Among the positives that I saw in yesterday’s smashing 15-8 Toronto romp over the Minnesota Twins was that the ravaging of the Minnesota bullpen in the first of a three-game set would likely have consequences for the Twins down the line. Today’s stirring and improbable come-from-behind Blue Jay win can be traced directly to the fact that the game turned completely when Ervin Santana, after a terrific start, ran out of gas in the sixth inning, and the bullpen was helpless to protect his fine effort.
But on a day when the Jays were weakened by a series of incomprehensible lineup decisions made by Manager John Gibbons, it was not just the inability of the visitors’ bullpen to bar the door that led to victory, but also some very real individual efforts on the part of the Jays who were in the lineup. The titanic battles to stay alive at the plate waged by Edwin Encarnacion and Josh Donaldson, each followed by a run-producing hit, are obvious candidates for plays of the game. But beyond them it was the grit of Kevin Pillar, who refused to concede defeat, the hustle of Melvin Upton, who maximized the gift handed to him by Twins’ rookie Max Kepler, and the fierce enthusiasm of that aging warrior of the mound Jason Grilli to rally his mates to victory, that all played their part in one of the most dramatic, if not artistic, games of the season.
There. I’ve written two whole paragraphs about today’s game without mentioning Marcus Stroman’s name, or using the by-now clichéd meme of “which Marcus is it today?” Yes, he gave up five runs on nine hits, three of them doubles, but he fought and fought, and finally got his groove for the last two of his six innings, and hands up, all of you who thought Marcus wouldn’t even finish five today. Almost everybody. I thought so. Most of the six singles he gave up were ground balls snaking through the infield; with luck he could have been cruising along with little damage done. So let’s not fret about Marcus today. He did his job, even if the Twins’ hitters didn’t make it easy for him.
During the broadcast last night, Buck Martinez cited San Francisco Giants’ manager Bruce Bochy’s statement that if somebody hits a home run for him, he will always put him in the next day’s lineup. Well, none of that superstitious crap for our resident over-thinker Manager John Gibbons. Last night Josh Donaldson, Justin Smoak, Russell Martin, and Darwin Barney all hit homers for the Jays, but only Donaldson was in the lineup today. Oh, there were reasons for sitting the others. Sure there were. Martin would be catching a day game after a night game. Bautista needed to DH because playing right field last night was just so draining. And we had to make room for the heroic return of Devon Travis, so scratch Barney. And Smoak? Well, no big deal, he wouldn’t have two games like that again, now would he?
So, what to do? Here’s what: Martin’s been on a tear. He gets Sunday off because Dickey’s pitching. Start him behind the dish today and give him three at bats, which might be enough to turn a game around, and rest him for the last few innings. As long as he had the go-ahead from the trainer and the Big Guy himself, give Bautista another start in right. It seems to me that he runs as much risk of hurting himself again by running the bases as he does fielding. This opens up the DH/first base option for Edwin and Smoakie. Finally, and I know I’m as the voice of one crying in the wilderness, but rest Travis’ knuckle for another day and see if Barney stays hot. If nothing else, he’s not likely to make a crucial error in a tight situation, a statement we cannot make with as much of a degree of certainty about Travis.
So, Thole caught today—got two hits, to his credit—Bautista was the DH, Travis played, and Smoak sat. This is not playing a hot hand, and the Jays responded with very little offensive pizzaz against Ervin Santana. Lucky for Gibbie that the heroics of the above-mentioned notables pulled his frying pan out of the fire!
There’s a curious connection between Ervin Santana and the Blue Jays that emerged when the Jays were negotiating with him as a free agent during spring training in 2014. I’m not sure why it didn’t happen, but the Jays were actually pretty close to signing him. They had an agreement in principle but it never got done. One of the drivers on the Jays’ side to get it done was that the veteran players on the team, led, no doubt, by Jose Bautista and R.A. Dickey, got together and agreed to offer to restructure their own agreements with the team in order to free up money to put on the table for Santana. Essentially, what they would have done was extend the period of deferred payments written into the contracts, so that the team would have more money in the till each year, but the contract payouts would continue for longer. It didn’t happen in the end, but it’s a story that speaks both to the drive of certain Blue Jay players to create winning conditions here, and it also speaks to the respect that Ervin Santana had among his peers as a quality starter.
Santana’s performance for the Twins today serves as proof that he still deserves respect as a quality starter. Through five innings, the Jays were only able to touch him up for one run in the fourth; they had two hits, he walked two, struck out four, and faced 18 batters, three over the minimum. The run in the fourth came on the heels of his second walk, to Edwin Encarnacion with one out. After Troy Tulowitzki flew out to right for the second out, Michael Saunders came through with a double into the right field corner. Edwin, getting a very good jump with two outs, scored from first.
In the meantime, Santana’s mates had built up a five-run lead on Marcus Stroman. They picked up one in the first strictly on the legs of leadoff man Brian Dozier, who singled to right, stole second, alertly took third when Joe Mauer flied out to left field, and scored on a wild pitch by Stroman, who was less than pleased with his own contribution to the proceedings.
Stroman’s little walk down in the tunnel seemed to have helped him settle down for a while. He retired the side in the second, and escaped from a jam in the third created by two straight base hits to lead off by getting a double play ball. Then in the fourth the ground balls that he prides himself on inducing betrayed him totally. He didn’t help himself very much when he walked the leadoff hitter, Trevor Plouffe.
Then we had a demonstration of the truth of the coaching philosophy of the most successful T-Ball coach in Ontario baseball history. For those of you who think that “success” in T-Ball is a contradiction in terms, involving as it does little kids, you haven’t seen it played at the highest level. If there’s one thing competitive-level t-ballers can do, it’s catch balls hit in the air. With five outfielders, a kid who can hit deep fly balls will almost always see them disappear into someone’s glove for an out. The goal is to keep the ball on the ground to make things happen. To the dean of T-Ball coaches, a bullet liner that was caught was just another out, and therefore a mistake. I can still hear his monotonous sing-song from the other side of the field as he encouraged his hitters: “On the ground, go round and round!”
And that’s what the Twins did. One walk. Four base hits, all on the ground. Two of them doubles, one inside the bag at third, the other at first. It was like watching a horrible endless loop of precisely-placed balls bouncing by or between fielders. By the end of the inning, the Twins had a five-nothing lead, and if Stroman was mad after wild-pitching home a run in the first, he must have been livid after the fourth. But to his credit, after giving up a ground-rule double to Max Kepler to lead off the fifth, he retired six hitters in a row, and could have gone another inning if it weren’t for his pitch count, which had reached 100 by the end of the sixth.
By the time he left, the Jays had climbed back into it, via the run in the bottom of the fourth, and two on an Edwin Encarnacion home run. At the end of six, the score was five-three, and Stroman must have had some hope that his team would come all the way back and get him off the hook for the loss.
The Blue Jays did just that, and how they did it is quite a story in itself. But first the Twins just had to set the bar a little higher. Bo Schultz was the first man in after Stroman’s day was finished, having just arrived on the Buffalo shuttle, and he had a good start, getting the tough Brian Dozier to ground out to second, and catching Joe Mauer on a called third strike. With two outs, he walked Max Kepler to bring up Plouffe, the Twins’ cleanup hitter. If walking the leadoff hitter is the cardinal sin for a pitcher, walking someone on a three-two count with two outs and nobody on is a very serious venial sin. (Not raised Catholic? Okay: an unconfessed “mortal sin” condemns you to hell fire. Cardinal sins are the worst of these. An unconfessed “venial sin” will cost you a couple years or so in the lesser smoldering embers of Purgatory before the stain is fried out of you and you can proceed to the Pearly Gates.) Or, like penitent monks secretly flaying their backs with leather thongs, you can opt for immediate punishment for venial sin by serving up a gopher ball to the next guy, Trevor Plouffe, which restored the Twins’ four-run lead. Schultz got Eddie Rosario to ground out to first to end the inning, but the damage was done.
Santana should have been feeling pretty good about himself as he came out for the seventh, pitch count at just 89, and a re-established four-run lead to work with. But Kevin Pillar was the leadoff batter, and he wasn’t interested in how Santana might have been feeling. Pillar plays baseball like the human equivalent of the stubborn goat butting the dam in the song “High Hopes”. He doesn’t have enough sense to know when over’s over. A lot of emphasis, naturally, is put on RBIs and game-winning hits, but there should be some kind of statistic for rally-starting. Come on, analytics guys, get to work!
Four runs down, facing a good pitcher cruising, Pillar led off with an opposite-field base hit to right. Melvin Upton followed by grounding into a force-out at second. The only base-runner you’d rather have on the bases than Pillar is Upton, so this was good. Santana walked Devon Travis on a three-two count. Josh Thole, was has been having useful at-bats in his last few games, grounded out to first also on a full count for the second out, moving the runners up. Frustrated and nearing the end, Santana threw four straight balls to Jose Bautista to load the bases.
That was it for Santana. Manager Paul Molitor came out and got him, and brought in Ryan Pressly. After the first two games of the series, you had to know that going to the bullpen to replace the starter is the riskiest move the Twins can make. Ryan Pressly got the call, and Santana foolishly hung around on the bench to watch his lead get shaved to a single run. I know you can’t go too far with a tiring starter, but like the Jays earlier this year, I would contend that Molitor would have been better off taking his chances with Santana with the bases loaded and one out, since salvation was only one double-play ball away, and Santana had already thrown two today. No outs? Yes, yank him. One out? Not so sure . . .
What is sure is that Ryan Pressly, like pretty well everyone who came out of the Twins’ pullpen last night, wasn’t the answer. Josh Donaldson singled to right centre to score Upton and Travis, with a drive that normally he would have tried to stretch into a double, but with two outs he chose not to chance it. Bautista meanwhile ended up at third. With one stroke Donaldson had negated Plouffe’s insurance homer. With the next stroke, Edwin Encarnacion singled sharply through the left side to score Bautista and cut the lead to one. Troy Tulowitzki followed with one more line drive, but right at second baseman Brian Dozier for the third out.
With the Twins’ lead down to one, Manager Gibbons turned to the close-game scenario, and brought in Jason Grilli to pitch “his” eighth inning. Number one task on the agenda for Grilli would be to avoid getting Plouffed, to keep the lead at one. So it was ominous when Miguel Sano softly lined one into centre for a base hit, and I should mention that we haven’t seen Sano hit the ball hard yet in this series. But it turns out that Grilli was just fooling, the old tease, and he quickly got down to work. Eduardo Escobar fanned on a full count. Juan Centeno hit an easy fly to centre on an 0-2 pitch. Danny Santana fanned on a two-two pitch. Anyone who thinks veteran professional athletes aren’t emotional should have seen the excited frenzy displayed by Grilli as he stormed off the mound for the dugout. And anyone who thinks that a team can’t be picked up by one player’s fire and determination did not see the team’s reception of Grilli in the dugout. You could read the belief in pulling this one out on every face.
Having few options at this point, Molitor sent Pressly out again, this time to meet his own fate. A faint hope must have been felt on the Twins’ side when he induced Michael Saunders to pop out to short leading off. Little did they know that they were only two hitters away from disaster. With one out, Kevin Pillar was back at the plate, and what did we say about rally-starting? On a two-one pitch Pillar ripped one past the third baseman Plouffe and it bounded into the corner as Pillar reached second standing up, representing the tying run. That brought up Melvin Upton, and on the fourth pitch from Pressly he hit a blooper into left field that tied the game, and raced all the way around to score the lead run as Twins’ right fielder rookie Max Kepler rashly dove for the ball, had it bounce over his head, and frantically chased it back towards the wall, finally sliding toward it and kicking it away from centre fielder Eddie Rosario who was about to pick it up and throw it in when Kepler’s foot got there first. It went as a triple, because you can’t give an error for misjudgment, but an error was given to Kepler for allowing him to score, though they hadn’t much chance of getting him at the plate anyway.
Thus the saga of struggling through a losing season with a team of prospects and rookies. It ain’t easy, but somebody’s gotta do it. And if our boys are the beneficiaries, who’s to complain? It’s not that our guys didn’t deserve it, either. Grilli’s punchout eighth and numerous truly gritty at bats can’t be blamed on the opposition. Nor can the situation you put yourself in when you’ve worn out the other side’s bullpen.
Not having anyone better to put in at the moment, Molitor left Pressly in the game for one more hitter, but Josh Thole finished him off with a booming ground rule double to left. Taylor Rodgers came in to get Jose Bautista to line out to left to get the elusive third out.
The exciting late-inning heroics that turned the game around also put another save on the table for Roberto Osuna, who hadn’t pitched in a week, an occupational hazard with closers, who may not pitch for days because their team is mired in a losing streak, or conversely has been winning big. In Osuna’s case, he hadn’t pitched in a week because his team had either won big or lost big, not a nail-biter in a week of games. While such a break might make a reliever feel a bit rusty, Osuna didn’t seem affected at all, as he fanned Dozier, retired Mauer on a liner to second, and fanned Kepler for his 29th save in 32 chances this year. His record of most saves by a pitcher under the age of 22 just keeps growing.
For his very prodigious contribution, Jason Grilli became the pitcher of record when the Jays batted in the eighth, and scooped up the win as a result.
A contending team in Major League Baseball needs an abundance of talent, it needs to be brimming with confidence, and it needs not a little bit of luck. Today the Blue Jays combined generous portions of all three ingredients to keep ahead of the pack in the American League East.
R.A. Dickey goes to the hill tomorrow in search of the sweep and a 4-2 record on this abbreviated home stand, before departing for the important three-game series with Baltimore in Camden Yards that starts Monday night. Dionner Navarro will be added to the roster Monday, probably at the expense, temporarily, of Josh Thole. Does anyone doubt that he will be behind the plate Monday night to catch Marco Estrada?
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