There was good news of a sort this morning before game time, and some definite bad news.
Not wanting to dance around someone else’s misfortune, the sort of good news for the Blue Jays, and the not so surprising news, is that Baltimore closer Zach Britton, sporting his 54 consecutive save streak, wouldn’t be available again today to face the Jays. Not only that, but he has been placed on the ten-day disabled list with “left forearm strain”.
Not that Britton has exactly blown away Toronto in his last three saves, but any run of Oriole games without Britton available to them is certainly good news for the rest of the division.
The bad news was equally unsurprising, but potentially much worse for the Toronto side. After being rocked by three home runs on Friday evening, there had been questions about Aaron Sanchez’ condition. An answer emerged this morning: Sanchez has been placed on the ten-day list as well in order to try to get a blister problem on his right middle finger under control.
The big consolation for Toronto as they’ve endured this terrible start to 2017 has been that for the most part the pitching, even the relief pitching, has been very solid, giving hope that should the hitting ever actually come around, it would not be out of the question that a good, long hot streak might develop.
But the Sanchez news came as a sharp reminder that depending on your pitching staff to stay perfectly healthy, as the Jays’ pitchers did for pretty well all of last year, only works as long as there are no negative reports coming from the trainers’ room. A pitching-rich team is only a couple of twinges away from disaster.
For four innings today Jay Happ and Dylan Bundy kept their opponents off the board, though it took a bit of wriggling on both their parts, and a fair number of pitches. Both teams got runners to third in the first inning, but neither scored. Happ created his own problem by rushing his throw for an error on Adam Jones’ one-out dribbler back to the mound. After fanning Mannie Machado, Mark Trumbo doubled to left, but Jones was held at third, to be stranded there when Happ got a weak fly ball from Chris Davis to end the threat.
Dylan Bundy did Happ one better by giving up a double to leadoff hitter Kevin Pillar, putting himself immediately in trouble. In a minor miracle, for the second day in a row, Zeke Carrera in the two-slot dropped down a bunt, moving Pillar to third, and getting a base hit out of it after the video review overturned the original out call on the field at first. So, runners on first and third with nobody out. And that’s where it stopped. Bundy fanned Jose Bautista on a 2-2 slider that dove low and away. Then Kendrys Morales pulled a ground ball into a 4-6-3 double play.
After the first the Jays wasted an infield single in the second and a walk in the fourth. The Orioles wasted two base runners, a single and an error, in the third, and an infield single in the fourth.
By the end of the fourth, Happ had thrown 59 pitches, and Bundy 63. Bend, but don’t break, and a scoreless tie going to the fateful fifth.
With Sanchez going on the DL, the last thing the Jays needed was another possible injury to a pitcher, but that’s just what they got in the Orioles’ fifth inning. Jay Hardy led off with a ground rule double to centre. Craig Gentry grounded out to Troy Tulowitzki at short, with Tulo making a nifty move to throw around the runner Hardy, who held the bag at second. This brought Adam Jones to the plate. The first pitch to him, a four-seamer well inside for ball one, was the last pitch Happ threw. He called out catcher Russell Martin. Russell Martin called out the trainer and the pitching coach, and Happ was done for the day with what would later be identified as tenderness in his left elbow.
Joe Biagini came in to replace Happ and gave up a single to Jones that scored Hardy. Jones got caught in a rundown with a sharp relay from Carrera in right to Morales to first to Tulo to Ryan Goins for the second out, and Mannie Machado popped out to Goins to end the inning. The Jays were now down by a run, but far worse they were down one valuable arm, with no idea of how bad it might be.
Bundy gunned down Russell Martin and Steve Pearce in the bottom of the fifth, gave up a base hit to Chris Coghlan and then survived a good at bat by Ryan Goins whose hard liner was right at Hardy.
Now the game, was squarely in the hands of the Jays’ bullpen, and it would be up to them to keep this one as tight as nearly every Baltimore-Toronto game in recent history has been.
But for the first and worst time this year, the Toronto ‘pen was decidely not up to the task. Manager John Gibbons brought Ryan Tepera in to start the sixth, and the wheels fell off immediately. Mark Trumbo singled to centre. Tepera wild-pitched him to second. Chris Davis walked. Wellington Castillo lined out to Goins at second for the first out. Rookie Trey Mancini, who already had a two-homer game against Boston, but only a couple of singles in eight at bats against the Jays, turned on a low inside fast ball from Tepera, got it all, and the Orioles were up 4-zip, but not done yet, hardly done yet.
Schoop singled to left and that was it for Tepera. On came Dominic Leone, who was greeted by a Jay Hardy run-scoring double. Leone then obligingly wild-pitched Hardy to third, a convenient perch from which to score on a Craig Gentry sacrifice fly to centre. Adam Jones finally struck out to end the agony, and a taut and fraught nail-biter was well on the way to being a laugher.
Bundy made short work of Toronto in the bottom of the sixth while working around a one-out single by Zeke Carrera.
I have to interject here that after Happ was removed from the game, I didn’t actually watch from the sixth inning on. I apologize, but it was Easter, and we had family for dinner, and it was all I could do to check in on the silent screen from time to time to monitor the action.
Which I did to my mounting horror. The first time that I checked in was as the Orioles were coming to bat in the top of the seventh. First I saw the score, which had suddenly transformed itself from 1-0 to 6-0. The second thing I saw was Troy Tulowitzki coming in to take an easy ground ball from Mannie Machado and somehow sort of bunting it away from him with the tip of his glove for a shocking and egregious error.
The next time I checked in was to discover that Leone had survived the Tulo error to keep the O’s off the board in the top of the seventh, and that the Jays had scratched out a run in their half of the inning. Relying on good old MLB GameDay, I discover that Tulo and Martin had led off with back to back base hits, with Tulo going to third on Martin’s hit. After Stefan Crichton, in relief of Bundy, fanned Steve Pearce, Chris Coghlan delivered Tulo with a sacrifice fly to centre. Jays’ fans hearts would have fluttered a bit when Ryan Goins doubled to left, Martin stopping at third, but then Crichton fanned Kevin Pillar to end the threat.
So Bundy had gone a tidy six innings, giving up no runs, walking one, and striking out six on 99 pitches.
When I was in university a long time ago, yer humble scribe digresses here, I spent an awful lot of time one year skipping classes to play euchre, that good old Canadian Legion hall classic. I couldn’t remember enough of the rules to play through a slow-motion hand now to save my life, but one thing I do remember is that when you play a loser card to get rid of it, it’s called “sloughing off”.
When Buck Showalter went to Stefan Chrichton to pick up Dylan Bundy, it was definitely a baseball version of sloughing off. Crichton, a 25-year-old right-hander, was drafted by the Orioles in the twenty-third round in 2013, precisely the 699th player chosen that year. After pitching a full year in relief in Double A in 2016, he had two appearances in relief with Triple A Norfolk this spring before being called up to make his major league debut this Easter Sunday against Toronto.
Guess Showalter knew what he was doing. Crichton gave up the one run in the seventh and then sat down. By the time he returned to the mound for the bottom of the eighth, the Baltimore lead had ballooned to 11-1, and it hardly mattered who was serving them up for the Orioles, or what hand or foot, for that matter, he was using to do it.
Again reconstructing from an increasingly unstable GameDay (has anyone else noticed how bad it is this year?) which is so bad that the injury delay to remove Jay Happ somehow showed up again in the play-by-play for the eighth inning, John Gibbons called on recently-recalled lefty Matt Dermody to continue the mop-up operation for Toronto.
Poor Dermody must have forgotten his mop: Mancini led off with his second homer of the game. Jonathan Schoop singled to right. Jay Hardy fouled out to first baseman Kendrys Morales (yay!) Craig Gentry, if you can believe it, homered to left, for 9-1. Dermody walked Adam Jones. Mannie Machado homered to right for 11-1, and Gibbie finally ran up the white flag and rescued Dermody, sending in Aaron Loup to retire Mark Trumbo on a grounder to short for the second out, before Chris Davis singled to left and Castillo flew out to centre to finally bring mercy to the beleaguered home team.
It’s a measure of the wierdness of the day that the lefty-lefty specialist Loup came in and retired the slugging righty Trumbo, and then gave up a hit to the slugging lefty Davis.
Crichton got to face the cruel reality of what can happen to the ERA of a relief pitcher after one short appearance. After he got the first two outs in the bottom of the eighth, Justin Smoak ended up on third with a triple after Jones in centre and Trumbo in right apparently played volleyball with his deep drive. Something funny had to be going on for the lead-footed Smoak to score his second career triple in just 2604 at bats!
Anyway, Tulo delivered Smoak with a base hit, which brought Crichton’s maiden voyage to an end, with a line of 1.2 innings pitched, two runs on five hits with no walks and two strikeouts. Oh, the ERA? For his trouble, Crichton is now wearing an ERA for his major league career of 10.80. Tyler Wilson came on to get the third out as Pearce flew out to left, but only after he had walked Martin.
Loup stayed on in the ninth and came out unscathed while yielding the Orioles’ fifteenth hit, a two-out single by Jay Hardy, who was 3 for 5 on the day, not bad for a number nine hitter. In fact, however, it’s a measure of how potent Baltimore is that Hardy is hitting ninth.
Wilson gave way to Vidal Nuno to pitch the bottom of the ninth as Buck Showalter took the opportunity to air out another of his lesser-known bullpen arms. Not that it mattered, but the Jays picked up a couple more runs off him to make the final count a slightly less disreputable 11-4. With one out, Ryan Goins singled, and Kevin Pillar followed with his first home run of the year.
But the Pillar homer was the last gasp of a totally demoralized Jays’ team that fell to two and ten, and must have been looking forward to the day off Monday to lick their wounds before hosting the formidable Red Sox in a three-game series that starts Tuesday night.
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