On August 14th, I wrote that if the Blue Jays didn’t make the playoffs this year,I’d eat my Jose Bautista shirt. Right after the end of tonight’s game, I started googling recipes for baked, boiled, broiled, sautéd, fried, fricaseed, and or juiced baseball jerseys. They all look pretty unappetizing, but a promise is a promise, right? At the moment, I’m leaning toward a nice camicia parmigiana, from Mama Siciliano’s web site. She has really great reviews.
Speaking of shirts, how tight should our collars be right now? Well, here’s the deal. Arriving in Boston for this final series of the year, Toronto is one game ahead of Baltimore. We hold the first wild card slot. Baltimore holds the second slot. The Tigers are one game behind Baltimore for the second slot, and therefore two games behind us. Going into this weekend, we need any combination of three wins and/or Detroit losses to guarantee a wild card slot. We also need to keep ahead of, or keep pace with, Baltimore in order to host the wild card game.
This doesn’t sound so bad, does it? But consider these facts, and see how you feel about our chances. We have been in the same position, with a “clinch number” against Detroit of three, since we beat the Orioles on Monday night. We have made no progress in that regard. In the two losses to Baltimore, in our own ball yard, we scored exactly two runs. In 13 and a third innings, our starting pitchers gave up only four runs, which beat two runs any day. We are playing in Boston’s home park, the quirkiest in major league baseball, a place where the home field advantage is incalculable. We are facing a team high on itself but still playing for home field advantage in their ALDS with Cleveland. We are facing a team preparing to say farewell (until the playoffs anyway; will it never end?) to its beloved slugger in a weekend-long outpouring of love. Tonight we faced the league’s leading candidate for the Cy Young award. Baltimore is playing in New York, facing a good team that has already been eliminated. Detroit is playing in Atlanta against the Braves, a team in hot contention with two others for worst record in the National League.
How tight should our collars be? Pretty damned tight, I’d say.
In four starts against us this year, Rick Porcello has won three and had one no-decision. He has not given up more than four earned runs in any of these starts. In his two previous starts he has picked up two wins, pitching 15 and a third innings, giving up five earned runs, walking 1, and striking out 16. Do I even have to mention that he’s 22-4 with an ERA of 3.11 going into tonight’s game, and should be the leading contender for the Cy Young Award?
Though he fanned two in the top of the first inning, you can’t say that Porcello started out to dominate Toronto. He gave up a single to left by Josh Donaldson, and walked Jose Bautista. Interestingly, he threw 24 pitches to five batters, not a great start if you’re looking for length.
Marco Estrada drew the start for Toronto. In his last couple of starts, roughly since it was announced that he’s been pitching for most of the year with a herniated disc in his back, he has pitched fourteen innings and given up one earned run. That’s one earned run. That’s an ERA of 0.64.
Estrada also faced five batters in the first inning. Unfortunately, things didn’t work out quite the same for him. He also struck out two, gave up a single and a walk, but he threw a wild pitch which advanced Brock Holt, who had walked, to second, so he was in scoring position when David Ortiz singled him home with the only run scored in the first four innings. Besides the wild pitch, there was one other difference in Estrada’s first inning. While Porcello threw a high 24 pitches, Estrada threw an astronomical 37, with disastrous consequences for his hopes of going deep into the game.
How do you end up throwing 37 pitches to five batters? Well, it’s pretty easy if they foul off 16 pitches, easily enough to have navigated an inning just with the fouled-off pitches. In the next two innings, for example, Estrada threw 13 and 14. When you think about it, batters basically foul off pitches that are strikes, or that are too close to take, especially with two strikes on them. So pitches that are fouled off, after strike two, are wasted efforts that could have produced outs. In effect, by the time Estrada went out for the second inning, he had already thrown an extra inning, or even more.
From the second through the fourth inning, neither pitcher ran up a string of consecutive outs. Porcello gave up three base hits, Estrada two and a walk. At the end of the fourth, the score remained 1-0 for Boston.
Despite his sparkling record, Porcello was the one to blink first as he suddenly fell behind 3-1 in the fifth inning. With Zeke Carrera batting leadoff and Devon Travis hitting ninth, not to mention Kevin Pillar batting eighth, a lot of good pot stirring has gone on lately when the lineup turns over. This time Travis led off with a double down the line in left that somehow missed the seats that jut out behind third (one of the quirks of Fenway I was referring to earlier). Recognizing that job one for the Jays was to get the game back to even, Zeke laid down a bunt that might even have been ordered by manager John Gibbons. It evaded the pitcher for a base hit while Travis went to third. Josh Donaldson tied it up with a sacrifice fly to right, leaving Carrera at first.
Then came the shocker, though after what Jose Bautista’s done in the last ten days or so maybe not so much. Whether intentional or not, Porcello strayed from the general game plan by throwing his first pitch, a two-seam fast ball, low in the zone but on the inside corner. Bautista’s eyes must been as big as saucers as he turned on it and parked it in the seats above the Green Monster in left. Not only had the Jays tied the game, they had a 3-1 lead to hand to Estrada as he came in to pitch the bottom of the fifth, which would turn out to be his last.
His last was a typical Estrada inning, at least when he’s not on a no-hit roll: give up a hit, then deal utter frustration with a runner in scoring position. Dustin Pedroia led off with a double to left. But Brock Holt and Mookie Betts popped up, and Big Papi gave everybody a jolt by driving Bautista to the wall with a hard liner that was impressive, but just a loud out.
Entrusted yet again with heavy responsibility by his manager, and much needed to step up in the absence of the injured Joaquin Benoit, Joe Biagini came in and was asked for two innings to bridge to Jason Grilli in the eighth, an assignment necessitated by Estrada’s early departure. One of the things Biagini has done really well this year is to extract his team from really dicey situations. Tonight was no different, but the pickle was his to begin with, so it was only right for him to have to solve it.
Hanley Ramirez grounded out to short to open the inning, but Xander Bogaerts lined one into the right field corner that rattled around down there long enough that he easily stretched it into a triple. With a runner on third and one out, Biagini was in familiar territory, and he set to work in earnest. He had to face the left-handed Jackie Bradley and the switch-hitting catcher Sandy Leon who would also be hitting left. First of all he dismissed Bradley as brusquely as a teacher dismissing an annoying kid from detention. First-pitch slider for a called strike low in the zone. Four-seam fast ball outside. Slider up in the zone, swing and miss. Nasty slider down and inside off the plate. Swing and miss for the strikeout. Then he had some real fun with Leon. Fast ball in the dirt. Slider in the dirt, off the plate inside, swing and miss. Another fast ball in the dirt. Slider just off the outside corner. Swing and miss. Finally, swing and miss on a low changeup way outside. Bogaerts didn’t have a chance of cashing his one-out triple.
If Biagini had been able to leave it there, it would have been fantastic. But the convergence of intangibles, such as Benoit’s pulled calf muscle and all those foul balls off Estrada in the first, conspired to force Biagini back out for the seventh, and it was a classic case of going to the well once too often.
Sharp-looking young outfielder Andrew Benintendi led off with a double to right. Dustin Pedroia—no, he didn’t immediately plate Benintendi with a base hit—he might as well have, as he showed the benefits of putting the ball in play, any play. Pedroia topped a dribbler just a few feet away from catcher Russell Martin. It would have had the effect of a sacrifice bunt, but turned out worse for the good guys. Martin fielded it and fired a strike—right to the rolled-up tarp behind first, under which it got stuck. Lost, actually. Benintendi scored and Pedroia ended up on second because of the ball going out of play. Now, maybe Pedroia ran inside the line (which is illegal—he’s supposed to use the 45-foot lane marked outside the foul line, to give the catcher a clear throw to first.) And maybe he didn’t. In any case, the umpiring crew, not interested in touching off a riot at Fenway, wouldn’t take another look at it.
Pedroia advanced to third with the tying run and nobody out on a Biagini wild pitch, and you just knew the doom scenario was about to unfold. Holt grounded out to a pulled-in Troy Tulowitzki at short, Pedroia not going on contact. Betts hit a one-strike down-and-in four seamer to centre for a hit that scored Pedroia and finished Biagini’s work for the night.
Gibbie brought in Brett Cecil to do the one thing he must do to earn his keep: dispose of David Ortiz, lefty on lefty. And he didn’t do it. Papi jerked an inside sinker that didn’t sink—call it a stinker, if you will—on a line into the short porch in right, and set off the “Goodbye Papi” hysteria in earnest, as he gave the Sox a lead for the first time in the game, a five-three lead that would stand up for the win.
A word about that short porch and David Ortiz. Everyone knows all about the Green Monster in left, but not that many are aware of the short porch extending out from the Pesky Pole. The foul pole in right is only 302 feet from the plate, and the wall extends at a very shallow angle for ten or fifteen feet before veering outward to a reasonable distance. Just so you know, the Pesky Pole is not called that because it is so annoying to opposing teams to see line drive outs turn into homers, but because of Johnny Pesky, a beloved Red Sox figure, an infielder who was with Boston for ten years, from 1942 to 1952, with three years out for military service. And yes, children, major-league ball players did have holes in their career records caused by their military service during the second world war. Look up Ted Williams’ career stats and think about what the totals would have been if he hadn’t missed three seasons serving as a Marine fighter pilot. In these days of privileged superstars, that sounds almost quaint, doesn’t it?
Anyway, the story goes that Pesky, a line-drive contact hitter, who only hit 17 home runs in his career, hit one of them in a game in 1948 that won it for legendary Sox lefty Mel Parnell by hooking it around the pole and just barely into the stands. Parnell, later a Sox broadcaster, began to call the foul pole “Pesky’s Pole”, and the name has stuck all these years.
If you’re looking for a reason why David Ortiz has lasted so long as basically a one-dimensional player for the Red Sox, you wouldn’t have to look much beyond the existence of the short porch at Fenway, issuing its siren call to Ortiz’ line drives.
The rest of the game was denouement. Ironically, after giving up the homer to Ortiz, Cecil finished off the inning by striking out both Ramirez, looking, and Bogaerts, swinging. Aaron Loup finished off for the Jays in the eighth by getting four ground balls. Three went for outs, the fourth was a checked-swing roller toward a shift-vacated third base by the left-handed hitting Benintendi that went for an infield single.
Down by only two runs, the Jays missed a good opportunity to tie it up in the bottom of the eighth. With one out, Kevin Pillar walked, and a Devon Travis double to left moved him to third. (What was it I just said about the bottom of the order stirring the pot?) But Koji Uehara, who has done well in the setup role for Boston since returning from the DL, summoned some reserve and retired Carrera on a popup, and Donaldson on a grounder to third.
That was their last best chance. Craig Kimbrell came in for the save and once again tried to give away the lead with his failure to throw strikes, but managed to keep his runners from scoring, and earned a shaky 33rd save out of 35 opportunities. Encarnacion grounded out to third, but then Kimbrel walked Bautista. He got a little closer to the finish line by retiring Martin on a popup. But then he walked Tulo, with Bautista advancing to second on a wild pitch during the at-bat.
Though this game was decided by any number of critical moments, the final turn of the wheel fell to Kimbrell facing Dioner Navarro hitting for Justin Smoak (interesting, this, a switch-hitter hitting for a switch-hitter). Three pitches and it was over. Navarro took a knuckle curve up in the zone for strike one, fouled off a four-seamer at the bottom of the zone, and fanned on a four-seamer that was thigh-high and on the outside corner. The last-ditch “rally” that consisted of not swinging at bad pitches died, and so did the Blue Jays.
So, what’s lower than the nadir? If thursday night’s shutout loss was the nadir of the Jays’ September swoon, whatever do we call this? On its merits it was neither a bad effort nor even a bad loss. Ortiz has hit plenty of decisive home runs in his career, and who says he’s not free to hit one against us? And if the Sox can shorten the start of a guy they can’t hit by fouling off multiple pitches, more power to them.
But, but. This hurt, and the magnitude of the hurt can only be measured within the context of both Baltimore and Detroit winning tonight. We are now a game behind Baltimore, in the second wild card slot, and a half-game ahead of Detroit, which has a makeup game to play if needed. And we’re still in Boston, while Detroit’s in comfy Atlanta, and the Orioles continue to hold mastery over the Yankees.
We cannot now make the playoffs on our own. We have Happ tomorrow and Sanchez on Sunday to take our best shots at beating Boston, but we need an Atlanta win over the Tigers to finish them off.
We can only hope.
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