If you think you’d like to be a big league baseball player, maybe you should think twice about the work and travel regimen before signing on for the big bucks.
I don’t know how your work week went, but this is what the Jays’ last week looked like. Monday they arrived in the Twin Cities for a three game series with the Minnesota Twins. They played the Twins Monday night, Tuesday night, and Wednesday afternoon.
After Wednesday’s 4-0 loss to the Twins’ star pitching prospect Fernando Romero, the team flew to Cleveland for the Thursday doubleheader that was scheduled to make up for the two games lost to rain in April in Cleveland.
As is usually the case, those rainouts in April sabotaged a much-coveted off day for both teams; both were available, decreed the poo-bahs of Major League Baseball, so play a doubleheader they shall!
In the face of another round of threatening weather that almost caused Toronto’s management to preemptively cancel the Wednesday night flight to Cleveland, the teams waited out a rain delay of nearly two hours past the 1:10 p.m. scheduled start time.
When they finally started, it was the beginning of a wild and crazy game that went eleven innings and was decided by a grand slam by Yanvergis Solarte, leading to a final score of 13 to 11 for the Blue Jays.
The second game started at 8:30 in the evening; it was a game in which Cleveland’s Triple A pitchers easily outpitched Toronto’s Triple A pitchers, to the tune of an ugly 13-4 loss for the Blue Jays, and a game that ended at 11:42 p.m., ten and a half hours after the doubleheader was supposed to start.
After the game—we’re still talking about Toronto’s travel schedule here—the Jays boarded a night flight to Tampa Bay, arriving there sometime close to dawn, one presumes, in order to bunk in and get some rest before the start of the weekend’s three game series with the Tampa Bay Rays.
As for the anomaly in my headline for today’s piece, it’s explained thus: Wednesday’s loss to the Twins followed two Blue Jays’ wins in Minnesota, so they won that series. When you combine the doubleheader split with the result of the only game played in the original weekend series, an 8-4 Toronto win, then Toronto wins this Cleveland “series” as well.
Because the games have come hot and heavy this week even for yer humble scribe, I’m going to treat the three games just played all in one piece, and I’m going to abandon my usual in-depth analysis of how it all went down, just to touch on certain highlights, and notable moments and issues.
Questions abounded on both sides of the pitching matchup for Wednesday’s matinee closer in Minneapolis-St. Paul. For the the Blue Jays, it was one big one: whither Marcus Stroman? Would he avoid the one-inning beatdown that’s plagued him for much of the year? Other questions were, would he finally start to be more economical with his pitches? Would he avoid the solid contact he’s experienced lately? Would he get deeper into a game for the first time all season? The answers to these questions were yes, yes, not really, and definitely yes, notwithstanding that yet again he was unable to spearhead a victory for his team.
Just to get the numbers out of the way, Stroman went seven full innings and gave up two runs on six hits with one walk and five strikeouts, on just 99 pitches. Unexpectedly, it was one of the most solid and complete starts we’ve seen from any of the Jays’ starters all season.
He gave up a run in the first and a run in the third and that was it, so he avoided the big inning problem that’s been so troubling for him.
As for the solid contact, in the first two innings he had three balls hit solidly against him. Leadoff hitter Brian Dozier hit one to the warning track in centre in the first, and Eduardo Escobar hit one to deep centre in the second before Eddie Rosario hit one the opposite way and way deep to left centre for a one-run Minnesota lead.
By contrast, the Twins scored their second run in the third with only one solid hit. Stroman gave up a leadoff infield hit off the glove of Yanvergis Solarte at third by Gregorio Petit, who stole second, but had to stop at third on the only good hit, a line single to right by old pro Joe Mauer. Petit finally scored on Max Kepler’s groundout to first.
After that Stroman stayed in charge. He gave up a base hit in the fourth, got a double-play ball after an error in the fifth, then gave up a hit, and stranded a leadoff double in the sixth. His seventh inning was a ten-pitch three-up, three-down, rounding back on his first inning of work.
So, the only thing wrong with Stroman’s start is that he didn’t win it because Toronto couldn’t score, which raises the question of Minnesota’s starter, Fernando Romero, who was a callup, the Twins’ top pitching prospect, and was making his much-anticipated major league debut against the Blue Jays.
For the Twins the only question was whether Romero was the real deal, and based on this outing, things look pretty good for him, and for the future of the Minnesota rotation. He has a good, heavy fast ball and a nasty sinking slider.
As debuts go for rookie starters, he wasn’t exactly lights out, but he was effective when he had to be, and this seemed to be one of those days when his opponents weren’t up to much, no matter who was pitching.
Romero went five and two thirds innings of scoreless ball, giving up 4 hits and 3 walks, with 5 strikeouts, on 97 pitches. That’s the impressive part.
The less impressive part was that he had to work his way out of trouble in three different innings. He had two runners on in the second, fourth, and fifth innings. Twice he faced Kendrys Morales with two on and struck him out with his slider, showing that he can utilize a scouting report with the best of them.
So did Fernando Romero look like the saviour of the pitching staff that the Twins are looking for, especially in the absence of the injured Erwin Santana? Not completely. Did he look like he’ll be a very good major league pitcher, sooner rather than later? Absolutely.
One Jay hitter who had his number was Kevin Pillar, who went two for two with a walk against him, singling in the second and fourth, and walking in the sixth, the walk which prompted manager Paul Molitor to call it a day on Romero.
As for those two singles by Pillar, sadly his extra-base-hit streak came to an end at ten in the second inning when he hit a measly single instead of a double or better. Still, with the two base hits he ended up the day hitting .324, and I’m starting to wonder if the Pillar nay-sayers might end up not having much to chew on this year, as the “different” Kevin Pillar seems to be developing some real staying power.
The Twins’ bullpen followed Romero with a solid three and a third innings of relief, as Toronto showed no ability to mount any kind of a rally against Trevor Hildenberger, Zach Duke, Addison Reed, and Fernando Rodney.
Aaron Loup had his first rough outing in some time, but it wasn’t like the Twins clobbered him in the eighth inning. The first two hitters reached against him with soft Texas Leaguers, and only Robbie Grossman with a line single to load the bases hit the ball hard off him. Loup gave up a third Minnesota run then on a sacrifice fly, and the fourth one, also charged to him, scored on a bases-loaded walk by Carlos Ramirez, who finished out the inning.
So the Twins pitched well enough and Toronto didn’t hit hardly at all except for Pillar, and the result was that the Blue Jays had to put away their brooms for another sweep opportunity down the road, pack quickly, and head off for Cleveland, where the rain clouds were threatening once again.
On Thursday afternoon, the weather gods helped the MLB schedulers avert a huge disaster by parting those clouds, albeit a little late, and allowing the Blue Jays and Cleveland to complete their very long, and very messy, doubleheader.
Sometimes life intrudes on baseball, even for me, and Thursday was one of those times. My wife and I had planned to drive all the way across town during rush hour to attend our five-year-old grandson’s spring concert at school, preceded by a light supper at his parents’ home.
We’d planned to leave the house about 4:00, so I thought I’d get to see most of the first game of the doubleheader before leaving. Silly me. That one hour and 53 minute rain delay for the start of game one left me able to watch only the first couple of innings.
This meant that I had to listen to/follow the rest of that crazy, crazy game with Mike Wilner and Ben Wagner on the car radio, and by surreptitiously watching Gameday at appropriate, or sometimes inappropriate, moments during our visit.
The good thing was that we were well in the car and on the way home when Solarte broke up the game in the eleventh inning, and I was able to hear Wilner’s excited home-run call live.
The bad thing, the really bad thing, the really, really bad thing, was that between the rain delay and the long first game I was able to watch the whole second game, every excruciating moment of it.
So the last play that I saw live of the first game was actually Yanvergis Solarte’s face plant at third base in the third inning. He really took one for the team, that crazy Solarte. Toronto was already leading 2-0 on Russell Martin’s second-inning homer, which cashed Solarte’s first hit of the day/night, a leadoff single to left.
Solarte had led off the third for the second inning in a row with a line shot the opposite way to left while hitting left off the right-handed Cleveland starter Carlos Carrasco. Carrasco, by the way, looked like he’s not quite ready for prime time after being on the DL. He sure didn’t dominate the Toronto lineup.
This time Solarte ended up on second with a double. Then, with one out and Kevin Pillar on behind him with a walk, Solarte advanced successfully from second to third when Martin flied out to centre fielder Brad Zimmer.
It was Solarte’s awkward slide into third that tore up his upper lip, requiring the training staff to attend to him, and leaving him with a big plaster-y-type bandage on his upper lip that looked like a milk ‘stache.
There must have been some magic in that old bandage he wore (come on, sing along with me here) because from that point on Solarte continued on what turned out to be the tear of all tears. He collected three more hits after the single and double to left, to go five for six with a walk. Plus, he piled up six RBIs, two on a two-out fourth-inning single, and of course the four on the walk-off grand slam in the eleventh.
And yes, Solarte did have base hits in all three of the second, third, and fourth innings.
And yes, he did set a Toronto record with eight base hits in the doubleheader, and joined Josh Donaldson—wait for it, he’s up for discussion in this piece too—in tying a major league record of a team having two players hit a home run in each end of a doubleheader.
So then there’s Donaldson, who made his surprise return to action for the doubleheader, when everybody but Donaldson was expecting him to join the team in Tampa Bay for the weekend.
He of course also had a great game of it, going 3 for 7 with a game-tying home run off Nick Goody in the sixth inning, after Cleveland’s horrendous seven-run rally in the fourth had wiped out Toronto’s exciting five-run early lead.
And yes, I admit that I’d just finished grousing to my wife in the car that I thought Donaldson had come back too soon to play in Cleveland, when he hit his RBI double in the Toronto fourth. This embarrassing turn of events led to much mirth and jocularity from my wife over the rest of the evening, whenever Donaldson’s name came up.
Really must remember not to make dire predictions out loud, especially not within the hearing of my wife, who is sometimes merciless.
So Donaldson’s back in full force, and we don’t know whether it was his competing presence at third, or the magical bandage that caused Solarte to go on his tear, but whatever caused it, we’ll take it.
The other issue I’d like to address about game one is the Toronto pitching. Jaime Garcia, who’d looked awfully good for the first three innings, suffered from another one of those meltdown innings in the fourth that we’ve seen far too many times from Toronto’s starters.
After the Cleveland seven-run fourth, it would be up to the bullpen to keep Toronto in the game. After all, after four innings the score was only 7-5, and there was a long way to go. A long, long way to go.
After Garcia’s early exit in the fourth, it was student body to the pitching mound for the Blue Jays. Danny Barnes struggled and gave up a run of his own before closing out the fourth.
Barnes was followed by John Axford, Tyler Clippard, Ryan Tepera, Seung-Hwan Oh, Tim Mayza, and Robert Osuna.
The big Canadian John Axford, who’s been nothing short of a revelation so far this year, was fantastic following Barnes. He retired seven batters in a row—no mean feat in and of itself against these Cleveland hitters—and did it on only 18 pitches.
Of the parade of relievers, only the usually redoubtable Ryan Tepera, and Roberto Osuna, who tends to lose focus when there’s no save on the line, were touched up by Cleveland.
After Toronto had scored a pair of runs in the seventh and eighth innings to retake the lead at 9-7, Tepera allowed Cleveland to tie it up in their eighth, giving up a solo home run to Francisco Lindor, and then an unearned run that scored as the result of a very embarrassing 3-base error by Solarte, whom circumstances managed to place at first base, a not-great fit for him, by the eighth inning.
And Osuna gave back two of the four Solarte grand-slam runs in the bottom of the eleventh before closing out the game by fanning pinch-hitter Yonder Alonso and getting Jason Kipnis to fly out to centre to end the game with the tying run, for god’s sake, after all this, at the plate.
Then there was game two of the doubleheader, which I did watch. Oy, did I watch that one. Ugh.
Since this was a game in which Cleveland’s minor league pitchers were better than Toronto’s minor league pitchers, and that’s pretty well the whole story of the game, we need to address the fact that the “traditional doubleheader” is simply not a good fit for baseball the way it is played, or rather managed, now.
The traditional doubleheader, and I’ve only heard the term this year, for some reason, is the type of doubleheader that used to be part of the regular schedule. The two games would be played consecutively, with about a twenty-minute break in between.
They might have been scheduled as a day doubleheader, usually on Sundays, with the first game starting at the normal time of 1:00. Alternatively, twilight or twilight/night doubleheaders, usually slotted for a 5:00 start, would sometimes be slotted for Friday nights.
Obviously, there are no longer any scheduled doubleheaders. Team managements are completely unwilling to give up the revenue from even a single game date.
So doubleheaders are now utilized only as a last resort to make up for rained-out games. As in Thursday’s twin bill, for which the MLB schedulers utilized a mutual off-day to slot in the two games to make up for the weekend games that were rained out on April 15thand 16th.
The traditional doubleheader runs completely counter to the contemporary practice in utilizing pitchers, both starters and relievers.
There are virtually no complete games any more. A starting pitcher has done a good job if he has finished six innings and kept his team close. The average for all starting pitchers in major league baseball (an educated guess here) would be about five and a third innings, five and two thirds tops.
That means that on a daily basis a team’s bullpen has to provide from three to four innings of work. Combine this with the fact that most teams carry only seven relievers, and there are five starters.
Allied to this is the disappearance for all practical purposes of the long man, the bullpen guy who can throw two or even three innings, and fill in as an extra starter. With the need for the bullpen to cover so many innings effectively on a daily basis, the guy who isn’t a one-inning specialist has a lot of trouble finding a spot for himself on a roster.
The upshot of all this is plain and simple: teams can’t possibly use the pitchers needed for two games on the same day that are either long or high-scoring, and hope to continue playing the rest of the week.
So MLB has come up with a solution for a problem that it created: teams can activate a twenty-sixth player for doubleheaders. Almost inevitably, this player is a minor league starter who will take the start in one of the games. In other words, it’s a roll of the dice. And woe betide the team whose minor league starter has a short night after a long first game.
So that’s what happened to Toronto in the second game of the doubleheader: Joe Biagini was average, or, worse, typical for him in recent starts for Toronto, and Adam Plutko was outstanding for Cleveland. Case closed.
But it was close until the fifth inning, in fact it was tied 2-2, but Biagini had wavered and struggled with his control from the start. In the fifth inning he hit the wall, and hit it very hard. Cleveland scored nine runs, count ’em, nine, in the fifth inning off Biagini and his successor on the mound, Luis Santos, who had no more success than Biagini.
In fact, it’s part of the cruel calculation of managing such games that John Gibbons, after Santos had given up five of the nine Cleveland runs on 31 pitches to get out of the fifth, was sent back out to give up another run in the sixth before finishing up at 51 pitches for one and two-thirds innings.
No way was Gibbie going to waste another member of his real bullpen on such a lost cause. And of course Santos’ reward for his appearance in the game was a one-way ticket back to Buffalo.
There’s nothing sadder in baseball, I think, than a fringe pitcher, or a minor league callup, labouring away in the late innings of a blowout. It’s a chance for him to shine, of course, and make his case for a job, but if it doesn’t go well, there he is out there, getting pummelled or walking everybody, and everybody in the ball park knows that there’s no one warming up in the bullpen.
And short of injury, there won’t be.
After Santos was wrung out, there were still six more outs to be gotten, and this time the sacrificial lamb was Carlos Ramirez, who had been brilliant, both at Buffalo and at the end of the year in Toronto, last season.
But Ramirez couldn’t find the plate.
After getting the first out Ramirez walked the bases full and then bounced one while striking out Tyler Naquin for the second out, allowing Jose Ramirez to score from third with Cleveland’s final run.
Our Ramirez, Carlos, threw 28 pitches in that seventh inning, more than enough for a reliever, but there he was, back out on the mound for the eighth. He held Cleveland off the board this time, but gave up a fourth walk and his only hit. He needed 27 pitches this time, for a total of 55.
Joe Biagini 86 pitches. Luis Santos 51 pitches. Carlos Ramirez 55 pitches. 192 pitches total. Enough for an efficient starter to throw two complete games. Look up some of Roy Halladay’s complete games and see. Or Mickey Lolich and Bob Gibson in the fabled 1968 World Series between the Tigers and the Cardinals.
So in the second game of Thursday’s doubleheader Cleveland manager Terry Francona and Toronto manager John Gibbons rolled the dice for starting pitchers. Francona, with Adam Plutko, rolled sevens, or whatever’s good in Craps. Gibbons rolled snake-eyes.
For what it’s worth, Adam Plutko threw seven and a third innings, gave up three runs on six hits, walked nobody, struck out six, and threw 104 pitches.
And the Toronto Blue Jays dragged their tired asses out of Cleveland in the middle of the night for their date with the Rays on Friday evening, with not even their spirits to buoy them up after the embarrassing second-game slaughter.
And Joe Biagini, Luis Santos, and Carlos Ramirez headed back to Buffalo, with nothing to show for their quick trip to Cleveland but some terrible numbers in their major league statistics. And a day or so of pro-rated major league pay.
Oh, and Plutko? He was back to Triple A after the game as well.
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