Long Ball Stories

In a melancholy sort of way, there’s something quite exhilarating about a September series between two teams no longer harbouring any hope of making the playoffs.

The air is crisp and clear, September in the midwest, including the Canadian midwest, being the loveliest time of the year. The warmth of the day’s sun lingers into the evening, helping to ward off the encroaching chill of early fall.

Rosters have been expanded with new faces, rookies as well as veterans, all hoping to make an impression that will last through the winter and give them a leg up on making the team, or any team, out of Florida next spring.

Veterans continue to play hard to cement their positions and prove their continued worth. Even—especially—those players facing free agency have much to play for, in order to improve their worth on the open market, or to entice their current team to take a flyer on them for another year. Are you listening, Ross Atkins and Marco Estrada? Get a deal done. Soon.

In short, the game is reduced to its simplest elements: pitchers pitch, hitters hit, fielders field, and whichever team does it best wins the game. In the process, there is much to watch, much to appreciate, and much to ponder.

And so it was this weekend that the Toronto Blue Jays returned home from their week-long road trip to the unfriendly lairs of division-leading Boston, and wild-card-contending Baltimore. Considering the stakes at hand for their opponents, the Jays comported themselves about as well as they had this entire disappointing season, winning three games of seven and just missing taking six of seven by the measure of three extra-inning walkoff losses.

If Toronto came into this series hoping to make up for some of the close calls and failures of 2017, how much more so the Detroit Tigers, who came in with a record of 59-80, having lost hope ages ago, and being among the first teams to dismantle, dump salary, and start the process of retooling, not for 2018, but for some point beyond.

Consider the changes in the Tigers’ lineup since the two teams last met: traded away have been Justin Verlander, Justin Upton, Justin Wilson*, Alex Avila, and J.D. Martinez; on the disabled list: Michael Fulmer, Jose Iglesias, and Victor Martinez, most worryingly with an irregular heartbeat. Sadly, unless Victor Martinez makes his way back, the days of annotating Victor and J.D. as VMart and JMart, and making jokes about KMart, are over.

*Apparently, Tigers’ management has decided that if they haven’t been able to put it all together with a bunch of Justins, they need to go in another direction.

So on Friday night we were looking at a Tigers’ lineup that started with old reliable Ian Kinsler leading off at second, and then went quickly nouvelle vague with Jeimer Candelario at third, the familiar and destructive Nick Castellanos in right, John Hicks at DH, more familiar names Mikie Mahtook in centre and James McCann behind the plate, Efren Navarro at first, long-time utility guy Andrew Romine in left, and sparkling rookie shortstop Dixon Machado hitting ninth.

On the other hand, manager John Gibbons, returning Friday after a leave of absence, had a more veteran array of talent on offer for the Jays, with only callup Richard Ureňa at short and hitting ninth. Arguably, Ureňa was only out there because Josh Donaldson had apparently come down with a bug and was unavailable, so Ryan Goins was slotted at second and Darwin Barney at third. The early notion of leaving Goins at short and seeing how Ureňa might adapt to second seems to have been put off until the spring; Goins, being more experienced and versatile, is the more obvious candidate to play second, leaving Ureňa where he’s most comfortable. The other appearance of a newbie in Toronto’s batting order was Teoscar Hernandez, who took over for Steve Pearce in left field after one at-bat because, as we learned later, Pearce’s back had stiffened up.

The pitching matchup represented the same kind of distinction between the two teams on Friday, with Marcus Stroman taking the hill for the Jays and . . . Buck Farmer (??) starting for the Tigers. Okay, to be fair, Farmer, whose name belongs on my list of great baseball names, has been up and down with Detroit since 2014. And yet this was only his seventh appearance for the Tigers this year, coming in with a positive won/loss record of 3-2, but a dreadful ERA of 7.18.

But wait, we’ve heard this story before. Guy you’ve hardly heard of, guy his team-mates have hardly heard of (okay, that’s going a bit far), comes in and outpitches the established major-league starter.

Well, that’s what we got. Farmer only went five innings, gave up two runs, only one earned, on five hits, but dang it, he got the win to go to 4-2.

Even the earned run was tainted. Ureňa reached with a two-out base hit in the fifth, and then Hernandez, hitting in Pearce’s slot, lofted a blooper into centre. Mahtook came racing in and unwisely tried for a diving catch. The ball kicked off something hard, maybe Mahtook’s forearm, and kicked away. Far away. Running on contact, Urenã scored from first, Hernandez given credit for a double. No error was given, but still.

Then, in the sixth, when Tiger manager Brad Ausmus sent Farmer back out with only 68 pitches under his belt, his catcher let him down with a passed ball when the pitcher had Jose Bautista struck out leading off, but he reached, eventually coming around to score on singles by Justin Smoak and Kendrys Morales, the last batter Farmer faced. Unlike the fifth inning run that was earned on paper, but shouldn’t have happened, this one was definitely unearned.

The game was really decided by two pitches and two swings of the bat, it was that close. The second swing of the bat was the vicious one-hop liner that Kevin Pillar ripped toward third off reliever Drew VerHagen, who’d just come in to replace Farmer after Morales’ RBI single. With the two lead sleds Smoak on second and Morales on first, the Pillar one-hopper that didn’t go for a double, because it was skillfully picked by Candelario right at the bag, turned into a batter’s nightmare: Candelario spun with the pickup, poked a foot at the bag at third, fired the ball to second, where Kinsler whipped it to first, barely beating the hustling Pillar, as the video review confirmed, for a shocking, devastating, around-the-horn triple play to end the threat.

The other pitch? The other swing of the bat? Ah, that one hurt even more than the Pillar bullet turning into dust.

Marcus Stroman seriously breezed through the first eight batters, needing ten pitches for the first inning, twelve for the second, and five for the first two in the third, eight hitters, twenty-seven pitches. Then the kid Machado came up and ripped a double to right field. Kinsler, who has always been kind of a poor man’s Dustin Pedroia to the Blue Jays, in other words a real pain in the bupkus, hit one through the left side. Machado had to hold up on the ball, and checked in at third.

On second thought, maybe it wasn’t the one pitch that Stroman threw to Castellanos that disappeared over the centre-field fence for a grand slam, but the four straight bad ones he threw to Candelario, the new guy, to load the bases. If he had gotten Candelario, Castellanos would not have gotten to the plate. But, sadly, five pitches after Kinsler’s base hit, the Tigers had a 4-0 lead, on a ball that Kevin Pillar thought he had in the bag, until it just carried, and carried, over his head and over the fence, for a Tiger grand salami.

Then it was a question of whether Toronto could recover from the blow. Stroman did, but it was too late for him. He went out after six innings, still down 4-2 because of the slam, the only mistake he made that he was punished for. Give him a scoreless third inning, and he was brilliant on the night.

Toronto suffered the frustration of seeing the lead lengthen, rather than shorten, once the bullpens were involved. Danny Barnes came in for the seventh, and retired Romine and Machado on two pitches each, but then threw a changeup in to Kinsler after throwing five pitches away. Kinsler jumped on it, and it was 5-2.

The Kinsler homer was all the Tigers needed to hold off the Blue Jays, who clawed back within one in the eighth inning, on solo homers by Ureňa, his first in the majors, and Bautista, the three hundred and thirtieth of his career, and twenty-second of the season. Thus the generations pass in baseball.

But it was for naught. The Detroit bullpen, denuded of experience, has ended up devolving the closer’s job on Shane Greene, a twenty-eight-year-old righty who has logged major innings in relief for the Tigers in the last two seasons, but never closed before. Greene issued a two-out walk to the pinch-hitter Michael Saunders, but then fanned another pinch-hitter, Miguel Montero, to end the game.

Thanks to the grand slam gopher ball and the take-it-or-leave-it triple play, the young Tigers took the first game of the series from the Jays’ veterans. Little did we know that those two plays would be all that would stand between the Blue Jays and a series sweep.

I had the pleasure of listening to most of Saturday’s game on the car radio, courtesy of Jerry and Joe, because the last-minute starting time change from one to four pushed the game back into driving time for taking our grand-daughter home to Scarborough after her regular Saturday visit.

So, sticking with tradition, I’ll offer some quick observations on the first seven innings or so, before spending a bit more time on the end of the game, which I did see.

The game featured a pitching matchup between a pair of left-handers who were in effect auditioning for consideration for next year’s rotation for their respective teams. Chad Bell of the Tigers is one of those late-twenties guys who’s taken since 2010 to finally make his major league debut this year. He’d appeared in 19 games in relief for the Tigers, and this would be his second start, after going four innings in Cleveland on the third of September and getting cuffed around a bit.

Brett Anderson, on the other hand, has been pitching in the majors since 2010, and had accrued 86 decisions with a career ERA of 3.97. Yet he too was a tryout in this game. He’d been cut free by the Cubs in May, and the Jays picked him up to fill the rotation in Buffalo, with an eye toward seeing whether he has anything left to offer to a major-league team. This would be his third start with Toronto since being called up in late August. Thus far he’d had a loss and a no decision, allowing four earned runs in eleven and two thirds innings, while pitching quite well..

The Tigers struck first, in the first inning, when Anderson ran afoul of Miggy Cabrera, which is not such a grave fault: he’s certainly not the first. With Jeimer Candelario on first with a base hit, Cabrera belted a two-run homer to left. Luckily for Toronto, these were the only runs Anderson would give up in six full innings of work; he would only give up four hits the rest of the way, walking none and striking out five.

Toronto got one back in the bottom of the first thanks to the first of four base hits on the day by Kevin Pillar, who was by all accounts the star of this game. With two outs, Bautista on third and Morales on first, Pillar ripped a liner past Machado at short into left to score Bautista. And rip it he did; I saw the first inning before we left.

The game remained 2-1 until the bottom of the fourth, when, if you can believe it, and to the great amusement of Jerry Howarth, Kendrys Morales scored from third on the front end of a double-steal. Morales had walked. Pillar had singled him to second. Hernandez had hit into a force play, with Morales going to third. With two outs, after Barney had struck out and with Goins at the plate, Hernandez broke for second. In what he later admitted was a mistake, McCann threw down to second, but Hernandez stopped and got himself in a runown. While the rookie Machado elected to chase down Hernandez, Morales romped home with the tying run. The mirth over this play was only slightly dissipated when the official scorer decided that Morales had not stolen home, but had scored courtesy of a fielder’s choice, McCann’s throw to second.

I missed, but saw replays later, of Pillar’s brilliant catch against the wall in the top of the fifth off Machado after Anderson had struck out the first two batters. Now having seen it on replay, I would classify it in the top ten or so all-time of his catches, though that number of ten is getting to be mighty elastic these days.

I also missed Pillar’s leadoff, go-ahead homer in the bottom of the sixth off reliever Warren Saupold, which was eventually followed by an insurance run driven in with a clutch two-out base hit by Luke Maile that scored Barney, who’d reached on a single, stole second, and advanced to third on a right-side ground ball out by Goins.

With the Toronto lead at 4-2, and both starters gone, Anderson after his quality six innings, I arrived home to watch the wrapup of the game, starting with Carlos Ramirez in the seventh adding to his amazing string of scoreless innings, encompassing all of 2017, minors and majors, including three appearances totalling six innings with Toronto. He added a seventh perfect inning against the Tigers, striking out two in the process.

Dom Leone, continuing to impress with his solid work, pitched a quick eighth, taking eleven pitches to get two groundouts and then fan Kinsler to end the inning.

In the meantime, after Pillar’s homer off Saupold, it had been Daniel Stumpf who came in and allowed Saupold’s base runner, Barney, eventually to score on Maile’s single. Drew Verhagen finished off the sixth with no further damage.

Jeff Ferrell managed to keep Toronto from extending its lead in a rocky seventh. With one out, Ferrell walked Morales. Pillar hit a solid liner to left for his fourth hit of the game, Morales moving up to second. Hernandez hit a second straight line single to left. Coach Luis Rivera tried to challenge the arm of Andrew Romine, normally a utility infielder, in left, and sent Morales around third only to be gunned down at the plate by Romine.

Lefty Blaine Hardy came in to face and retire Goins to start off the eighth, but Maile, who is starting to make sharp contact, shot a double to centre. After Urena fanned for the second out, Bautista lofted a teasing little fly over Kinsler’s head at second. Kinsler tracked it back, dove for it, but it ticked off his glove for a base hit that scored Maile with a very important fifth run.

Which took us to the top of the ninth and the rather surprise appearance of Ryan Tepera as the closer, going for his second save of the year. We later learned that Roberto Osuna was unavailable because of a stiff neck.

For all of his advancement this year, on this Tepera was not quite up to turning in an efficient ninth inning, limiting the drama, which is what we would have wanted with a three-run lead going in. Yet, in the end, he held off the Tigers, earned the save, and closed out the Jays’ 5-4 win, the same score as Friday night, but with the other team on top.

Almost all bad things start with a leadoff walk, this time to Candelario. Miggy Cabrera singled to left, bumping Candelario up to second. Castellanos doubled home Candelario, Cabrera stopping at third. Nobody out, 5-3, tying run at second. Who ya gonna call?

Nobody, because there weren’t nobody out there no how! Tepera just had to buckle down and do it. Cabrera didn’t matter, but Castellanos had to be left out there on the bases.

And by god, Ryan Tepera did it. Here’s how: John Hicks grounded out to Smoak unassisted, the runners holding. Jacoby Jones popped out to Goins at second. And Andrew Romine, who’d saved a run in the seventh with his throw to cut down Morales at the plate, and who’d also made a Pillar-esque diving snag of a liner headed for the corner in left off Maile, a catch I didn’t see until just now watching the video, in the end, that Andrew Romine could not quite top the heroics of the real Kevin Pillar, and so took a called third strike from Tepera to end the game.

Whew! And I raced back in from the car to watch the last part of the game just to put myself at risk of a cardiac adventure?? Thank god it turned out okay for the good guys, or I’da been off to the emerg fer sure!

So, series tied at a game apiece, runs dead even at nine apiece, Sunday would tell the tale, whether the Tigers would leave town with their heads held high, or their tails (sorry) between their legs.

I started this narrative with commentary on the Tigers’ having already dismantled much of their long-standing core contingent, going with a lineup featuring quite a few new faces.

Sunday’s game, however, presented a promising new face breaking out for Toronto as well. Teoscar Hernandez, who has been a regular presence in the lineup since coming up from Buffalo, gave a performance that on its own merits, regardless of what he does from this point on, should merit him serious consideration for a regular spot in the outfield for Toronto next year.

Hernandez, it will be recalled, came to Toronto along with the departed Nori Aoki from Houston in exchange for Francisco Liriano, whose days in Toronto were numbered in any case. It should also be recalled that he had caught the attention of the Jays’ pooh-bahs in August, 2016, when his first major-league home run was hit against Toronto, in Toronto, in his first major-league game, while on a callup assignment for Houston.

In one of baseball’s typical little ironies, the victim of Hernandez’ first dinger in his first game? None other than Francisco Liriano.

On Sunday, facing the veteran right-hander Anibal Sanchez of the Tigers, Hernandez struck out to strand the bases loaded with one run already across the plate in the first inning.

But he made up for the first inning disappointment in the fourth inning when, after Ryan Goins reached on a one-out flare single to right, he took Sanchez to the deepest part of the ball park, hitting it out to centre to give Toronto a 3-0 lead, recording his first homer for Toronto, but his second career dinger in Toronto.

Then, in the fifth inning, maybe manager Brad Ausmus would later regret his decision to let Sanchez pitch to Hernandez with one run already in and a couple of runners on. Singles by Bautista, Morales, and Pillar had already plated one additional run, making the score 4-2 for Toronto. (In the top of the fifth, Manny Machado had reached on a fielding error by Ureňa, and Kinsler had homered to left off Jay Happ, cutting the lead at that point to 3-2, the closest the Tigers would come.)

With Morales and Pillar on base, Hernandez took Sanchez downtown again, this time to the opposite field, this time for three runs, giving him five ribbies for the game and basically salting it away for the Blue Jays.

It’s not like Hernandez was the only Jays’ rookie to impact Sunday’s game. Richard Ureňa seems to have found a spot as leadoff batter, not to mention his sparkling defensive play at short, leaving aside the careless error or two. In the first inning, his speed turned a Kendrys Morales single into an unusual RBI for the Toronto DH. He had led off the game with a ground single up the middle, and then looked destined to die at first as Josh Donaldson and Justin Smoak made outs, bringing up Morales. But Toronto manager John Gibbons started Ureňa on a 1-0 pitch. Morales lashed the ball on a line past the empty infield on the left side into left centre for a single. The speedy rookie never hesitated as Luis Rivera waved him home, and he scored from first on the single without even drawing a throw to give Toronto an early lead.

Jay Happ started for the Jays, and though he had to work his way out of trouble in three of the first four innings, on this day he had his strikeout mojo, eventually notching up nine which helped him out of a couple of jams, as in the first, when after striking out the first two Tigers he gave up base hits to Detroit’s twin terrors, Miggy Cabrera and Nick Castellanos, but extracted himself by fanning John Hicks to strand the runners.

Happ’s only lapse (nice phrase, that) came in the fifth, when he served up the homer to Kinsler that cost Toronto two runs, because of the afore-mentioned sloppy miss by Ureňa at short on an easy grounder by Dixon Machado, who rode home on Kinsler’s blast. But the dinger by Kinsler of course only put one run on the board in terms of Happ’s record.

The Toronto lefty’s strikeout total, not to mention his penchant for working in and out of trouble, led once again to an elevated pitch count, and he was more than well done after six at 113 pitches, though by this time he was cruising along on a 7-2 lead.

But Happ’s departure left a big chunk of outs to accomplish to seal the deal, and that’s where a third impact rookie had a big role to play for the Jays. Luis Santos, the chunky twenty-six-year-old right-hander with the crazy record in Buffalo this year (3-12, but a decent 4.07 ERA and a not-bad WHIP of 1.26), who has flown under the radar with all the attention garnered by Carlos Ramirez, was just the man to fill the bill.

Santos, with two solid appearances already under his belt, three and two thirds innings against Baltimore with one earned run, and two scoreless innings against Boston, was a real zip-meister in his three innings of mopup work. No runs, two hits, two strikeouts, and thirty-four pitches for three innings. Despite the Jays’ big lead he qualified for his first major-league save under the provision of pitching effectively over a number of innings to preserve a lead.

What’s amazing about Santos is his nonchalant, bring-it-to-em approach. No nonsense, just go after them, with a funky delivery of a nice repertoire of pitches that has so far been very effective. And how valuable can Santos be next year, as someone who has always started, for giving the team three innings of bridge work when it’s badly needed?

In fact, it’s become obvious, with the performance of the Toronto relievers who have been here all year, and the glittering work turned in by the recent arrivals, that the one place where Ross Atkins does not have to throw money around in the off-season for new talent is the bullpen, which is getting stronger by the game. In fact, the toughest job for management might be finding roster spots for all the relievers who deserve them.

Oh, and we didn’t even mention that Teoscar Hernandez (all for re-christening him “Oscar” raise your hands!) was on the front end of what was, given the way Santos followed Happ, a totally superfluous eighth run in the seventh inning. He reached with a one-out single to centre, and zipped around to third on a single to right by Darwin Barney, who quietly went four for four today when nobody was looking. By the way, I really like this first-to-third stuff. Where’s it been hiding all these years? From third, Hernandez was able to score on a James McCann passed ball off a pitch by Tiger reliever Artie Lewicki.

I was going to add Artie Lewicki to my list of great baseball names, but on second thought, especially since he’s from Detroit, the erstwhile pro bowling capitol of the world, maybe his name would be better suited for a character role in the proposed sequel to The Big Lebowski, a project which doesn’t exist, because I totally made that up.

On the whole, then, it was a fun and interesting weekend at the old TV Dome. Nothing to do with the pennant race, mind you, just some good, old-fashioned baseball. Toronto took the series, two out of three, from the bottom-dwelling Tigers (we should talk?) and were it not for the precise placement of a hot shot by Kevin Pillar, and the lousy placement of a pitch to Nick Castellanos, both on Friday night, the Jays would be sitting down Sunday evening to dine on big cat road kill, after a most satisfying sweep.

We came close, though.