Tonight the Blue Jays’ pitching staff continued its dominance of the theoretically potent Seattle lineup for the second night in a row, registering a crisp and clean 4-0 shutout.
The Mariners, who put four legitimate .300 hitters in the lineup even with Robinson Cano sidelined by a nagging leg complaint, have racked up seventeen consecutive goose egg innings against a scrambling and injury-riddled Toronto pitching staff.
In fact, they haven’t touched the plate since Nelson Cruz wasted Marco Estrada’s last “warmup pitch” in the first inning of Thursday night’s game.
Let’s get this out of the way right now: everybody loves Joe Biagini. He’s funny, insightful, inarticulate in an amazingly articulate way, and irrepressibly affectionate. Who else would ever even think of giving Jose Bautista a great big hug after one of Jose’s monster shots?
But we have to be honest, too. We wouldn’t love him quite so much if he wasn’t such a skilled, cracker-jack hurler. After all, as much as Muni Kawasaki made us happy, and still does, even as he recedes into memory, we still kind of cringed when he came up to the plate with the game on the line, even if he did come through in memorable fashion a couple of times.
So as we watched Joe Biagini grow into his important bullpen role last year, it quickly grew in the backs of our minds that we were looking at an important part of the future of the Toronto starting rotation. Well, folks, it’s pretty obvious that given the opportunity offered to him by the shocking rash of injuries suffered by our rotation, now three-fifths down, which is not as bad as BlackHawk Down, but getting there, that the future is here.
Two starts: nine innings pitched, one unearned run, six hits, no walks, seven strikeouts, 120 pitches, four innings against the pesky Tampa Bay Rays, and five innings plus a batter for his first win as a starter against these same potent (did I mention that?) Mariners.
‘Nuff said on Biagini. Welcome to the bigs, Joe, you’re ready.
Not quite enough said. There was a quintessential Joe moment after the game. Arash Madani was doing the post-game with him, and he asked him a silly question, really, whether, if the coaches came to him and asked him to join the rotation for the rest of the year, he would agree to it. And a perfectly straight-faced Biagini’s response was, “Well, first I’d come to you and ask you, and if you said it was okay, well, I’d do it.” Madani did not have an answer for that.
I have to talk about journalistic scruples now. When I write a long form story about a Blue Jays’ game, I have watched every inning of that game. I feel very strongly about that. If I didn’t see it, I don’t write about it. I’m so scrupulous about journalism that if I were in the White House press corps I would have been pitched from the first daily press briefing Sean Spicer ever gave.
I only saw the end of tonight’s game, from the bottom of the seventh on, so that’s all I’ll write about below. The intro stuff about Joe Biagini pitching tonight, you’ll notice, includes nothing about his actual performance, or the Jays’ taking a lead they never yielded, so that was fair game.
I had to make a choice tonight. My wife, who is an accomplished oil painter, working from family photos to portray striking moments in the life of our family, had three paintings in an art gallery show that opened tonight.
Now, baseball’s baseball, and it does consume a big part of my life, but loyalty to your wife of nearly 49 years is a pretty important thing, too, and besides, you know, someone had to take some pictures of this important event.
But I wanted to keep in touch so at the last minute I tossed my “ball game” radio into the bag with the camera.
Now we have to talk about my radio. We were having trouble pulling in 590 The Fan around the house early last season, because of that stupid weak AM signal they put out. Are they ever going to carry the Jays on a nice clear FM frequency? Probably not. I wasn’t writing daily stories yet, but as always I needed to hear the game, even if I was out gardening.
So I started looking for some 2016 version of the good old transistor radio with earphones that we used to have, a wearable earbuds radio that had an AM band. Well, guess what? There ain’t hardly no such thing out there. Any little unit with earbuds and a radio receiver only had FM. Really.
I did find something, though, and since it was the only thing out there, I ordered it. You wouldn’t believe these things. They are, in fact, industrial strength noise-suppressing earphones, which happen to be equipped with an AM-FM unit, so that your lawn maintenance guy or your flight line baggage worker can listen to the radio while he/she is on the job. They’re huge black things, with a bright yellow stripe around the earphone cups, presumably so that the airplane you’re guiding to a parking space on the tarmac doesn’t run you over in the dark. They’ve even got a stamp on the head band labelled “Work Tunes”.
The sound quality’s not all that great either. Look, these things aren’t from Bose, and they’re not from Blaupunkt, either. They’re actually produced and sold by DeWalt, the power tool giant.
So it was my seriously dorky ball game headphones that I packed off to the art gallery where my wife’s work was being shown.
The gallery is a magical place in a magical spot, hidden away in the northwest corner of Toronto in an amazingly natural setting running down to the banks of the Humber River. There are two main studios connected by a path through a little garden area tricked out with some picnic tables. When they do a showing, the first studio, closer to the road, is where they set up the customary coffee-and-treats station, and the second one is where the show is hung.
My role at these openings is to be a charming and supportive spouse, take pictures as needed, and (this is most importance), give serious consideration to all the lovely pieces on display before voting for one of my wife’s works for the “People’s Choice” award.
My presence is not required every minute of the opening, and my kind wife understands my dilemma, so it was okay to slip away once in a while and check in on the game. My plan was to slip my dorky ‘phones out of the camera bag, kind of hide them behind my back, slip out of the studio, and perch at the picnic table from time to time and check in on the game.
I wish I had a picture; I must have been quite the spectacle. To compensate for my utter aged ordinariness, I try to sport sort of an older, faded, semi-hip, faux European vibe. Grey hair, trim grey beard. Top this with the dorky DeWalts, and, well, you get the picture.
So, here’s what I got from the DeWalts: after the end of the first there was no score. There was still no score in the bottom of the second, but things were promising. As I tuned in, Ryan Goins had just snaked one up the middle for the back half of leadoff back-to-back singles. Add to the picture above my exuberant fist bump when Darwin Barney laid down a perfect sacrifice bunt on the first pitch (Small ball! Yay!) A woman and her husband walking down the path to the gallery pretended not to notice me. When Devon Travis followed with an up-the-middle groundout to score Pearce, I thought, “we’re good now”, and went back inside as things got busy with speeches and such.
I tried to listen to the game on the car radio on the way home—my wife was driving—but the animated conversation of three very creative artists on a night out was a bit too much for “listening quietly and not shouting”, as I had been requested, so out came the DeWalts again, through which I learned that Jose Bautista had hit a two-run dinger to make the score 3-0, and that Biagini had been really effective again. Christian Bregman for the Mariners a little less so, as witness the Bautista jack, but not bad.
By the time we got home, I’d listened as the bottom of the order produced another small ball run in the sixth to push the Toronto lead to four. Goins led off with a single, went to third on a single to right by Barney, and trotted in on Travis’ sacrifice fly to left. Nice and easy. Five moments like this in April, and Toronto would be only a game under .500. C’mon, guys, it aint’ rocket science.
So what did I see when I did watch baseball tonight? I saw the tidy wrapup to a tidy Toronto win. I saw “big Jean” Machi go two and a third innings to help out the exhausted and depleted Seattle pitching staff. He gave up the Travis sac fly in the sixth, and stayed on into the eighth, when he retired Steve Pearce for the first out, and then yielded the mound so that an extraodinary event could take place.
As Ryan Goins strode to the plate, here came Manager Scott Servais, with one out and nobody on, to summon Zac Curtis, a lefty, to match up with Goins. Even I, the unelected president of the Ryan Goins Fan Club, and the sole proprietor of the Write Ryan Goins in as the All-Star Shortstop web site (which I just made up), did not see it coming that an American League manager would actually hold up a ball game to play the percentages on the left-handed hitting Goins. Can it be anything other than onward and upward from here for our favourite cue-ball-shorn infielder?
Finally, I saw Roberto Osuna, in the non-save situation, chew through the Mariners in the top of the ninth as if they were a nice soft tortilla con queso that his mom had just whipped up for him: 14 pitches: a Danny Valencia groundout on the first pitch, a Guillermo Heredia punch out, a Taylor Motter strikeout.
Oh, and I also saw that Roberto and catcher Luke Maile have choreographed their own little victory celebration that we can enjoy until Russell Martin returns and brings back the Knock-Knock Play with him.
So there you have it. It was a great night all around. Biagini moving on up. A beautiful gallery opening in a bucolic setting. A Blue Jay shutout. And some serious respect for Ryan Goins. What more could you ask?
How ’bout Marcus Stroman on the hill tomorrow afternoon, with the Jays looking for their fourth in a row. And no, you’re not dreaming. And neither am I, I don’t think.
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