They have to do something! Incantations? Ritual sacrifice? Voodoo? Sprinkle pixie dust on the bat rack? Have the pitching coaches and the batting coaches swap jobs? Lock the manager in the john before the game? Who cares? Just do something, anything to rid this team of its accursed batting slump and get it back on track! One idea I had was to sacrifice a pure white chicken and pour its fresh blood over the barrels of all the “gamer” bats belonging to the team’s stars. But then, you might have trouble with PETA, right? Besides, I hate it when the blood stains rub off on the baseballs . . .
The trouble with modern-day baseball management is that its leading lights may have all the smarts in the world, but they utterly lack imagination. Where is Bill Veeck when you need him? Now there was a guy with imagination!
If you know anything about the legendary owner Bill Veeck at all, you probably know that he was this wacky guy who once sent a midget up to bat in a major league game. (Eddie Gaedel, who wore the numer 1/8 on his uniform, walked on four pitches and was lifted for a pinch runner.) Or the guy who in the mid-seventies, near the end of his riotous career, sponsored a Disco Demolition Night promotion at Comiskey Park in Chicago that resulted in a full-blown riot and caused the White Sox to forfeit that night’s game.
But Bill Veeck was a pretty smart guy who was responsible for a lot of innovations in major league baseball. It was his idea to plant the ivy along the wall at Wrigley Field. He was the first owner to have the players’ names put on the backs of their uniforms. He integrated the American League in July of 1948 by signing Larry Doby, and in fact was apparently thwarted by the commissioner of baseball in 1943 when he let his intention be known that when he took over the Philadelphia Phillies, a team he was going to buy on a fire-sale basis, he was going to stock the team with stars from the negro leagues and forcibly integrate baseball. The story goes that the commissioner, Judge Kenesaw Mountain Landis (I’m not making this up) an old-school segregationist, had the league take over the franchise from its previous owners so another buyer could be found who would keep the team in Philadelphia, and keep baseball white.
One of his more memorable ideas might have a certain attraction for Blue Jays’ fans, especially in the throes of the current slump. In St. Louis he sponsored Grandstand Managers’ Day: placards for voting were handed out to the fans as they entered the stadium and the stadium announcer offered them the opportunity to vote on various decisions that arose in the course of the game, such as whether or not to bunt. Relevance to Jays’ fans? First, it would give them a chance to have their say on the spot about some of Gibbie’s stranger decisions. More importantly, the Brownies won that day, 5-3, to break a four-game losing streak.
If we could just figure out how to summon the spirit of Bill Veeck, I’m sure he would come up with some ideas for solving the current mess the Jays are in.
As you can see from my title, I’ve decided to write about the second and third games of the just-completed series in Toronto with the Tampa Bay Rays in a single piece. There is a practical reason for doing this, in that I won’t have to spend quite as much time wallowing in the dismal reality of the last two days (sometimes, folks, this is hard, really hard. Sometimes I feel like I’d rather write about what a sweet guy Roughneck, er, Roughned, Odor is than write about yet another in the recent string of dispiriting Blue Jays’ losses.) The second reason for lumping the games together (and lumping is just the word, isn’t it?) is thematic, in that the two games were so similar, like baseball peas in a pod.
In both games, the Blue Jays’ starter looked up to throwing a shutout from the first inning. In both games, a shockingly sudden lightning strike by Tampa Bay’s offence jumped them into a quick, unexpected lead. In both games, the Jays’ hitters utterly failed to put up any meaningful threat, and in both cases, deprived of their ability to turn to their high-leverage relievers, the rest of the Toronto bullpen allowed the Rays to tack on runs until the game was out of reach. Both games, especially in the context of Toronto’s recent batting woes, were, in short, frustrating, despressing, and all too predictable.
Marcus Stroman wasn’t perfect through the first four innings last night, giving up three walks and a base hit, but he was supported by three double plays. Two were of the conventional variety, as Stroman benefitted from his ability to keep the ball on the ground, while the third resulted from a base-running gaffe by Kevin Kiermaier that was capitalized on by an alert Zeke Carrera, who threw behind him to first after a not very difficult catch to double him off the bag. Of the four base-runners allowed by Stroman, only one ended up being stranded, as a consequence of the double plays. Not pretty, necessarily, but this is how you win, with pitching that plays into your defensive strength.
In the fifth, though, the Rays started measuring Stroman’s offerings, and when they did his fourth walk of the game added to his problems. Nick Franklin led off with a liner toward the left-field corner on which Melvin Upton moved quickly to his right, dove, and made a nice catch. The left-handed Corey Dickinson then took advantage of the shift and poked one into left field that went for a double. Stephen Souza walked on a three-two pitch, bringing the number eight hitter, utility shortstop Alexei Ramirez, to the plate. On an 0-2 pitch, instead of wasting one, Stroman was too good with a two-seamer and Ramirez drove it over the left-field fence. To be fair to Ramirez, who’s just signed with Tampa, this may have been only his sixth homer this year, but he does have 115 in his career. Suddenly, Stroman’s one-hitter was a 3-0 deficit, one run contributed by his fourth walk, and the Jays were once again looking up from under.
Meanwhile, facing a workmanlike left-handed Drew Smyly, the Blue Jays displayed at least one each of their typical slump-prolonging behaviours. These include the lead-off hitter making an out, usually on soft contact, a double play immediately following a leadoff walk or base hit, or a two-out double being wasted. There wasn’t even an opportunity for the classic two-out strikeout with a runner in scoring position. After the Ramirez home run, in the home half of the fifth Melvin Upton led off with a single, Kevin Pillar grounded into a double play, Zeke Carrera, he of the pinch-hit heroics on Monday night, doubled to right, and Darwin Barney flied out to end the inning.
To his credit, Marcus Stroman finished well in the sixth, and qualified for a quality start, giving up three runs on only four hits, though the four walks were telling. He struck out Kiermaier swinging, retired Evan Longoria on a grounder to third, and then pitched over an infield single by Brad Miller by getting Nick Franklin to fly out to centre. He finished with only 92 pitches, and I imagine we would have seen him in the seventh if he had been pitching with the lead.
Very few games are without at least a glimmer of hope, and Toronto’s moment came in the bottom of the sixth, when they finally broke through against Smyly, forcing Manager Kevin Cash to remove him from the game, and closing the Tampa lead to 3-2. With one out, Smyly walked Jose Bautista, then got Edwin Encarnacion to fly out to right, bringing Russell Martin to the plate in yet another two-out, man-on-first situation. This time, though, it was different. Martin launched a high, booming drive to left that reached the 200 level and finally brought the fans out of their stupor. Cash brought in impressive callup Ryan Garton, who gave up a single by Troy Tulowitzki to right, before Melvin Upton grounded into a fielder’s choice for the third out.
Manager Gibbie is very predictable in his use of the bullpen, and his trust is hard-earned. With a lead or barely trailing, if his starter goes six innings, it’s a no-brainer, BenGriNa has been great. But tonight Joaquin Benoit was not available, having pitched in three games in a row for the first time this year. So next up was Joe Biagini, who has developed beautifully, and is clearly one of Gibbie’s main men in the pen. This time, though, with the Rays painfully close in our headlights, he didn’t do it. After finally giving up his first home run of the season in his last outing, Stephen Souza hit the second off him with one out. Biagini escaped the inning without further damage, but the disheartening extra run had negated half of Martin’s blast. It almost seems as though the Jays are tempting the fates when they start to rally, and the fates delight in smashing them back down.
The Jays had one last gasp in the bottom of the seventh. Kevin Pillar led off with a single against Garton, which brought lefty Dana Eveland in to face—and fan—Zeke Carrera, after which Danny Farquhar came in to face the pinch-hitting Dioner Navarro who popped out to short left. Then, as so often, things stirred further after the second out. Travis singled. Farquhar walked Bautista, bringing Edwin to the plate, two outs, bases loaded, down by two. Big inhale. Edwin takes a hittable strike one. Edwin swings over a breaking ball in the dirt. Edwin takes two balls out of the zone. Edwin fans on a high hard one. Big exhale.
And that was it for Toronto on this night. One more base-runner, Tulo with a single in the eighth, erased on a double play. Seven up, six down.
Meanwhile, down by two, Gibbie finished up with Brett Cecil pitching the eighth. Cecil escaped without damage, despite giving up a bloop single to the left-handed Kevin Kiermaier, the one guy he was supposed to get. In the ninth, he went through Matt Dermody, whose lefty-lefty faceoff with Corey Dickinson resulted in an infield single, Scott Feldman, who walked a couple, yielded a sac bunt, and a run on a fielder’s choice, and Aaron Loup, who wild-pitched a second run home before Ryan Tepera came in to get the last out. The Rays picked up two insurance runs on an infield hit, two walks, a wild pitch, a hit batsman, and two stolen bases.
Such is the fate of the blue Blue Jays these days.
Today’s rubber match of the Toronto-Tampa Bay series in Toronto opened with the most exquisite first inning a lover of good baseball would want, if that lover were also a Blue Jays’ fan.
After a number of starts in which he has been less than his best, the real Marco Estrada opened the game by mesmerizing the Rays’ tough top three hitters. Knowing that teams, especially the Rays, had been keying on his changeup, catcher Dioner Navarro wisely switched to Estrada’s oft-maligned 88-mph fast ball as the go-to pitch, and he fanned both Logan Forsythe and Kevin Kiermaier before catching Evan Longoria looking at a called third strike. It was as precise a demonstration of pinpoint command and the ability to throw the hitters off balance as you would ever hope to see.
Then the Blue Jays came to the plate, and the magic of perfect baseball continued. Alex Cobb, who had settled down to pitch a solid five innings for the Rays against the Jays in Tampa in his first appearance since 2014 following Tommy John surgery, was on the hill, and threw a first pitch strike to Devon Travis who hit a solid line drive to right centre field on the second pitch. Stephen Souza in right, who, along with the entire Tampa outfield had been playing Travis extremely shallowly, finally got burned as the ball got past him and Travis hustled into second. On the first pitch to him, Michael Saunders laid down a perfect, and perfectly unexpected, sacrifice bunt toward third that moved Travis to third with one out. On the first pitch to him, Edwin Encarnacion hit a solid line drive to Kevin Kiermaier in medium centre, on which Travis easily scored.
Four pitches, one hit, two pieces of exquisite situational hitting, and the Blue Jays had a 1-0 lead crafted on perfect baseball. It mattered not a bit that Troy Tulowitzki flied out to centre to strand Jose Bautista, whom Cobb had walked after Edwin’s sac fly. This one was going to be different!
Oh, if they had only just awarded the game to the Blue Jays on the basis of the first inning! Unfortunately, they had to play out the rest of the game, and that did not work out very well at all for the struggling Torontos.
Here is what the woeful (have I used that word already in this piece? This week? This month? Doesn’t matter. It applies) Blue Jays’ offence produced for the rest of the game: zilch. Nada. De rien. Oh, sorry, Dioner Navarro hit a one-out single in the seventh. Here is what the Jays’ offence produced today against the combined efforts of Cobb (six and a third innings) and relievers Ryan Garton (one and a third innings) and Steve Geltz (one inning): one run, two hits, four walks, six strikeouts, and eleven runners left on base. Travis had the only (!) extra-base hit, and Edwin had the only RBI.
So, could the Jays still have won today’s game? Sure, if Estrada and/or Estrada and relievers pitched a complete-game shutout. And for the first three innings, not only did he throw a shutout, he threw a perfect nine outs. He also set a franchise record when he struck out the first two batters in the second inning, giving him five consecutive strikeouts at the start of a game. In all, he struck out six of the nine batters he faced.
Unfortunately, though, major league baseball for some unfathomable reason has declared that ball games are nine innings long, and that above all the fourth inning must be played. So Marco Estrada returned to the hill in an effort to extend his perfect string.
But it stopped right there, because the second time through the order it was a very different story for Mr. Estrada and his adversaries. If we go by the pitch tracker, Estrada’s catcher Dioner Navarro, hadn’t relied very much on the changeup to chalk up the nine outs in a row. In the first inning, for example, when he struck out the side, he threw 20 pitches, but only four changeups, and none of them were strikeout pitches. Presumably the changeup was avoided because Tampa had been waiting on it in his last start; the switch to well-placed fast balls was very effective in the first three innings. (I refer to Navarro as the one making all the pitch decisions because Estrada has told reporters that he always throws what the catcher calls for, whether it’s Navarro or Russell Martin.) In any case, Navarro started going with the changeup for the knockout pitch, and it would seem that the Tampa hitters anticipated the change over to the changeup. (Are you following this?)
So Estrada started Logan Forsythe with a curve ball outside the zone, then got a swing and miss and a foul on two fastballs. Navarro called for the changeup to put him away: line drive single to left. Then he tried to start Kevin Kiermaier with a change, and it was promptly looped over the right-field fence for a short but shocking homer and a sudden two-run Tampa lead. Unfortunately for Estrada, who had to rely on the anemic bats of his team-mates to bring him back to square one, he proceeded to give up a third run, which might have been the nail in the coffin for this day.
After the home run, Evan Longoria flied out to centre, but Brad Miller walked. Nick Franklin managed to hit behind the runner, grounding out to Edwin Encarnacion unassisted while Miller moved up to second. Then in what might have been the key at bat of the game, Corey Dickinson swatted a 1-2 curve ball up the middle on the ground to score Miller with the third Tampa run.
Estrada’s pitch count had been a middling 63 after four innings, but he laboured in the fifth, while not being hit, walking two and allowing the count to rise to 89. In the sixth it took him six pitches to get Brad Miller to ground out to second, and Nick Franklin worked him for six more, singling to right on the sixth. That was it, at 101 pitches, and Manager John Gibbons was out to take him out. Strangely, for a pennant race, down 3-0 in the top of the sixth, he chose to bring in his rookie left-handed callup, Matt Dermody to match up with Corey Dickerson. I’m not sure what he was saving Brett Cecil for, but this was definitely not a move of genius. Dermody’s first pitch to Dickerson was a slider for a called strike. That worked, so they tried another one, but it disappeared over the centre field fence and the Rays lead, if it loomed large at 3-1 over the punchless Jays, became a mountain at 5-1. Dermody’s night was quickly done, and it was Danny Barnes’ turn. I can’t quibble with going to another callup here; at this point the issue was damage control, and by that I mean damage control to the bullpen arms, not to this ball game. Well, Barnes got out of the inning, but not before conceding run number six. He gave up singles to Stephen Souza and Bobbie Wilson, and then an infield hit to good ol’ Logan Forsythe, to score Souza from third.
The Forsythe RBI dribbler was the epitome of this entire two-game sequence for the Jays. He topped the ball, and it rolled up the cutout between the third-base line and the turf. Darwin Barney, still playing third because of Josh Donaldson’s hip issue, had no choice but to let it go. It came agonizingly close to the edge of the turf, which would have ticked it into foul territory, but never touched it, and it rolled, and it rolled, and it rolled until it stopped dead when it rolled right into the bag at third. This was like watching the entire month of September so far for the Blue Jays, condensed into five seconds. By the time the ball hit the base, Wilson had scored, high-fived, danced in the dugout, and started to don his catcher’s gear.
When Cobb exited the game with two gone in the bottom of the seventh, he left Dioner Navarro at second after his lonely single, and Kevin Pillar, whom he had walked, at first, with two outs. I’d give you Cobb’s impressive pitching line against Toronto, but really, it was no great shakes. The Jays’ sixty-year-old batting practice pitcher could have done as well against these guys the way they’re hitting. Gibbie sent Justin Smoak up to hit for Ryan Goins under the faint hope clause, but Ryan Garton popped him up to end that foolishness.
It hardly mattered that Tampa Bay scored two more “insurance” runs in the ninth off Bo Schultz and Ryan Tepera. The Rays employed three singles, a sacrifice fly and an RBI to plate two more, just to add insult to injury.
After going down meekly and mildly in the bottom of the ninth, despite a leadoff walk to Troy Tulowitzki, the Jays had to be happy that they were looking at the back ends of the Tampa Bay Rays for the last time this year.
They had to be equally happy that they were getting out of town too, heading for the coast, lighting out for the territories, where they wouldn’t have to hear all of the weeping and wailing and gnashing of teeth they left behind in Toronto.
Postscript: You’re right, it’s not fair that I am so strongly critical of the Jays’ offence without at least offering an analysis of what’s wrong. They’re over-swinging, trying to fix the problem with one blast. Cut down on the swing. They’re swinging at marginal first-pitch strikes, making soft contact, and taking ones right down Broadway. They’re begging for walks, more upset about the fact that the umps don’t see things their way, than that they’ve fanned with runners on in scoring position. Jose, are you listening here? There’s no change in approach when the situation changes. Seasoned professionals should not fan going for the downs with a runner on third and less than two outs. When you’re hitting second behind a leadoff hitter who’s gotten on base, it’s not the same as if you were leading off. Don’t perform like it is. This is all easy, elementary, and obvious. Easy to fix? Not so much.
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