I had to check the calendar tonight to make sure it was still July, and we hadn’t jumped ahead to October: after tonight’s embarrassing loss in Cleveland, it’s clear that the Jays’ turkey of a 2017 season is cooked and ready to eat. Bring on the cranberries and pumpkin pie!
Here are the facts: the starting rotation is in shreds: only Marcus Stroman and Jay Happ are healthy, and Happ is throwing far more pitches per start than he did last year for Toronto. Because of the problems with the starters, the relievers are gassed. With other teams bombing at will against our faltering pitching staff, the hope that our slump-riddled offence can trade bunches of runs with the opposition is zero.
Tonight, Marco Estrada looked a lot better than in his last few appearances. A whole lot better. For a while.
In fact, other than a long solo homer by Edwin Encarnacion leading off the second, and a Carlos Santana double in the fourth, he looked a lot like the Marco Estrada of yore: two strikeouts and a popup in the first inning, a popup and two grounders in the second after the Encarnacion shot to centre, three popups in the third, and a little help from his friends in the fourth, in which Michael Brantley skyed to right, Encarnacion walked, and Jose Ramirez popped up down the right-field line for Ryan Goins. This brought Carlos Santana to the plate and resulted in the second hard-hit ball of the night off Estrada.
Santana smoked a double to dead centre field, over Kevin Pillar’s head. The ball hit the wall hard and rolled back toward the infield. Pillar tracked it down and fired to the cutoff man, Troy Tulowitzki, who turned and threw a strike to Russell Martin at the plate to cut down Encarnacion, trying to score from first with two outs.
By this time, the Jays had manufactured a 3-1 lead over Cleveland, in a most un-Toronto-like way, without the aid of a home run. They picked up their first run in the first inning by, first, not wasting a leadoff double by Jose Bautista, and, second, getting a two-out RBI single from Kendrys Morales.
This came off Cleveland starter Trevor Bauer who, fortunately for the Indians, did not play with his drone on Thursday night, and so brought a healthy pitching hand to the game tonight. Unfortunately for him, at least in the short term, he also brought his propensity to labour mightily to find the strike zone. It took him 33 pitches to get out of the first, and another 19, for 52 in total, in the second, when the Jays cashed their second leadoff double, this time by Zeke Carrera, to improve their lead to 2-0.
Looking more like the Kansas City Royals than the Blue Jays, they utilized a ground ball to first by Kevin Pillar to move Carrera to third, and then got a line sacrifice fly to centre by Ryan Goins to score Carrera.
It wasn’t all magic for Toronto at the plate though. After stranding a two-out single by Justin Smoak in the third, Troy Tulowitzki led off the fourth with the team’s third straight leadoff double, and was followed by Carrera drawing a walk, but this time they came up empty. Pillar stroked a liner to centre that looked promising but surprisingly carried to centre fielder Bradley Zimmer’s glove for the first out, and then second baseman Erik Gonzalez turned Goins’ bouncer into a quick double play.
In the fifth, though, Bauer was within one out of retiring the side in order, having struck out the first two batters, but he walked Donaldson to bring Smoak to the plate, who produced Toronto’s third run, and the second one by way ofa two-out base hit, a booming double to left that scored Donaldson. At 112 pitches and down 3-1, it looked like Bauer’s long and weary night was at an end, and he would go out without any chance for a win.
But in the bottom of the fifth, Estrada’s resurgence came to an abrupt end. He would only get two outs in the inning, see his pitch count balloon from 57 after four innings to 96, and lose the lead for Toronto, for good.
Cleveland’s muscular but speedy right fielder Abraham Almonte led off with a booming drive to left centre on a 2-0 pitch—and yes, Estrada fell behind on the first batter—and Pillar tracked it to the wall, climbed the wall, but just failed to reach it. By the time Zeke Carrera tracked down the carom, Almonte was chugging into third. Roberto Perez walked. Erik Gonzalez singled to right to score Almonte to narrow the lead to 3-2. Estrada fought back by striking out Bradley Zimmer, then loaded the bases by walking Francisco Lindor. Cleveland tied the game with Michael Brantley’s ground single up the middle that scored Perez.
This brought Edwin to the plate for his third at-bat against Estrada; he went to 3-2, fouled off a pitch, then drove one into the gap in left centre that scored Gonzalez and Brantley, who had stolen second. Cleveland had a 5-3 lead, and once again Estrada failed to survive the fifth inning. Aaron Loup came in to end the inning, by striking out Carlos Santana after Jose Ramirez had singled to right, with Encarnacion and third-base coach Mike Sarbaugh choosing not to challenge Bautista’s arm and risk getting thrown out at the plate again on the Ramirez hit.
Remembering that this was Cleveland, with the twin stalwarts Andrew Miller and Cody Allen in the back of the bullpen, Toronto had a window of the sixth and seventh to bounce back from the two-run deficit. Manager Terry Francona brought in lefty Tyler Olson to face Carrera, and John Gibbons responded by subbing Steve Pearce, who was hit on the leg by Olson, putting the leadoff runner on.
Francona called for Brian Shaw, who has been nearly as effective against Toronto as the two back-end giants, and he did not fail his team this time. Two ground balls went for fielder’s choices, and then Bautista popped out to Santana in foul territory. Shaw retired the side in order in the seventh, closing the window that the Jays were hoping to take advantage of. In the meantime, Loup stayed on to breeze through the Cleveland sixth, striking out the last two batters he faced.
This brought us to the Cleveland seventh, an inning in which not only Toronto’s chances in this game, but perhaps it hopes for the season, went up in smoke as
Cleveland ground out 8 runs off Loup, Jeff Beliveau, and Cesar Valdez to salt the game away.
I’m not sure whether John Gibbons’ pitching decisions at this juncture of the game were determined by necessity or his own quirkiness, but firstly it seemed odd that he would have sent Loup out again to start the seventh. True, he’d only thrown seventeen pitches to rescue Estrada and then pitch the sixth. And true, the first batter was the left-handed Zimmer. But on the other hand, it was highly unusual to ask Loup to bridge over three innings, and his numbers against left-handed hitters aren’t all that great in any case.
Regardless of his manager’s reasoning, Loup walked Zimmer, and then was helped out when Bautista made a nice running catch of a drive off the bat of Francisco Lindor. But that drive to right drove Loup from the game, and with the left-handed Michael Brantley coming up, Gibbons elected to go to his second lefty, Jeff Beliveau.
Now, Beliveau’s done a pretty good job for the Jays so far, and has rung up some big outs. Whether he was out of gas today, or he’d left his smoke and mirrors in the bullpen, or the Indians just had his number, he had nothing to add to the proceedings except gas for the fire. He hit Brantley, then gave up an RBI Texas League single to Edwin to score Zimmer for his fourth ribbie against his old team, and close out Loup’s record. The rest was all on Beliveau, and it wasn’t pretty. Ramirez doubled into the gap in left centre to score Brantley. Santana singled to right to score Edwin and send Ramirez to third. Almonte homered to right to clear the bases and bring Beliveau’s run total to four. Then he walked Perez before getting the hook from John Gibbons, who brought in Cesar Valdez.
Valdez, who’d been nearly perfect in his last outing against Boston when he went four innings of long relief and gave up one hit while striking out five, didn’t get off any easier than Beliveau. Gonzalez’ double to left moved Perez to third, and they both scored on Zimmer’s single. Lindor’s double to centre sent Zimmer to third, but both were stranded there when Valdez escaped the inning with a strikeout and a deep fly ball to centre by Edwin that stayed in the park.
Totting it all up, Loup was charged with one of the runs, Beliveau, who didn’t retire a batter, gave up six, and Valdez gave up one. From a doable two-run deficit, Toronto’s deficit had grown to ten, and what happened after hardly mattered.
As always, the score as meaningless once it was in the books, just another loss, but what did matter is that Marco Estrada, though he threw better longer, still couldn’t get to five innings again, and the consequence of that was that more pitches had to be thrown by more relief pitchers, raising, of course, concern about the immediate future. How long will it be before the entire house of cards comes down?
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