Okay, so I’m combining these two game stories into one narrative, which is not going to be very long, for a number of reasons, all of which an be conflated into a single statement: these were absolutely the worst, most dispiriting, two games played by the Toronto Blue Jays in recent history, which we can date back to the 2015 trade deadline, and the beginning of Toronto’s first pennant drive in twenty-two years.
(I recognize that I might seem to be ignoring last year’s disappointing ALCS against Cleveland, but the Jays were competitive in every game in that series, and their loss can clearly be attributed only to a failure to hit the ball, not to the kind of system-wide breakdown we’ve seen this past weekend.)
After losing two of three to Baltimore here at home, it was imperative that our heroes acquit themselves better against the de facto division leaders, the Boston Red Sox. Not that the Sox haven’t played well enough so far this year, considering the significant decrease in power output they’ve experienced, and the number of disruptions they’ve suffered to what should have been an overpowering rotation. It’s just that they’ve played more okay than the other teams in the division, given the dismal performance of Toronto, the five-hundred-ish play of Baltimore and Tampa Bay, and the recent slide by the erstwhile front-running Yankees.
On paper, taking into account a relatively equitable rash of injuries to key members on every team, Toronto should be right in the middle of things. But, as of Sunday evening, after Part Two of the Rape of the Blue Jays, the locals are languishing at the bottom of the division, though undeniably still within striking range, considering how far back they were in 2015 before the Big Push.
However, judging from what we saw this festive weekend, there ain’t no Big Push in sight, no-how, no way. The starting pitching is still remarkably inconsistent and unreliable—witness the wildness of Marco Estrada on Friday night—the bullpen is exhausted and growing more so by the day, and the hitting, well, the hitting has been the pits, is still the pits, and if it remains the pits for much longer, no amount of bucked-up pitching, shored up by the return of Aaron Sanchez to the rotation and Joe Biagini to the bullpen, will salvage the season.
There—sheesh! I finally got all that off my chest!
So last Canada Day, 2016, was the day of the epic battle between Cleveland and Toronto, the nineteen-inning game which ended up with Darwin Barney giving up the winning home run to Carlos Santana in the top of the nineteenth after Ryan Goins threw out his arm with bowdacious curve balls in the eighteenth, and Trevor Bauer pitched five innings for the win, taking himself out of the rotation for his next start, and making his biggest impression on Toronto fans prior to the Episode of the Bloody Digit in the ALCS.
What did we get on Canada Day this year? A dismal, dispiriting affair which could have been called after the second inning. Hell, make that the first inning, since the Bosox handed Chris Sale a 2-0 lead before he ever took the mound, and Sale and the Boston bullpen held the Blue Jays scoreless until Steve Pearce’s solo homer leading off the ninth.
We were looking at an uphill climb right off the bat, and when the Red Sox added two more in the top of the second, the prospects for the day took a dive right into the tank.
We hosted a family picnic, which ended up indoors, refugees from the rain, for Canada 150, so I had to abandon the game in the seventh, but it was no great loss: I’d been looking for an excuse to flee since the third inning. Theoretically, the only thing worse than bad baseball is no baseball, i.e., December and January, but this time out it was a dead heat, methinks.
On Saturday, Francisco Liriano started the game by doing a prudent thing and throwing four wide ones to Mookie Betts, putting the leadoff batter on. Then he retired the next two batters, which took all of thirteen pitches for a walk and two outs. On the fourteenth pitch, though, he coughed up a double to Hanley Ramirez, on which, amazingly, Betts did not score. But that just meant he could trot hom ahead of Ramirez when Jackie Bradley hit his usual opposite-field base hit, a double to left. Chris Young grounded out to short for the third out, and Sale could start with his little clutch of runs in the bank, not a great prospect for Toronto.
And, all of this took 21 pitches, so Liriano was on track for another five-inning start at best, meaning another four innings on deck for the beleaguered bullpen.
But, really, this wasn’t all that much about Liriano, was it? The real question was whether or not the Jays could generate any offence against Chris Sale at all. If not, it wouldn’t matter of Liriano gave up two or ten.
For the first two innings, Sale did expend a few pitches and allow some base runners, throwing 19 pitches and allowing a single and walk in the first inning, and hitting Steve Pearce leading off in the second. But with another two runs to work with, Liriano again giving up two after retiring the first two batters, the occasional base runner against Sale didn’t mean very much. After hitting Pearce in the second, for example, he struck out the side.
From that point both pitchers settled in, and Liriano even managed to last through the sixth on an even hundred pitches while giving up one more soft run in the fifth on Betts’ third walk, a stolen base, an advance to third on a ground ball, and a sacrifice fly.
Sale, meanwhile, cruised seven shutout innings. After hitting Pearce in the second, he retired seven in a row before giving up a single to Tulowitzki in the fourth. He then hit Martin leading off in the sixth and gave up a following double by Smoak, and allowed a two-out Texas League single to left by Ryan Goins in the seventh. At no time was there any sense that the second or third base hit in the inning might be coming, or even possible. He finished up seven innings on 116 pitches, giving up no runs on four hits while walking one, striking out eleven, and hitting two, just to keep the guys loose up there.
Blaine Boyer pitched a clean eighth after hitting Martin, the latter’s second hit-by-pitch in the game, and Robby Scott mopped up in the ninth, giving up the Pearce homer and a one-out single to Darwin Barney, but finishing off by fanning Ryan Goins and popping up Jose Bautista to bring this one to its actual, technical, end, long after it was truly done.
Journeyman right-hander Lucas Harrell, just called up by Toronto, came in to pitch after Liriano finished up, and even manager John Gibbons seemed to have conceded the game to Sale, letting Harrell stay in through the seventh and eighth, and only pulling him in the ninth when he’d run out of gas after throwing 52 pitches and giving up two runs, expanding the Boston lead to 7-1. Jeff Beliveau came in and finished up by fanning Bradley, but it was too little and too late.
As were all the Jays’ efforts on Canada Day 2017.
Sunday it was up to Joe Biagini, in probably his last start before the return of Aaron Sanchez, to try to stem the tide for Toronto and salvage one game of the series. After a close extra-inning loss on Friday night, and a breeze by Chris Sale on Saturday, this one had to go well for Toronto and Biagini, or . . . Can’t finish that thought, eh? Neither can I.
Biagini, who’s obviously been drinking from the same Kool-Aid jug as the rest of the Toronto starters, quickly retired the first two Sox in the top of the first, on only seven pitches, no less, even catching Mookie Betts looking on a 2-2 pitch. But then, well, it started again. He walked Dustin Pedroia on a 3-1 pitch. Pedroia stole second while Biagini was walking Mitch Moreland. Hanley Ramirez grounded one up the middle and through to score Pedroia, with Moreland taking third. Finally, Jackie Bradley grounded out to short to end the inning.
Another two-out rally. Another first inning lead.
And another fine start by an opponent’s starter, this time lefty Drew Pomerantz, who retired the top of the Jays’ order on thirteen pitches.
If that’s all we had at the start, what was the big deal? One run down, and we’re not facing Chris Sale, right? Except that with one out in the top of the second, the rookie Tzu-Wei Lin tripled to centre and later scored on a single by Betts, who couldn’t possibly have struck out again, could he have?
And it was kind of good for Toronto to come right back in the bottom of the second and recover one of the two runs, without even hitting a home run. Justin Smoak, who later in the evening would learn that he had won the starting job at first for the American League All Star team, led off with a single to centre, and then applied an under-appreciated talent of his, good base-running, to get into position to score. After Pomerantz walked Kendrys Morales, Troy Tulowitzki hit a deep liner to centre, Smoak read the contact properly, tagged up, and made it to third on Bradley’s throw, whence he could score on Steve Pearce’s sacrifice fly. 2-1 Boston after two.
Biagini and Pomerantz both stranded two runners in the third, the Sox getting base hits from Moreland and Bradley, who were stranded when Biagini fanned Christian Vazquez. Pomerantz was victimized by a careless misplay of an easy fly ball to left by Darwin Barney that Andrew Benintendi just plain muffed, Barney ending up on second. Bautista walked, and Russell Martin followed with a hard drive to right, but right at Betts for the first out. But on an 0-1 count, Josh Donaldson grounded one right to Marrero at the bag at third for an easy 5-3 double play.
After the end of the third, any semblance of a real baseball game simply blew away on the wind, the wind created by the whoosh of Mookie Betts’ bat. In a most un-Boston-like display, the two rookies at the bottom of the order, Lin and Marrero, bunted their way on to lead off the inning, bringing Betts to the plate. Biagini made the mistake of falling behind 2-0, and had to come in with a juicy fast ball over the heart of the plate that Betts promptly deposited into the hands of a guy strangely dressed all in white in the first row of seats beyond the wall in left centre field.
Though it was only a four-run lead, and though Biagini came back to retire six in a row after the (first) Betts homer, when the Jays rolled over and failed to capitalize on a base hit in the fourth and two in the fifth, it looked like it was Pomerantz’ win to protect.
In the top of the sixth Betts guaranteed the outcome and drove Biagini from the game with his second round-tripper, following yet another opposite-field single by Marrero, which extended the Boston lead to 7-1. Aaron Loup came in to finish up the inning, but once again it was too late: the horse was long gone.
Any remote hope of the Jays mounting a comeback went on life support in the bottom of the sixth when Smoak, continuing to hit the ball hard regardless of his team-mates fecklessness, hit a one-out double to left centre, only to have Morales fan and Tulowitzki ground out weakly to second.
With the help of Glenn Sparkman, on for the second time in the series against Boston, the Sox finally pulled the plug on the hapless Jays by ringing up eight more add-on runs to make the game a bizarre sort of joke. Sparkman only managed one out and gave up seven runs on seven hits. But, to be at least a little fair, I kept track, and six of the seven hits off Sparkman were to the opposite field, and even the two-run job by Hanley Ramirez off Jeff Beliveau went out to right, not to mention a following base hit by Bradley to left that didn’t enter into the scoring. You know you’ve had it when the opposition scores eight runs on nine hits in one inning, and only one hit, a single to centre by Mookie Betts, did not go the wrong way.
For some strange reason my game notes don’t exist for the last two innings of this one. Maybe I just lost interest. D’ja think?
After the Sox put Friday night’s game away with three runs in the top of the eleventh, the cumulative score for the next two games was, if you’ve got the stomach for it, 22-2. The hit totals were—wait for it—33-11. Oh, but each team had only one error. That’s because you couldn’t really charge errors on all the bloopers hit by Red Sox batters that bounced away from frantically charging Jays’ outfielders.
Though it’s not likely that Boston was very happy to leave the friendly confines of the TV Dome, there’s no doubt the Jays were happy to get out of town, if only to find a dark, quite place to lick their wounds, and contemplate the disaster their season may be becoming.
Leave a Reply