It’s strange how your mind works sometimes. Shortly after the Blue Jays won the series clincher over the Orioles tonight, I saw a headline on a game recap that referred to Aaron Sanchez as a “single-A pitcher”, a humourous reference to his recent “demotion” to Dunedin for R and R, which ended with tonight’s start against the Orioles in Baltimore.
I started turning that idea around in my head, until it suddenly transformed itself into “the pitcher from Single-A”, and then I realized what was happening. The phrase is a slight emendation of the title of a baseball novel published in 1950, The Catcher from Double A, by Duane Decker, one of a series of thirteen young adult baseball novels he wrote about the fictional major league team, the “Blue Sox”.
When I was a kid growing up in the middle of Detroit in the 1950s, one of the high points of my childhood was the acquisition of a library card, which came about the same time I was allowed to walk the mile or so to the nearest public library branch. I was eight years old. Of course, any parent today who let an eight-year-old boy walk a mile to the library in what was already well on the way to becoming “inner city Detroit”, would be arrested and charged with child neglect, if not abuse. Funny that what made me happiest in childhood would not be permitted today.
The Montclair branch of the Detroit Public Library was a classic old neighbourhood library building, paneled and shelved in heavily varnished hardwood, the whole interior permeated by the intoxicating smell of books, glue, old paper, leather, and maybe a whiff of the librarian’s cologne hanging in the air. In the children’s section of the library (this was well before the days of “young adult” readers; “children” meant anyone not an adult), the sports section was one bank of four shelves. By the time I was ten, I had read every single book on those shelves, even including one about an American teenager who aspires to ride in the Tour de France.
Among the first titles that I raced through were all of the early Blue Sox novels, each of which featured the arrival in the big leagues and the coming to maturity of a young player who had to overcome various problems to become a real professional and a good team-mate on a contending team. There was a novel with a main character for each position on the field, so the author in building the series was also building his fictional championship team. It was a wonderful series, replete with vivid, continuing characters, and I can remember how empty I felt when the lineup card was filled and I had read all the stories.
Which is a roundabout way of saying that reading that phrase about the class-A pitcher made me think with great nostalgia about the Blue Sox, and about their catcher from Double-A, Pete Gibbs. One last note: as I looked over the titles in the series before I started writing this, I was struck by how white and Anglo-Saxon the Blue Sox were. There was one black player who made the team, in a book published not long after Jackie Robinson’s debut, but no Hispanics, no Orientals, no Black players from the overseas territories of the Netherlands. (Didi Gregorius, Zander Bogaerts, Jonathan Schoop). Just . . . white guys. What a different world that was, when you think about the diversity in the Blue Jays dugout, which is reflected to a considerable extent in the faces that appear in the stands at the TV Dome every game. Baseball is far the better for it, and so is the world, but I did love my Blue Sox.
So, all eyes were on Aaron Sanchez as he made his first start since his enforced “time out” in Dunedin, designed to relieve him of some innings of workload, yet having him available for the crucial games in the stretch run against divisional opponents.
But we were in Baltimore, so Orioles’ starter Yovani Gallardo had to navigate the intimidating top of the Jays’ batting order before Sanchez would take the mound. Gallardo, who was signed by the Orioles off the free agent market in February, after raising at least some speculation that he might be signing with Toronto, is a ten-year veteran with a career record including this year of 106-82 and an ERA of 3.78. He toiled mostly in the National League, seven years with the Brewers, before being traded to the Rangers for 2015, where he became an important cog in their playoff run.
However, Gallardo has struggled with injuries this season in Baltimore, and to the consternation of the Baltimore fans, his numbers don’t reflect the interest he garnered on the market last winter, sitting at 4-6 and 5.69. Tonight, also to the consternation of the Baltimore fans, but to the delight of the Blue Jays fans already in their seats at Camden Yards, and the disappointment of their fellows who hadn’t reached theirs yet, Jose Bautista deposited Gallardo’s first pitch of the game into the left-field seats.
Gallardo settled enough after that to dispatch Josh Donaldson and Edwin Encarnacion on infield grounders, but then he walked Michael Saunders, bringing Russell Martin to the plate as the cleanup hitter. When Martin goes to right field with power you know he’s swinging the bat well, and he swung the bat well on a 3-2 pitch from Gallardo, and delivered it to the inhabitants of the first row of seats in right centre. The Jays and Sanchez were up 3-0 before he even took the hill.
Before we talk about Sanchez, let’s look ahead to the second and third, when the Jays had Gallardo on the ropes but let him off, giving him the opportunity to rebound from his start and turn in one of his better performances of the year through the middle innings, and kept his team in contention in a close game. In the second, Dioner Navarro, marking his first appearance after returning to the Blue Jays, tonight as DH, hitting left against Gallardo, singled sharply to right to lead off the second, but was ultimately erased when Devon Travis hit into a double play started by third baseman Manny Machado. As an aside on Navarro, much of the focus on his acquisition has been about his positive effect on team chemistry, and about pairing him with certain pitchers, but we should also appreciate the fact that he is a switch hitter, and provides some badly-needed port-side presence to the lineup. Now that we enter September after tonight’s game, presumably there’ll be a third catcher on the bench, so it’s not a concern that the team has its only two catchers in the batting order.
In the third, though, Gallardo was lucky to get out with his skin, and with the lead still only 3-0 as Toronto missed a real opportunity to blow him away and the game open. Jose Bautista led off with his second hit of the night, a single to left. Then Josh Donaldson went the other way to single to right. Both runners moved up on a wild pitch that skipped away from Matt Wieters’ attempted block. Edwin Encarnacion was caught looking in a tough at-bat both for him and the pitcher, when he fouled off one four-seamer on three and two, before taking the next one for a strike that he didn’t think was there. This brought up Michael Saunders with one out and first base open. Even though it was only the third inning, mindful of the clutch homer that Saunders had hit last night off Ubaldo Jimenez, Manager Buck Showalter decided to put Saunders on to load the bases for Russell Martin. This was quite the risk, considering he was passing one dangerous guy in the clutch for another, who had already hit a two-run homer in the first. This time it worked, though. Martin hit the ball hard, but right at Manny Machado guarding the bag, where he would step on third for the force and easily double up Martin.
Incredibly, after the rocky start, Saunders was the last batter to reach base, as Gallardo retired the side in the fourth, fifth, and sixth, meaning that he got eleven outs on the last ten batters he faced. With a line of six innings, three runs, five hits, two walks, and three strikeouts on 102 pitches Gallardo departed with a quality start, but down 3-1, with little chance of gaining the win. Though the Orioles had scored their first and only run, which was unearned, in the bottom of the fifth, Aaron Sanchez shut them down in order in the sixth, and departed the game himself, in line for the win, and with the unlucky Gallardo in line for the loss.
So Aaron Sanchez only gave up one unearned run on five hits in six innings with three walks and two strikeouts over 112 pitches. It was a quality start for sure, and he ended up getting the win to go to 13 and 3, but can we say that the extra rest really helped? There are, of course, two ways of looking at that question. In the short term, did missing a turn and going and following what in effect was a rehab schedule, apparently, for ten days, help him to stay strong and sharp, or did it throw him off? In the long term, we won’t know the answer to the routine they’ve created for him until we know if he’s able to pitch in his last scheduled start of the season, hopefully game four or five of the World Series. Even beyond that, we might not know whether it was the right thing to do until we see if he gets through an ordinary marquee starter’s workload in 2017 without having any arm problems. Then, of course, maybe he would never have developed arm problems regardless of the innings. This ain’t science, folks.
My very strong impression gained both from observing his demeanour on the mound and watching the progress of his at-bats, is that this was not one of his best performances despite the numbers, and that his command, both of his pitches and of his routine, was less than what we’ve come to expect of him this year. Even within his pitching line, the three strikeouts over six innings, notably lower than his season average of 7.4 strikeouts per nine innings pitched, an average which includes tonight’s three punchouts, is telling.
Then look at his base-runners. He retired the side in order only in the second. In the first he got the first two outs then gave up a single and a walk. In the third he got the first two outs and allowed a single. In the fourth he walked the leadoff batter, Chris Davis, then was lucky to see Devon Travis make a circus catch going away from the infield on a nasty blooper by Mark Trumbo for the first out, before retiring the side. In the sixth, he gave up a one-out base hit to Matt Wieters, and with his pitch count already over 100, was teetering on the edge of being yanked, but was able to retire his last two batters to finish off the inning.
The fifth inning? Oh, that was a special case, and though the damage was minimized, it was not a pretty sight, for either Sanchez or the normally rock-solid third baseman Josh Donaldson. Once again, Sanchez breezed through the first two hitters, Jay Hardy grounding out to short, and Nelson Reimold lining out to Kevin Pillar in centre. Then Hyun Soo Kim singled to right and Jonathan Schoop singled to left, with Kim blazing around to third, bringing the dangerous Manny Machado to the plate. Sanchez made the pitch he needed to Machado, who hit an easy bouncer to Donaldson at third. Donaldson came in, and perhaps thinking of Machado’s speed just plain missed the catch, as the ball deflected off his glove while Kim scored on the play. Chris Davis walked on four pitches before Mark Trumbo flied out to right to finally end the inning.
The run hurt, of course, because Sanchez had protected a 3-0 lead since the first inning. But what hurt more was the extension of the inning, which clearly cost Sanchez any chance of going seven innings. He went into the inning with a reasonable 63 pitches for four innings, but took 25 to get out of it, bringing him to 88 for the game.
As of the seventh inning, both starters were done, then. Gallardo had acquitted himself considerably better than expected, and Aaron Sanchez in comparison seemed to struggle a bit. Yet it was Sanchez who left with the lead, having given up only an unearned run, while Gallardo was on the hook for the loss, thanks to the two pitches in the first that left the ball yard.
You would think that with the Jays in the lead, they wouldn’t have to worry about the premier arms in the Baltimore bullpen. Yet perhaps because Buck Showalter is sensing the season getting away from him he may have felt that it was necessary to pull out all the stops to try to win the series. So he used his regular seventh and eighth inning hold pitchers, Mychal Givens and all-star setup man Brad Brach. A great idea, but it didn’t quite work out for the Orioles. Each coughed up a run to the Jays, giving them some insurance. It’s a good thing for Showalter that he has an off night tomorrow night, because he’d burned his two-best hold pitchers in a losing cause.
Givens didn’t look to be in much trouble in his inning. Troy Tulowitzki led off by striking out. Then Dioner Navarro lifted a soft, loopy single to right that should have scared no one, especially since Givens followed by fanning Kevin Pillar. But then with two outs Devon Travis rifled one into the left field corner, and in one of the most improbable scenes of the season to date, with the two outs already posted, Dioner Navarro steamed around the bases and scored all the way from first on the double. Much hilarity ensued in the dugout as Navarro feigned trying to catch his breath while his mates fanned him with towels.
Next came Brad Brach for the Orioles, and Toronto hasn’t had much success against him. He looked pretty good tonight as well, until he got to two outs, when he served up a juicy one to Michael Saunders, who pulled it over the fence in right for a very welcome insurance run, and you can’t have too many of those, especially in Baltimore. Before Saunders came to the plate, Brach had to pitch over a soft looping “single” to short centre off the bat of Josh Donaldson. I don’t know who’s training or influencing the score keeper in Baltimore, but where I come from, this was totally an error by Jonathan Schoop, who moved out under the ball languidly, didn’t quite get all the way under it when he had plenty of time to be camped, and let it clank off his glove. I’m sure Josh appreciates the base hit. I hope Schoop appreciates not having an error charged against him. Anyway, Brach enticed Edwin Encarnacion into hitting a double-play ball to cut down Josh, and would have been home free, except for Saunders.
After Stroman’s departure, Manager John Gibbons used Joaquin Benoit in the seventh, who gave up a leadoff walk before shutting the Orioles down. Then in the eighth, with lefty Chris Davis followed by righty Mark Trumbo followed by lefty Pedro Alvarez, Gibbie elected to have Brett Cecil start the inning, hoping he’d get the two lefties out and not let Trumbo do any damage in between. Well, Cecil tried, he really did, but didn’t quite finish the whole job. Davis flied out to the warning track in left on the first pitch, but then Trumbo hit a single to right, and Cecil wasn’t going to pitch to Alvarez anyway at that point, so Gibbie yanked him for Scott Feldman. Feldman came in and did his job well. In nine pitches he caught Steve Pearce, hitting for Alvarez, looking at a called third strike, and then got Matt Wieters to hit a weak little bouncer up the line that he fielded and made the tag on Wieters himself.
After the elegant-sounding yet sharp-throwing Oliver Drake retired the Jays in order on eight pitches in the top of the ninth, Manager Gibbons decided yet again, to my continuing annoyance, to bring Roberto Osuna in to mop up with a four-run lead. Feldman could easily have taken the ninth, and is capable of multiple innings, so why not leave him out there? Oh, because Osuna had warmed up. Yup, gotta get him in there. This was almost a double disaster for the Blue Jays. As usual Osuna wasn’t very sharp when there was no save on the line. With two outs and Nelson Reimold on first with a single, Osuna served up a gopher ball to Schoop, making the game closer and more tense than it should have been. Worse, and it could have been infinitely worse, Osuna dodged the injury bullet when Jay Hardy, the leadoff hitter for the Orioles in the ninth, rifled one back through the box that caromed hard off Osuna’s left wrist just above the glove. The ball went right to Travis who got the out at first, but the main concern, of course, was Osuna. After consultation with the trainers, Osuna decided to carry on, and he did finish out the inning despite the tater to Schoop. Really, folks, it’s time for Gibbie to just leave Osuna taking it easy in the bullpen, and only bring him in to do the job he’s been give, saving close games.
So the Jays started on top, were never headed, received a decent if not overwhelming pitching performance from Aaron Sanchez in his return from voluntary exile, and would have chilled out comfortably, except for the perennial ninth-inning drama. Boston mashed Tampa Bay at Fenway, so the Jays stayed two ahead of the Sox and moved up to four games over the Orioles as all three teams looked forward to a Thursday off.
Friday night it will be Marcus Stroman against Alex Cobb, in his first start since 2014 after Tommy John surgery. Should be a good matchup, despite the venue, the odious Orange Juicer Dome in Tampa.
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