Here are three situations that mattered, a lot, to the outcome of tonight’s opener of the Jays’ three-game series in the Oakland Coliseum, the playing surface of which has now been re-christened, as spiffy new signage announces, “Rickey Henderson Field”:
Oakland starter Sean Manaea walked Kevin Pillar leading off the first inning. Josh Donaldson promptly delivered Pillar with the game’s first run by hitting a double into the left field corner. At the end of the inning, Donaldson was still standing on second base.
In the second inning, Troy Tulowitzki led off with a double to left. At the end of the inning, Tulowitzki was still standing on second base.
In the fifth inning Zeke Carrera led off by drawing a walk from Manaea. Pillar delivered him with a double to left, then moved to third when Josh Donaldson grounded out to shortstop Chad Pinder, using the old Little League trick of delaying his break to third until he saw that Pinder’s throw was actually on the way to first, betting that he could beat a return throw to third from the first baseman, which he did. Pillar was then thrown out at the plate by a mile when Jose Bautista grounded out sharply to third baseman Trevor Plouffe when the Jays had the “contact” play on.
Baseball is a game of tradition, as you might have noticed. The traditions that you see followed and honoured in the course of a major league baseball game are only the tip of the iceberg. Tradition runs through almost everything that is done and everything that happens around baseball.
Take batting practice—BP—for example. You might think that players go in the cage for BP and just focus on improving their swing mechanics so that they can get more, and better, base hits. Well, they do. But that’s not all they do. A properly-run batting practice will have the player practice certain specific skills, as well as generally honing his stroke to make better and more frequent contact.
It will differ from coach to coach, but generally all well-run batting practices would expect the player to work on “situational hitting” before swinging away. Situational hitting may include practicing any number of things, but in particular should include bunting, divided into sacrifice bunting, itself sub-divided into towards third and towards first, and bunting for a base hit. Then there are the situations where the goal is to advance the runner. “Runner on second, nobody out” is a situation that calls for the hitter to hit the ball on the ground to the right side of the infield to advance the runner to third, whether the hit is a base hit or not. Needless to say, given the variety of ways that a runner can score from third base with one out, the chances of scoring the run in that situation increase exponentially. “Runner on third less than two outs” is a situation that calls for either an outfield fly ball for a sacrifice fly, or a ground ball back through the box and continuing up the middle, depending on where the ball is pitched. Again it doesn’t matter whether it’s a base hit or not.
Depending on time, the expectation would be that the hitter in the cage would try several repetitions of each of these types of situational hitting before swinging away.
Yes, friends and neighbours, practicing hitting a ground ball to the right side of the infield to move a runner on second over to third with less than two outs is a thing, and it has been a thing in major league baseball for well over a hundred years.
You might have read a newspaper story that quotes Josh Donaldson, among others, talking about his approach to hitting and how it is very different from the traditional. The article, noting that Donaldson has tweeted “Just say NO . . . to groundballs”, and which you can read at:
cites Donaldson as having “stated flatly that any ball he hits on the ground, even one that goes for a base hit, was an accident.”
How does this new approach to hitting, as best exemplified, apparently, by our very own scufflin’ Huckleberry Donaldson, accord with the traditional practice of a situational hitting approach? The obvious answer is that it doesn’t.
When it works, the pursuit of an improved “launch angle” off the bat results in a thing of beauty, a majestic home run that plates one or more runs with one swing of the bat. However, when it doesn’t work, it results in mistimed contact and an easy out, or a strikeout and an even easier out.
Why does all of this matter? Because, friends and neighbours, it’s a lot easier, if less glamorous, to apply situational hitting successfully in a game situation than it is to hit a home run, and without needing to reach into the cupboard and “open up a can of instant runs”, as the great Ernie Harwell used to say, it almost always results in a run.
If you note the score of tonight’s Toronto loss to Oakland, 5-3, and go back to the three instances I noted at the beginning of my story, leaving all other events in the game aside, and successfully apply situational hitting, the 5-3 loss turns into a 6-5 win for Toronto.
Sure, this is a simplistic view of the very complex thing that is a nine-inning ball game, but even if you leave aside the question of winning and losing, and just talk about Toronto’s run total tonight, you still come up with six Toronto runs, which is exactly twice as many as they actually scored. Give me any game the team has lost, and give me double the number of runs that the team actually soored, and let’s recalibrate and see how many additional wins we have.
In the three instances cited above, here’s what followed the arrival of the afore-mentioned batter at second base:
In the first inning, Jose Bautista grounded out to the left side, and Donaldson had to hold. (It’s the first out that’s crucial with a runner on second: if you move him to third and there’s only one out, he can score on either a sacrifice fly or a ground ball in the middle of the diamond that gets past the pitcher, i. e., he can score on the second out.) Then Manaea struck out Kendrys Morales and Justin Smoak. By the way, if the pitcher strikes out the side to strand that runner on second, that’s great for the pitcher. But the secondary question becomes, what was the approach of the hitters who struck out?
In the second inning, Manaea struck out Russell Martin, who admittedly was rung up by plate umpire Gerry Davis on a marginal call, and Darwin Barney before Zeke Carrera hit the ball hard on the ground to the right side, but only to make the third out.
In the fifth inning, as I mentioned above, Pillar made it to third on the first out, but only because of cheeky base-running, not because Donaldson played it correctly at the plate. That brought the runner-on-third-with-one-out scenario into play, which requires the batter either to elevate the ball to the outfield, which should be an easy task for a Jose Bautista, or not to pull the ball on the ground. If the batter pulls the ball to either corner where the baseman is playing in, the defence has a better shot at cutting down the run. And if the hitting team happens to put on the contact play (don’t get me started on that one!) and the batter pulls it, hard, like Bautista did, the runner is such a dead duck that he rightly doesn’t even slide, like Pillar didn’t, because why get hurt or hurt the catcher when you’re out anyway?
Oh, was there a baseball game tonight? Sure there was, and in the game, Jay Happ’s second start since coming off the disabled list, he put in five and a third innings and pitched, let’s face it, only middlin’ well, though he would have gotten off better if he hadn’t thrown a gopher ball to Ryon Healy in the second inning after walking Khris Davis and giving up a bad-bounce base hit to Yonder Alonso. That one shot made up three of the five earned runs given up by Happ. And, if you want to play that game, the other two earned runs came on another walk to Khris Davis and another homer to exactly the same spot by Healy in the fourth.
So Happ’s line against the rest of the A’s showed a two-hit shutout, but don’t even ask about his line against Healy. To be fair, Happ’s not quite back to 2016 levels, as he only struck out four while walking three, and laboured to 98 pitches. On the positive side, the fact that he managed 98 pitches would suggest that his arm is recovering nicely.
Once again the Jays’ bullpen was called on to do a little extra, and once again Danny Barnes was the first in, after Happ gave up a one-out double to Yonder Alonso in the sixth. Once again Barnes left the base-runner on, and once again he pitched an easy seventh, finishing up with five outs in a row, three on popups and one on a strikeout, in only seventeen pitches. In this season of shorter starts from Toronto’s rotation, Danny Barnes has become the indispensable man out of the bullpen, with his ability to throw a complete shutdown, and do it for two innings. In this case, besides picking up Happ as needed, he took it right to the eighth, so that even with a moderately shorter start from Happ manager John Gibbons only needed two pitchers out of the ‘pen.
Coming in for the eighth was newcomer Jeff Beliveau, called up from Buffalo to replace the struggling J.P. Howell, who was placed on the ten-day list with arm trouble following the Sunday game in Toronto. Belliveau is a thirty-year-old left-handed pitcher signed as a free agent last December by Toronto to provide depth for the pitching staff at Buffalo. He had one active year with Tampa Bay in 2014, spent most of 2015 and 2016 in the minors, and has been used extensively out of the bullpen in Buffalo this spring, making seventeen appearances including one start, totalling thirty-two innings with 43 strikeouts and an ERA of 3.09.
Despite giving up a leadoff double to Chad Pinter, Belliveau had a solid outing, retiring Jed Lowrie on a fly ball to right, Matt Joyce on a grounder to first which moved Pinder to third, and then Yonder Alonso on a groundout to shortstop. Fifteen pitches, one hit, three outs, two of them ground balls: not a bad debut; Belliveau could become a valuable bullpen piece for Toronto, especially now that Aaron Loup appears to be moving away from the lefty matchup role.
Left out of this whole discussion so far has been the start turned in by Sean Manaea, the left-hander who has been one of the few solid starters for Oakland this year. His line was pretty sharp: six innings, two runs on four hits with seven strikeouts and three walks, the walks notable because he’d only given up two walks over nineteen innings in his three previous starts, and the walks tonight helped elevate his pitch count which limited him to the six innings on 111 pitches.
Since I’ve already said my piece about Toronto not being able to take advantage of three opportunities of runners on second with nobody out, it should be obvious that Manaea, despite his line, was teetering on the edge most of the game. Two of the wasted Toronto opportunities, in the first and the fifth, actually came after the Jays had already scored, but by the time they picked up their second run in the fifth, Healy had already hit his copy-cat shot off Happ, and the Oakland lead was secure at 5-2.
Manaea, in fact, only retired the side in order once in the whole game, and that was in his last inning of work, the sixth, when he required only eleven pitches to set the visitors down. The next two Oakland pitchers represented old home week of a sort for the Blue Jays. First up was John Axford, the Canadian born in Simcoe, Ontario, who navigated the eighth despite giving up a one-out single to Zeke Carrera. Axford was a bit lucky, as Donaldson made the third out on a hard line smash to Trevor Plouffe at third, which stranded Kevin Pillar, who had replaced Carrera by hitting into a fielder’s choice.
In the eighth it was Liam Hendricks, who had done a good job of re-establishing his value during his good 2015 season in the Toronto bullpen, when he’d racked up 64 innings with 71 strikeouts in 58 appearances in a role in which he was greatly depended upon. Hendricks was generous to his former team-mates, but not enough to cough up the lead. Justin Smoak took him deep for number fifteen for Smoak. Bizarrely, his shot followed almost the same line and trajectory as Healy’s two homers. Trevor Plouffe helped Hendricks out by snagging a vicious liner off Bautista’s bat leading off, and Troy Tulowitzki followed Smoak’s homer with a single, but Hendricks fanned Russell Martin to end the inning.
Oakland closer Santiago Casilla wrapped things up for the A’s and secured the win for Manaea with two strikeouts, despite issuing a walk to Zeke Carrera.
We can have all the debate we want about home runs versus traditional baseball strategy, pitting Earl Weaver’s “my idea of strategy is two walks and a three-run homer” against, say, Tony LaRussa’s tactical brilliance, but the fact is that the homer hitter lives or dies by the blast, and if he’s obsessed with launch angle and the perfect pitch to drive, he’s going to strike out an awful lot when he doesn’t get it all. When it comes to accepting “all or nothing” from a power hitter with a runner on second and nobody out, as opposed to moving him over in the old-fashioned way, I know where I stand.
It’s nice to score three or four runs in an inning, but they don’t add up to any more than scoring a run an inning for three or four innings. It’s that simple.
Leave a Reply