I’m not saying that the Toronto Blue Jays wanted last night’s series opener at the TV Dome more than the Boston Red Sox, just that they needed it more.
Both teams came into town off their first series losses of the year, suffered on the road, the first real stumbling blocks to the respective teams in this young season.
But the Red Sox, coming into town with the best record in baseball, had only lost two of three in Oakland, one of them a no-hitter by Oakland starter Sean Manaea, and they still sported a gaudy 17-4 record, the best by far in major league baseball.
The Jays had lost three of four in New York to the Yankees on the weekend, and came into this game with a respectable record of 13 and 8, but they didn’t have the luxury of a four-game bulge on the entire world with which to console themselves.
Furthermore, in light of recent terrible events, the city itself needed pick-me-ups wherever they could be found. The first came with Monday night’s stirring Maple Leaf win over the Bruins to take their first round of the Stanley Cup playoffs to a game seven.
So when the same two cities confronted one another on the local ball diamond, the stakes were high, as were the emotions, considering that Boston had suffered its own tragedy with the Boston Marathon bombing exactly five years ago this month.
When Jay Happ came out throwing smoke and mirrors at the dangerous but overmatched Boston lineup, and the Toronto hitters cobbled together three cheap runs in the second inning, the game began to take on a wondrous aura for the team’s passionate fans.
The 2018 season has started remarkably well for the Blue Jays, and they should have come into this series with a bit of swagger despite the losses in New York. But hanging over their heads was one very cautionary note: the Red Sox carried over a seven-game winning streak in Toronto from 2017.
Happ started like a house on fire, as if he had taken on the banishment of Boston’s Toronto win streak as his own personal mission.
Mookie Betts popped up the first pitch of the game to Justin Smoak in foul ground. Happ blew Andrew Benintendi away with a high fast ball. Hanley Ramirez grounded out to Aledmys Diaz at short on the first pitch. Seven pitches from Happ and Toronto was heading for the bat rack, no first-inning explosion from Boston to overcome.
Rick Porcello is off to an awesome start with Boston, with four wins, an ERA of 1.40, and not having surrendered a single homer or walked anyone. He struck out the side to answer Happ. But there was a little note of concern in the fact that he issued his first walk of the season to Teoscar Hernandez on a 3-2 pitch, and took 21 pitches to navigate the four hitters he faced.
Until their uprising against Roberto Osuna in the ninth inning, perhaps the hardest hit ball the Red Sox hit, certainly the hardest off Happ, came from J. D. Martinez leading off the second for Boston. With the Jays pulled around to left for the powerful righty, Devon Travis only had time for two quick steps and a dive to his left to flag down a bullet headed for right centre. He got up just in time to make the play on to first.
Happ retired Rafael Devers on a grounder to short and Eduardo Nunez on a foul fly that Curtis Granderson ran down in right. Including the Martinez at-bat, the second-inning pitch count was 12, putting him for 19 after two, when he often takes 19 to navigate the first inning.
You had to anticipate that when Porcello came out for the bottom of the second we’d see more of the same, and the grounds for the duel between Jay Happ and Porcello would have been well established.
But something funny happened on the way to (at least) a seven-inning scoreless tie: the Blue Jays chopped and hopped and played altogether like a National League team that can’t hit, but still manages to bleed out cheap runs.
Porcello didn’t help himself going 3-1 on Steve Pearce leading off, then losing him, but the whole rest of the inning was down to Sleepy John Gibbons surprising us yet again in this strange new season.
With the slumping Russell Martin at the plate, Gibbie put on the hit-and-run. It was textbook, even if it did play out in slow motion. Pearce broke for second. The second baseman Nunez had the coverage with the righty Martin at the plate, and broke for second. Martin slapped at the ball and there it went, gently bouncing, bouncing, right toward the hole left by Nunez. The latter frantically retreated and tried his best to close on the ball, ending in a fruitless dive as it went went through to right. Pearce looked over his shoulder rounding second, saw that the ball had gone through, and chugged to third.
A thing of beauty it wasn’t, but it worked, and everything that happened afterward stemmed from it.
Kevin Pillar bounced one to Devers at third. My heart was in my throat (really! And it was only the second inning!) as I realized that the contact play was on and Pearce was barrelling for the plate. But lo and behold Devers, who had plenty of time, threw wide to the plate. Pearce was safe and Pillar was across first, with Martin at second.
Aledmys Diaz hit into a fielder’s choice at second with Pillar out and Martin going to third. Travis hit a grounder to Devers and now the contact play was on with Martin, who was out at the plate, leaving Diaz at second and Travis at first.
Then Porcello made his second mistake and it really compounded his problems: he threw a wild pitch to Granderson, and Diaz and Travis moved up. With two outs now and the infield at regular depth, meaning Devers was in a little bit with a lefty at the plate, Granderson hit the third ball of the inning to Devers, a hard shot that took a wicked hop off the seam of the turf and deflected off poor Devers’ glove out into no-man’s land in short left. Diaz scored easily; Travis scampered home after him, and Toronto had a 3-0 lead.
It was like every nightmare inning you’ve seen played out against Toronto in the last few years: three runs on only two hits, one of which nearly died in front of the right fielder, and the other died in left after the deflection.
Hey, against Rick Porcello, we’ll take ’em any way we can get ’em, right?
Both Happ and Porcello dominated from this point in the game, right until they finished up after seven innings. Porcello got a huge assist from Mookie Betts in the fifth inning that saved him a fourth run. Granderson, who must have eaten his Frisky Oats before the game, hit a wicked one-hopper off the glove of Nunez out in right field in the shift, so wicked that it made it through to the wall off his glove. Then came the play of the game so far for Boston.
Teoscar Hernandez hit a liner to right centre that was clearly headed for the gap for back-to-back doubles. Except that Betts was on his horse and closing fast. Then he threw himself into a dive that was angled toward the wall, as the ball was nearly past him. He dove andthe ball dropped right into his glove for the second out.
Porcello walked Smoak for his third walk of the night, and of 2018, remember, but Yangervis Solarte hit a broken-bat liner to second to end the inning.
In the sixth the Bosox finally broke through against Happ for a run, but they didn’t exactly tear the cover off the ball either. Brock Holt, that pesky little imp who’s getting playng time because ofthe injuries to that otherpesky little imp, Dustin Pedroia, and to the great Xander Bogaerts, started things off.
Just a thought, here: how are the Red Sox 17-4 coming into this game when Pedroia hasn’t played an inning, and Bogaerts has been out since April eighth? Scary, yes?
So Holt took two called strikes on the outside corner, watched one ball well low and away on the outside corner, and then threw himself across and slapped at a fourth outside pitch, this time at the chest. Of course it shot through the empty left side of the infield and then down into the corner for a double. It was the third hit off Happ and the first one to reach the outfield with even a touch of authority.
On this night the fearsome top of the Boston order, Betts, Benintendi, Ramirez, was as nothing to Jay Happ. With Holt in scoring position, the first Boston batter to reach second, Mookie Betts meekly flied out to short centre, and Andrew Benintendi went down on strikes for the third time. Only Hanley Ramirez stood between Happ and stranding Holt.
The problem with Hanley Ramirez is that he’s so damn strong. You can absolutely beat him in on his hands with a fast ball, which is what Happ did on the first pitch. Ramirez swung, caught the ball on the label, and hit a soft, weak liner that sailed—gently, mind you—over Travis’ desperately reaching glove and out into right centre for a very impressive “muscle” RBI single. Happ fanned J. D. Martinez for the second time to strand Rodriguez, but it was now 3-1.
In the bottom of the sixth Steve Pearce got into a hanging slider and everybody, including Pearce thought he’d gotten it all, but it faded a little at the end, which allowed Jackie Bradley Jr. to flag it down on the warning track in dead centre.
And if you judged by the seventh inning alone, it looked like both Porcello and Happ could go on like that all night long. Happ retired Boston on ten pitches for 97 for the night, and added his tenth strikeout, a season high, on the last batter he saw, Jackie Bradley Jr.
Porcello finished with a ten-pitch seventh, nine strikeouts, and 103 pitches in all.
On to the eighth as the tension built: this game was going to end up in an Osuna save opportunity. Nail-biting time!
Ryan Tepera came in to pitch the eighth for Toronto. Tepera has developed his own style, a little wild and wooly around the edges, but very effective. This was a typical Tepera performance. He gave up a one-out base hit (to Holt, of course), but bore down to fan Betts on a checked swing, and then Benitendi, for the fourth time on the night. That’s Tepera, all out for 20 pitches, devil take the hindmost!
Joe Kelly came in for Boston for the bottom of the eighth. Kelly, who’s waiting to hear about the appeal of his 6-game suspension for his part in the recent beanbrawl with the Yankees, finished Toronto off in short order, with one strikeout on ten pitches.
So the Boston ninth opened on the familar sight of Roberto Osuna seeking divine inspiration, or divine retribution on his opponents, whichever the case may be. Besides Osuna on the mound, there was one other change. Curtis Granderson switched to left field and Randal Grichuk came in as a defensive replacement in right, with Hernandez leaving the game. This change became significant, as both players would be involved in key plays during the inning.
It’s a little hard to know whether Roberto Osuna was a little off from the beginning or not, but as with past blown saves for Osuna, it did seem that as the inning wore on he lost confidence in his stuff, and it was also remarkable that on several occasions he and Russell Martin struggled to come to agreement as to his pitch selection.
Leading off, Ramirez was in the hole 1-2 when Osuna caught too much of the plate with the cut fast ball that he was accused of playing with too much on occasion last year. Ramirez lined it into centre for a base hit.
J.D. Martinez fanned for the third time on the night. But the free-swinging Devers turned on a high, inside 2-2 pitch and shot it to right for a single that moved Ramirez up to second. Then Grichuk came into play.
Nunez shot an outside pitch into right centre that should have been a double, but Grichuk quickly ran it down to hold Nunez to a single while Devers had to stop at third; Ramirez scored to narrow the lead to one.
Osuna reasserted himself to blow away Jackie Bradley Jr. on two overwhelming high inside fastballs. This brought Christian Vazquez up for the first time. He had taken over behind the plate after Sox manager Joey Cora inserted Mitch Moreland as an unsuccessful pinch-hitter for Sandy Leon in the eighth inning against Tepera.
Vazquez fell behind 0-2, but on the called second strike Nunez stole second with little effort by the Jays to hold him close at first, a bit of a strange call at the time, but meaningless in the light of Vazquez’ subsequent walk to load the bases.
Dan Iasogna, who was behind the plate last night, has a long and unpleasant history with the Blue Jays. Based on what happened on the sixth pitch of the Vazquez at-bat, that history is not likely to go away any time soon. On a 2-2 pitch, after Vazquez fouled off the fifth pitch from Osuna, the hitter took an obvious third strike from Osuna. It was up and in, all right, but clearly by every graphing method available it was a strike. Except, of course, that no pitch is a strike until the umpire calls it a strike, and Iasogna flat missed the pitch that should have ended the game.
Instead, Vazquez walked, bringing the most dangerous Sox hitter to the plate, Brock Holt. How weird does that sound? On a 1-0 pitch Holt singled through the left side scoring Devers from third. Third-base coach Carlos Febles waved Nunez on to the plate, carrying the lead run for Boston.
But recall that it was now Curtis Granderson in left, rather than Teoscar Hernandez. The veteran charged the ball and fired a strike to the plate to nail Nunez so easily that he didn’t even slide for the third out, sending the game to the bottom of the ninth.
Joe Kelly came out again for Boston and quickly retired Kendrys Morales hitting for Pearce and Russell Martin. Pillar extended the inning and raised hopes by bouncing a double past the diving Devers (hey, that’s a thing!) for a double into the corner. But Kelly induced Diaz to fly out to right, sending the game to extra innings.
With Osuna more than done at 31 pitches John Gibbons called on Tyler Clippard to try to hold the fort for Toronto. Clippard started badly, walking Mookie Betts on another questionable call by Iasogna on a 3-2 changeup down and in that seemed to be on the black. But he finished well. Really, really well. Alex Cora tried to start Betts and on the fifth pitch he got a terrific jump but Benintendi had to foul off the pitch to protect the plate. Benintendi finally flied out to right on 3-2, setting up Hanley Ramirez, who ended any suspense by smacking the first pitch on the ground right at Diaz, who started an easy 6-4-3 double play.
Cora pulled a bit of a surprise on the Jays for the bottom of the tenth by bringing his closer Craig Kimbrel into a tie game in extra innings on the road. Speculation by the broadcasters was that since Kimbrel hadn’t had much work Cora wanted to get him into the game.
Too bad for Cora. Too bad for Kimbrel.
Not that Kimbrel didn’t strike out leadoff hitter Devon Travis. Oh yes he did, caught him looking, he did. But he didn’t get by Curtis Granderson, oh no.
Grandy, fast becoming a fan favourite in Toronto for his enthusiasm and his professional focus, had never had a hit off Kimbrel, going 0 for 5 lifetime. Grandy took the first pitch from Kimbrel. Of course, he always takes the first pitch, but it was way low and inside anyway. The second pitch was closer but still high and inside.
So of course Kimbrel had to come in with a fast ball. He made it too good, though, and Curtis Granderson hammered it off the facing of the fourth deck in right to win the game.
If Curtis Granderson was already a fan favourite before last night’s game, imagine what he is now: outfield assist to stop Boston from scoring the lead run in the ninth, walkoff homer in the tenth.
Well, these guys aren’t so tough, are they?
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