It’s easy enough to pinpoint the exact moment when Toronto’s hopes of winning tonight’s rubber match of the current three-game series with the Los Angeles Angels went down the drain.
Going into the top of the sixth inning, Jay Happ had been masterful in pursuit of his eighteenth win against only three losses. He had shut out the Angels over five innings, with two hits, both in the first inning, no walks, and six strikeouts while throwing only 61 pitches. Starting with the C.J. Cron double play ball in the top of the first, after he had given up singles to—who else?—Mike Trout and Albert Pujols, Happ had retired thirteen batters in a row.
But everyone has the odd rocky inning, and the sixth started out that way for Happ, with the eight-nine-one hitters coming up. Kaleb Cowart unleashed on an outside first-pitch fast ball and rifled it the opposite way down the right field line, where it one-hopped into the seats for a double. Happ must have been rattled, because he walked Gregorio Petit, the second baseman hitting ninth, on a three-one pitch. This turned the lineup over to left-handed hitting Kole Calhoun, the leadoff hitter, and brought us to the crucial moment in the game. Calhoun lashed a hard grounder on a three-two pitch right back at Happ. The replays from behind the plate were excruciating to watch. Happ’s landing foot hitting the ground, toes pointing toward third. The ball smacking off the outside of his left foot and careening sharply across the third base line. Meanwhile, and this is the excruciating part, at least for those of us not named Jay Happ, who weren’t actually “feeling his pain” as they say, you can clearly see that the ball was heading directly for Troy Tulowitzki, who was standing exactly one step away from second base. Had the ball not hit Happ’s foot (and is there a game in which Happ, a big, strong-looking guy, is not made to feel like the target in an arcade game at least once?) it was a dead easy shortstop unassisted to first double play, and we would have been looking at two outs, Cowart on third, and still in possession of a 2-0 lead.
But the ball never got to Tulo. Happ received attention from the trainer, and decided he was okay to go. Pain-wise, that may have been the case, but command-wise, no. How nice to be cruising along and suddenly have to face Mike Trout with the bases loaded and nobody out. Trout singled through the left side, which seems to be the Angels’ preferred method of attack, knocking in two and tying the game. With Pujols up and runners on first and second, there came the secondary dagger that signed Happ’s fate. Pujols, you see, can’t run. At all. They use an egg timer to clock his home to first, and a sun dial to time his first to third. The best hope now was a double play ball, a hope that lasted one pitch. Happ spiked an outside fast ball on that first one, Russell Martin tried to backhand it, it clanked away from him and the runners moved up. No more double play ball. After going to one and two, Pujols opportunistically grounded a single up the middle to score Calhoun, Trout stopping at third, and Manager John Gibbons emerging from the dugout to stop the bleeding. Happ’s quest for win number 18, that had started so well, was done.
Joe Biagini came in to face C.J. Cron, who grounded into a 4-6-3 double play that scored Trout with the Angels’ fourth run. Andrelton Simmons lined out to Zeke Carrera in right to end the inning.
Ashes and dust. That’s all that was left of a game that had augured to be positive in every way, from the fact that it was Happ’s turn on the mound, to the fact that his opponent was the former superstar now mediocre nibbler Jered Weaver, to the fact that this game marked the eagerly-awaited return of Jose Bautista to the lineup, inserted at the leadoff spot and serving, as he apparently will for a while, as the designated hitter. This does not bode well, by the way, for Justin Smoak, who won’t see much time at first base as long as Edwin Encarnacion has to play in the field to accommodate Bautista at DH.
After the Jays’ infield turned the double play to end the Angels’ threat in the top of the first, Bautista strode to the plate as the throngs in the TV Dome, closed tonight because of, well, rain, roared their welcomes and waved their signs. Bautista being Bautista, you just knew that he would either strike out or hit one out, and he fulfilled the prediction . . . by striking out with a mighty cut at a puny 84 mph four-seam fast ball from Weaver. Are you kidding me? That’s an R.A. Dickey fast ball, and Weaver doesn’t even throw a knuckle ball to compensate. Josh Donaldson followed with a grounder to the shortstop on an 81.5 mph changeup, and I’m not sure how Pitch Tracker can tell the difference between Weaver’s four-seamer and his change.
But then Weaver cranked it up a notch to 84 .9 for the fast ball, which got it into Edwin’s preferred batting-practice range, and he spanked one to left that one-hopped the wall for a double. The very hot Russell Martin drew a base on balls to bring Troy Tulowitzki to the plate. But this time Weaver went to the curve ball, so slow you expected it to stop and back up into his hand again, on a two-two pitch, and Tulo flailed at it for the third out.
Now I want to depart from the strict chronology of the details of this game to lay before you a very dark thought that occurred to me as I was trying to come to grips with the outcome of tonight’s game. We’ve been so happy with our starting pitching this year, “best in the American League”, and all that. We’ve been especially happy that the quality of the starters has helped to compensate for the obvious fall-off in offensive effectiveness that the Blu Jays have displayed the entire year. With the pitching so good, who needs ten runs a game?
The clinker in our thinking was that we never considered that the pitching might falter, even just for a little while, one turn of the rotation, a few starts, two guys getting arm weary at the same time. We never really thought, “where will we be then?” But now we’ve had three sub-par, that is to say not up to their very high standards, starts, two for Marco Estrada and one for Jay Happ. And what have we seen as a result? Sluggish, dismal failure. The starting pitchers coughed up leads, and the hitters, for whatever reason, did very little to capitalize on their few chances to break out and come from behind. Losing eight to two and six to three to the basement team in the AL West serves as a dire warning that we had better patch up and resolve our hitting problems, because there may be more times ahead when the pitching alone can’t carry us. The Jays were supposedly built on power and defence, with adequate pitching. They have succeeded up to now on excellent pitching and defence, with barely adequate hitting. They are, in short, teetering on the brink of disaster if they don’t start bashing the ball.
Let’s consider now their performance against tonight’s Angel starter, Jered Weaver. At the creaky age of 33, Weaver’s best days are definitely behind him, which might give pause to those who think, for example, that players like Mike Trout and Bryce Harper, and pitchers like Noah Syndergaard and Jacob de Grom who have burned very bright very early will continue to burn brightly for the fifteen or so years that we expect of the very greatest players. Weaver, who as recently as 2014 put up numbers like 18-9, 3.59, 213.1 innings, 169 strikeouts and only 65 walks, this year is 9-11 and 5.31, through 144 innings, with 73 strikeouts and 40 walks. How he is pitching tells an even more complete story. According to the pie chart they love to put up on the broadcast, he is throwing equal numbers of five different pitches, fast ball, changeup, cutter, slider, curve ball. And as I mentioned, if you put his fast ball stitch to stitch to R.A. Dickey’s, it’s a dead heat.
After escaping the first inning by bamboozling Tulo to strand a couple of runners, Weaver walked the tightrope again in the second, though to be fair he had a little fielding help, or lack of same, from his second baseman, Petit. After Kevin Pillar grounded out leading off, Melvin Upton, who’s starting to make serious contact, and would go three for four tonight with two doubles, ripped one into the left field corner for his first double. Zeke Carrera did his job to move Upton to third by hitting a right side grounder, but Petit just plain booted it, and Carrera was safe, a bonus. Weaver then threw four straight balls to Darwin Barney, still playing second for Travis because of the latter’s injured knuckle, but hitting ninth tonight because of Bautista’s return. This turned the lineup over to Bautista, and with the bases loaded and only one out the buzz grew again in the stadium. This time Bautista hit the second pitch, hard, but right at Kole Calhoun in medium-deep right for a sacrifice fly scoring Upton for the Jays’ first run. Donaldson also hit the ball hard on a 2-0 pitch, but again, lined it right at Mike Trout in centre.
So, two innings, one run, two doubles, two walks, and four left on base. Was this the start of something big, or same-old same-old? Well, Weaver retired nine straight from there on, bringing Donaldson back to the plate with two out and nobody on in the fifth and the run of putouts came to an end when he pounded one into the airline company bar in centre, making a girl in a green blouse very excited. I think she almost caught it. Happ had a two-run lead, which looked pretty good going to the sixth, but you know how that turned out.
Weaver, on the other hand, got a couple of outs in the Jays’ sixth before getting into trouble of his own and having to give it up. That was the difference between Happ’s sixth and Weaver’s: the Angels’ hurler got two outs before he ran into trouble, leaving reliever Jose Valdez in a pretty tight spot, but with only one out to get. Once again it was the Jays’ bottom of the order that got things going. With two outs Pillar stroked a single to left that was followed by Upton’s single to centre, advancing Pillar to third. Upton then stole second. Regardless of how the game ended up, this duo of Pillar and Upton towards the end of the lineup looks promising, with their combination of the ability to hit to all fields, and speed. With first base open, Zeke Carrera worked a walk in a great at-bat. Immediately down 0-2, he worked his way to a 2-2 count and then fouled off three pitches before taking balls three and four. This brought Mike Scioscia out of the Angels’ dugout, Barney to the plate, and Valdez into the game. Mr. “he’s toast” Jered Weaver had gone five and two thirds innings, given up two runs, only one earned, five hits, three walks, and struck out four on 98 pitches. Scufflin’, but good scufflin’.
On a one-one count, Barney hit the ball hard on the ground, right up the middle, but of course the shift was on, and it was right at the second baseman Petit to end the inning and the last real threat for the Jays. When the Angels immediately pushed across two runs on Biagini in the top of the seventh, the first runs he’s given up in an Ice Age or two, the frost was on the pumpkin, the wind went out of the Jays’ sails, and I can’t think of any more clichés to say it was over for the home team, despite scoring another run in the ninth on doubles by Upton and Bautista, giving Jose a one for four, an extra base hit, and two RBIs in his first game back.
Finally, like everyone else in Canada, let’s talk of Brett Cecil, though there’s not much to say that hasn’t been said, except that John Gibbons needs to divest himself of the notion that Cecil can be an important part of this bullpen without something major changing. As I said, the final blow to the Jays in this game came in the seventh, when Joe Biagini got in trouble, but left the game with some hope of keeping the score at 4-2. His only real fault in the inning was giving up a leadoff single to Jett Bandy. Nick Buss came up and did what we’ve all been looking for all season: bunted away from the shift toward third. Josh Donaldson didn’t have a chance on it. Kaleb Cowart tried to bunt them over, but Biagini popped him up, catching it himself. Then he got Gregorio Petit on a short foul fly to right. This brought up the left-handed Kole Calhoun, and of course brought Gibbie out to match him up with Brett Cecil.
Thanks to Gregg Zaun for this next info, and yes, I know Gregg’s never seen a move by Gibbie that he couldn’t criticize, but it turns out that Calhoun actually hits better off lefties than righties! So of course it would have been, might have been, fine to leave Biagini in there. No need to worry about Biagini after 21 pitches if he’s fresh; he’s strong as a horse, and a career-long starter in the minors, to boot. But, Gibbie’s Gibbie, Cecil’s Cecil, and Calhoun walked on a three-one pitch to load the bases for—wait for it—Mike Trout, not to mention Joaquin Benoit. Trout drove another line drive to the left of a diving Donaldson, and the Angels had two add-ons. Now, here’s my advice to Gibbie: forget the lefty/lefty unless it’s David Ortiz, and don’t send Aaron Loup back down. Wait for the next blow-out, one way or another, and put Cecil in at the beginning of an inning and let him pitch his heart out. Do it again. If he doesn’t come around after that, it’s time to go shopping.
The woeful Twins are in this weekend, Liriano gets his Friday night start against them, and the Jays can still go four of six on the bottom-feeders, but they need a sweep to do it. One game at a time.
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