seven innings, the only time he really faltered was when Jay Hardy led off the third with a solo home run to left. He otherwise allowed base-runners in the first, when he stranded a single by Hyun Soo Kim, in the fifth, when he hit Matt Wieters with a pitch leading off, and then gave up a two-out single to Nolan Reimold, before fanning Jonathan Schoop to end the inning, and in the seventh, when he walked Mark Trumbo leading off, but then saw him erase himself when he went a couple of steps in the wrong direction while Justin Smoak was making a nice grab of a line drive by Matt Wieters and stepping on first for the double play.
For all his poor numbers since reporting to the Orioles, Wade Miley pitched well enough for them tonight. Other than the fact that he left with a two-run deficit in place, his numbers were similar to Estrada’s, seven innings, five hits, two walks, but nine strikeouts (of course; these were the Blue Jays hitting against him). His pitch count was higher at 112, but in his last inning he retired the side with just five pitches, so he was hardly labouring.
The essential differences between Estrada’s start and Miley’s were two. After Hardy had given the Orioles the lead with his homer in the third, Josh Donaldson, still basking in the memory of all those hats, hit one out, to right centre again, to tie it up. But after the home run Wiley walked Edwin Encarnacion and gave up a single to Russell Martin with one out, opening the way for Troy Tulowitzki to drive in Edwin with a single to left. In a smart base-running play, Martin, rounding second, saw that a good throw from left-fielder Kim might cut off Edwin at the plate, so he steamed past second to trigger the cut-off of Kim’s throw. This allowed Edwin to score unchallenged while he was being tracked down on the base path and tagged out. Superficially a TOOBLAN (Thrown Out On the Bases Like A Nincompoop), but in reality good baseball. Trade a run for an out? Sure thing.
The second glitch for Miley came when Jose Bautisa hammered one out of the park to lead off the sixth and increase the Jays’ lead to three-one. He wobbled a bit the rest of the inning, walking Encarnacion but fanning Martin, giving up another single to Tulo, but catching Melvin Upton looking for the third out. The fourth and sixth were Miley’s toughest innings, as he racked up 26 pitches in each, but then there was the easy seventh, and Miley could pack it in with a good outing under his belt.
Getting back to Estrada, besides his improved numbers, the other thing that was notable about his performance tonight was that it was once again a joy to see him throw beautiful pitches. In the face of some early evidence that the Orioles were sitting on his excellent changeup, since the first three batters all hit the ball fairly hard, Martin, to whom Estrada gives total control over pitch selection and location, started calling more curve balls and fast balls, both to great effect, so that he could re-introduce the changeup later on. Much has been made of the influence of Mark Buehrle on the Jays’ pitchers over the last couple of years, and it’s unquestionable that Estrada’s mastery of location and spin reflect the tutelage of the departed staff mentor.
With Miley finished after seven, O’s Manager Buck Showalter brought in Mychal Givens to face the Jays in the eighth. After retiring Bautista on a groundout and walking Donaldson, he got Edwin to fly out to left, and fanned Martin to keep the game close for Baltimore.
At 98 pitches after seven innings, you’d think that Jays’ Manager John Gibbons would want to shake hands with Estrada and let a reliever start the eighth, usually the preferred option for most relievers. But, no, Gibbie has his idiosyncracies, and one of them is to send a starter back out there for one more kick at the can, presumably on a hitter-by-hitter basis. I was surprised, but not really, to see Estrada back out there for the eighth. I wasn’t surprised that he only threw two more pitches, the second of which Jay Hardy whacked into right for a base hit. I also wasn’t surprised to see Gibbie pop out of the dugout to fetch Estrada and bring Joe Biagini into the game. There are only two reasons I can think of for doing this. The first is that he wanted the matchup with the first hitter, but then Hardy’s the guy who took Estrada out in the third. The second would be to give his starter an ovation from the crowd, but this was Baltimore, so . . .
Biagini did the job he would have done anyway, fanning Reimold, inducing a little bloop popout to second by Schoop, and retiring Kim on a grounder to short. Three outs, 14 pitches. Not bad for a Rule 5 guy who finds himself right in the middle of a pennant race, much to his surprise and delight.
Showalter opted to bring in the newly-arrived (signed yesterday) Tommie Hunter to pitch to the Jays in the ninth. Hunter’s name has been entwined with some interesting ones since his ML debut with Texas in 2009. In 2011 he was traded to the Orioles along with—get this—Chris Davis, for Koji Uehara. At the trade deadline last year he went to the Cubs for one Junior Lake. He became a free agent last winter and signed with Cleveland, who released him on August 25th, making him available for the O’s to pick up yesterday.
The first two years Hunter was with Baltimore, he was used mostly as a starter, but with middling success, and then he spent two years plus in their bullpen with really good numbers, a lot of innings and ERAs under three in both 2013 and 2014. In fact, I’m hard put to think why they would have traded him to the Cubs for Junior Lake last year.
Anyway, he’d just arrived in Baltimore, was inserted right into the ninth inning tonight against the Jays, and while he may have been glad to be back in Baltimore, I don’t think he enjoyed facing the Jays, because for once they were the team picking up insurance runs at his expense.
Troy Tulowitzki’s hard grounder into the hole between short and third tested Jay Hardy, but he made a fine backhanded plant and throw for the first out. Then Hunter walked Melvin Upton on a three-two pitch, bringing Kevin Pillar to the plate. Of all the Jays’ holdovers from last year, Pillar is the one who seems to have retained the most of the “stirring the pot” spirit. He singled sharply to left, bringing up Justin Smoak, batting left-handed against Hunter. On a one-two pitch, Smoak shortened up (for once) and just laid the ball out into right field where it dropped in front of Mark Trumbo, scoring Upton and sending Pillar around to third. Then Devon Travis executed the “less than two outs, runner on third” drill perfectly, rolling a lazy grounder out to second that could have scored Albert Pujols, let alone Kevin Pillar. It didn’t matter that Hunter fanned Jose Bautista for the third out; the Jays were heading to the bottom of the ninth with a 5-1 lead.
As it turns out, it was immaterial that Gibbie had burned Roberto Osuna yesterday against the Twins in a non-save situation, since today’s game was now non-save as well, with the add-on runs in the ninth for the Jays. That hardly mattered to happy senior Joaquin Benoit, who was delighted to close out the game for the Jays. In an appearance that summoned all those stupid tag lines about “partying like it’s 1995” or whenever, Benoit pitched like it was 2013 in Detroit. All he had to do was get through Machado, Davis and Trumbo. So he fanned Machado on a one-two pitch. He fanned Chris Davis on a full count, and persisted through nine pitches to Trumbo to get him to line out to Upton to end the game. I hope he kept the game ball from that one, because it was a thing of beauty, and who says old guys can’t pitch?
At the beginning of this piece, I referred to tonight’s game as the “cool, calm execution of a game plan”. You be the judge of that.
The Orioles are now four games back of the Jays, and Boston trounced Tampa Bay 9-4, so the lead over the Sox remains at two. Tomorrow night it’s Jay Happ against Ubaldo Jimenez. Looks good for our side, no?
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