Long Ball Stories

There’s a line from the Gilbert and Sullivan operetta The Gondoliers that comes to mind after today’s game. In its silly plot (trust me, G and S operettas all have silly plots) one of the flower-market girls has to put on a blindfold and is spun around by the other girls and dropped off by chance in front of one of the handsome gondoliers, who will then become her beau. When she takes the blindfold off and sees that he’s the one she’s been pining for, she exclaims, “It’s too much happiness!”

That’s my reaction to today’s walk-off 3-2 Toronto win over the Mariners for the Blue Jays’ fifth straight win, bringing their record back to within four games of .500 after that dismal start in April.

If I had actually seen Lunch Bucket Boy Kevin Pillar’s walk-off homer with two outs and nobody on in the bottom of the ninth off Seattle closer Edwin Diaz, I would probably not just have exclaimed my line, but croaked from excitement afterwards.

But, it was another conflicted day for me. On the weekend of an art-gallery show, Friday night is the opening and Sunday afternoon is the tear-down and pickup, not to mention the awarding of the “People’s Choice” award, voted on by the show’s attendees, and awarded to the painting that receives the most votes. I mentioned the voting in my Friday night game story.

We had to meet someone at the gallery at three, thus the truncated report to follow, which will address only the first part of the game, and then comment briefly on its outcome.

The wait from three to four, when we could take our paintings down and the award would be announced was intermittently filled with chatting with friends from the gallery, snacking, and checking in on the game—yes, the dorky DeWalts were in service again—and it was excruciating. I wouldn’t compare it with the tension of watching the Wild Card Game last October, but there are definite points of similarity.

For some reason the gallery official who was counting the votes did it right in the room where the show was hung, and the process was so-o-o-o slow. But when she was finished, she turned around and said to my wife, “Oh, it’s really nice that you’re still here, because the People’s Choice painting is your ‘Three Little Bums from School’.” Amazingly, both she and I had voted for another painting of hers, so her total could have been higher.

It’s a 36 by 18 (that’s right—go big or go home, just like the “old Blue Jays”) painting based on a photo of our grandson and two of his JK friends, taken from the back, as they hang on a wooden fence waving at a passing fire truck. The title? Oh, it’s a coy adaptation of another G and S thing.

Is there anyone else chronicling the Blue Jays who has a not-so-secret penchant for Gilbert and Sullivan?

So, on to today’s game, which of course was marked by Mothers Day recognition and the return to the hill of Aaron Sanchez.

The opening pitch was thrown to Marco Estrada by his lovely mother, and if you don’t know the story by now, and haven’t seen the family photos published by Steven Brunt, you need to do that. Now. It’s okay. My story will still be here when you’re finished.

Then Sanchez took the mound for the top of the first. And what an exciting return to the fray it was.

Jean Segura (who else?) beat out an infield dribbler to Devon Travis to lead off the game (what else?) On the first pitch to Ben Gamel, the pesky but supremely talented Segura took off for second and appeared to beat, barely, a strong throw from Luke Maile, who, remember, had gunned down Guillermo Heredia on Saturday. The throw was right on the bag, and Ryan Goins’ snap tag hit the back of Segura’s hand as it reached the base. Apparently. And according to umpire Ted Barrett.

But the review overturned the call, based, no doubt, on one of the most stunning video views I have yet seen from the slow-motion close-up cameras. You can clearly see, and it’s posted on MLB.Com on the GameDay wrapup for this game, that Segura’s reaching hand was slightly above the ground as he slid into the bag. You can also clearly see that the tag, slapped onto the back of his hand from above, smacked the palm of his hand firmly into the dirt before his fingertips touched the bag. Out! Wow!

Sanchez proceeded to fan Ben Gamel on a 2-2 pitch after a tough 9-pitch at-bat. He then walked Nelson Cruz, which is a good thing, and retired Kyle Seager on a deep fly to Steve Pearce in left to end the inning. An infield hit, a walk, a strikeout, and 19 pitches for Aaron Sanchez in the first inning. Well, okay then.

The M’s started Ariel Miranda, a left-handed 28-year-old Cuban import, whom none of the Jays had ever seen. He came into the game with a 3-2 record, but an ERA of 5.20.

This was going to be a tricky assignment at best. Nobody comes out of Cuba and makes it to The Show who doesn’t have at least some serious baseball chops, and that certainly includes Mr. Miranda, who of course being left-handed came in at a disadvantage facing the Jays, considering that Jose Bautista is on the march, and a lefty turns both Kendrys Morales and Justin Smoak around to their more potent side.

And Miranda did not disappoint Manager Scott Servais. He threw a lot of pitches, true, going five innings plus a batter, and accumulating 100 pitches including three walks. But the rest was all good: one run, three hits, and eight strikeouts.

The one run that he gave up was the one batter he faced in the sixth, when he walked Jose Bautista. Scott Servais then called in James Pazos, a curious decision. Pazos is a burly, heat-throwing lefty, but another lefty would keep the next two batters, Morales and Smoak, still on the starboard side. It may be a measure of the serious problems Servais has with his pitching staff that he would go to a known quantity, throwing absolutely from the wrong side, instead of risking another call-up coming in. Not to mention that both teams had already gone through a lot of arms in this series.

In any case, Pazos got by Scylla—Morales—by striking him out, but he couldn’t get by Charybdis, Smoak. Now, I am reconstructing here, because I was at the gallery, but I heard the radio call of the Smoak at bat. The Jays were down 1-0—I’ll tell you about that in a minute—with one out and Bautista on first. The broadcaster thought Smoak had hit one to the wall in left centre, and absolutely did not do a home run call. But the hit was a true rope, and it maintained enough elevation, apparently, to carry over the fence when it did not look like it would. One run charged to Miranda, one run to Pazos, and Toronto had the lead.

Aaron Sanchez was good, very good when he had to be, but occasionally struggled with command. There were moments when the broadcasters thought he might be bleeding a bit onto his uniform from his troubled middle finger, but he certainly never went full-tilt Trevor Bauer on the mound. His line: 5 innings pitched, 78 pitches, one unearned run, five hits, two walks, and four strikeouts. The reports after the game were that his finger never bothered him, and from what I saw there may have been some problems with the location of his breaking balls, but certainly not with their crispness or bite.

The unearned run off him was a real ouchy. Veteran catcher Carlos Ruiz, 38 years old and built like a fireplug, five-ten and 215 pounds, topped the ball so slowly to third, Darwin Barney coming in and firing to first, that he may or may not have been safe. First base umpire John Tumpane called him out, but the call was overturned on review.

I won’t tell you who was next up, but Mr. Perpetual Annoyance ripped one into the right-field corner. Bautista made a perfect play off the wall involving a complete spin, and fired the ball dead on line to second, where the batter was hustling for the bag. Safe or not at second, the lumbering Ruiz was not going past third in any eventuality, except the one that happened. The throw hit the sliding runner and bounced back past Devon Travis toward short right field. The batter was safe with an earned double because you can’t anticipate a close call, Ruiz trotted in to score, and Bautista was automatically charged with, on the face of it, a very unfair error, but correct according to the rules, making the run unearned.

The Seattle run in the top of the fifth was the last action I saw live.

Then came the Smoak homer putting the Jays in the lead in the bottom of the sixth, leaving Dominic Leone, who had relieved Sanchez for the sixth, the pitcher of record, giving hime the chance to be the garbage man for a second game in a row. It didn’t take him long to divest himself of that status, as he served up an 0-1 gopher ball to Jarrod Dyson, who was leading off the seventh.

Leone got the next two batters, and then John Gibbons called on Ryan Tepera to replace him. This was one time when Toronto got tremendous mileage out of its relievers. Leone went one and two thirds albeit having given up the tying homer, and Tepera got the last out of the seventh and then finished up. Without having seen it, you just know that Tepera was fabulous. Just check out his line: two and a third innings pitched, two strikeouts, just 23 pitches. That’s it.

Sometimes justice prevails, because Tepera finished off the top of the ninth for Toronto which meant he was the beneficiary of Pillar’s dramatic blast and took the win.

As for Seattle, Scott Servais also got good ‘pen after Pazos gave up the homer to Smoak. Nick Vincent pitched a clean seventh, former Jay Mark Rzepczynski (pronunced “Shep-ynsky”) and Tony Zych (the Polish Cavalry?) kept Toronto off the board in the eighth, with Zych picking up a bit of a mess from the lefty Rzepczynski and cleaning it up.

Then Servais made the very reasonable decision to bring in his young slender closer Edwin Diaz to shut the door on the Blue Jays in the ninth and he did it until he didn’t, grounding out Ryan Goins and Luke Maile before Pillar put the game in the win column for the Jays.

I’ll close with an amusing anecdote from Jerry Howarth. One of the disadvantages of watching the game like a hawk on our new 4K is that I don’t get to hear Jerry’s stories.* When Rzepczynski came on for Seattle, he recalled that when he first came to the Blue Jays Jerry had gone to the Jays’ media rep and said that he was confused, because he couldn’t find Rzepczynski in the media guide to see how to spell his name. The response from the media rep was, “Have you looked under the ‘Rs’?” Jerry recounted his answer: “Why in the world would I do that??”

So, thanks to more solid pitching, only one earned run over nine innings, almost perfect defence (I haven’t mentioned Pillar’s back-to-the-plate catch on Valencia in the fourth, but you should look up the video) and Pillar’s game-ending heroics on the other side of the ball, the Jays have now won five in a row, and climbed within four games of

.500. After their 2-11 start to the season, they have won 15 out of 25. That’s a .600 pace, folks.

*Anyone who suggests muting the TV and listening to the radio crew has never tried it. The radio broadcast is closer to “real time” than the TV transmission. If you’re listening to Jerry et al, you will know that so-and-so struck out before you see the pitch thrown. I hate that. Even the TV transmission that comes through the Rogers OnDemand box is actually a beat slower than the TV transmission coming through the simple, free digital box. We have the former in our sun room, and the latter in the kitchen, and they’re only ten feet away from each other, but I can hear the home run call on TV from the kitchen when the ball hasn’t reached the batter yet. Technically probably explainable, but esthetically terrible.

Where to start about today’s game? I’m torn between:

One: Maybe we should start listening to Papa John Gibbons when he drawls, “No, I’m not worried about [Bautista/Tulo/Martin/whoever]. He’s a pro. We know what he can do. He’ll come around.”

And two: It’s well past time to recognize how much the “lunch bucket” guys, Pillar, Carrera, Goins, Barney, now Maile and maybe Travis, but especially Kevin Pillar and Zeke Carrera at the top of the order, have done to change the culture of the Toronto Blue Jays in the wake of all the injuries to the “go big or go home” contingent in the team’s makeup.

Obviously, either approach would provide an appropriate entrée for addressing the Jays’ fourth straight win this afternoon, a tight but satisfying affair that ended up with the same score as Thursday night’s series opener, 7-2 for the good guys.

Let’s start with Jose Bautista, since he was the one who iced the game. How natural it seemed that it unfolded as it did. Kevin and Zeke—they’ll get their due anon—had manufactured a run for Toronto in the third. Marcus Stroman’s flair for the dramatic, that is, multiple baserunners followed by multiple strikeouts, protected that run until the fifth, when an maddeningly scratchy run by the Mariners tied the game.

Then the sixth saw the Ms take the lead in more traditional fashion with three solid singles, putting Stroman on the hook for the loss until Kendrys Morales, newly returned to the lineup after a few days on the shelf, took him right back off the hook with a rousing blast to right, putting the game in the hands of the Toronto bullpen.

Seattle’s bullpen, sadly, had been in play since Ryan Weber, to all appearances a fine young pitcher, became the next in a long line of Seattle starters to develop arm trouble, and had to pull himself from the fray after three and two thirds innings.

So the seventh inning dawned with that exquisite Toronto tension in play: would the bullpen continue to dazzle? Would the lineup manage to come up with a run or two to put the game away?

Of course, back in the heady days of the Blue Jays Bombers, circa pre-September last year, we didn’t worry about such things, did we? At least one decisive blast off the other guy’s relievers was just a given; you never had to worry about the runs, just the bullpen.

Now it’s almost exactly the reverse: can we scratch out a run while the bullpen stays strong?

So the dance of the end game started. Today, it wasn’t as easy for the Jays’ relievers as it has been. It took the combined efforts of Jason Grilli, Aaron Loup, and Dominic Leone to suppress a dangerous Seattle threat in the seventh, in most dramatic fashion, and keep the game even.

Boy, did this inning have moments. Grilli started with a bit of bad luck. No, I’m not talking about the fact that he had to face Jean Segura, but what happened when he did. Segura topped a teasing little hopper down the third base line. Darwin Barney would have been lucky to get Segura with a perfect play, but he lost the handle, and Segura was across with an infield hit.

Then came one of those dramatic moments that don’t appear in the box score, and seldom make the game reports. Ben Gamel lashed one deep to centre that stayed in the park, allowing Kevin Pillar to draw a bead on it. Now, I haven’t mentioned this, but besides all of his other talents, Segura is plenty quick. He tagged up on the ball, and broke for second with the catch. But then he stopped to admire the Pillar weapon that’s seldom mentioned, his sterling arm. From the deepest confines of the park, Pillar threw a bomb, all the way in the air, that Ryan Goins caught at his knees while standing on the bag at second.

Then Nelson Cruz fought off a pitch and barely muscled an opposite-field single to right, with Segura stopping at second. Considering the damage Cruz could have done, this wasn’t a bad outcome, but it brought John Gibbons out to bring Aaron Loup in to match up against Kyle Seager. Loup got Seager all right, fanning him for the second out, but there was the little matter of the wild pitch he threw during the at-bat that let the runners move up. Then it was Dominic Leone’s turn to face Danny Valencia, who, remember, was let go by the Jays in the middle of 2015 in favour of keeping Chris Colabello, and just might have been feeling a bit of extra motivation. It only took Leone two pitches in induce an easy grounder to third from the still-dangerous Valencia, to end the inning. Keep that number, two pitches from Leone, in mind, okay?

Wait a minute, you might say, aren’t you taking a long time to get around to Jose Bautista. Fair enough, but his moment is right around the corner.

After Grilli, Loup, and Leone did their thing in the top of the seventh, Scott Servais brought in Nick Vincent, who has been one of his rocks in the bullpen, to keep the game level.

But with one out Pillar singled to centre for his third hit of the game. Zeke Carrera then hit a grounder off Segura’s glove for an infield single. This brought Bautista to the plate for the key at-bat of the game. But wait: isn’t there supposed to be a different thread here about the “lunch-bucket guys”? That’s okay, in the seventh the two story lines converged as Pillar and Carrera were the ones who got to ride home on the strength of Bautista’s blast to centre that broke the game open.

Zych got the last two outs in the seventh, but it was a bit late, eh? So as of seven, that set up to Tony Zych to take the loss, and let’s see, who was it? That’s right, it was Dominic Leone, remember him? Two pitches to end the Seattle sixth, and now he was in line for the win. No wonder they sometimes refer to middle relievers as “garbage men” for picking up a win here and there like vultures with tasty road kill.

With the three-run lead, John Gibbons reverted to his close-out protocol and brought in Joe Smith, who escaped damage in the eighth despite giving up a single and a walk. In fact, he left only one man on base, because Luke Maile, lunch-bucket guy, combined with Ryan Goins, lunch-bucket guy, on a great throw-down and tag out of Guillermo Heredia trying to steal second after he singled off Smith.

Then the lunch-bucket guys manufactured a couple of neat add-on runs in the bottom of the eighth, but this wasn’t their first contribution to the afternoon’s festivities, so let’s go back a bit and see what else the guys from the poorer part of town did to make their mark on this game.

Ryan Weber had started the game by retiring eight of the first nine batters he faced, having given up only a double to that other guy, Bautista, in the first. But there were a number of hard hit balls that made you wonder about when something was going to start shaking down for Toronto.

The eight out of first nine retired naturally brought Kevin Pillar back to the plate with two down and nobody on in the third. We’re starting to have a thing here with Pillar, and I’m going to start watching it, and that’s how often he seems to get something going that pays off when he comes up with two down and nobody on.

So this time he chipped in the Jays’ second hit when he ripped a line single over the outstretched glove of the leaping Taylor Motter at second. With Zeke Carrera at the plate and not much to lose, Pillar took off and swiped second. Like they do, Zeke’s eyes lit up a bit when he saw the duck out there on the pond, and he whacked a grounder to Motter’s glove side that just got under the shaggy second baseman’s dive, bounced into right, and brought Pillar home with the first run of the game. Poor Motter: over his glove, under his glove, he didn’t know what might come next.

Lunch bucket guy (let’s call them the LB Boys, okay?) Ryan Goins did a fundamental baseball thing in the fourth inning that gave Toronto another scoring chance, even though it didn’t pay off. What was that fundamental? Put the flippin’ ball in play! Two outs and nobody on again, and the Mariners into a shift for Goins that put Danny Valencia on the outfield grass down the first base line, Goins hit a hard grounder down the line. It didn’t have double written all over it, and it was the kind of ball that Justin Smoak gobbles up, but Valencia mis-timed a hop, maybe off a seam, and butchered it; Goins ended up on second. The only reason he died there was because LB Boy Darwin Barney, who was making Jarrod Dyson run all over the place in centre field all day with nothing to show for it, drove him into right centre where he made a (nother) nice running catch to end the inning.

In the fifth it was LB Boy Pillar who doubled over Gamel’s head in right (going the other way) with two outs and nobody on (again), but he died there when LB Boy Carrera flew out to (where else?) Dyson in centre.

In the sixth, with one out, after Morales’ home run had re-tied the game, Justin Smoak finally got away with pulling a hard grounder into the shift. All he had to do was hit it so hard that it went off the glove of Segura, shifted into short right, for a single. This brought LB Boy Goins to the plate for one of the cheekiest moments of the game. I don’t know whether it came from the bench or not, but didn’t they put on a hit-and-run, with dump truck Smoaky at first!

Time for some baseball 101 here: Let’s keep in mind here that the hit and run is more properly the run and hit, and is intended to get a guy from first to third on a base hit, with the secondary accomplishment of staying out of the double play. With a hitter at the plate who has a sharp eye and good bat control (good luck finding one of those around these days!) a runner who might not otherwise be a threat to steal breaks for second with the pitch, triggering the middle infielders to have to cover the bag. Generally, and they arrange this before every batter, if not every pitch, it would be the opposite field guy to the hitter, so if it’s a lefty at the plate, the shortstop covers. The hitter, seeing the shortstop breaking for the bag, slaps the ball toward where the shortstop was, but now isn’t. The runner, with a full head of steam, makes it to third and the hitter’s got a base knock to boot. When it works, it’s a thing of beauty.

So when reliever Tony Zych committed to the plate, Smoak took off, Jean Segura broke for the bag to take a throw, and Goins bounced one right past the spot where Segura had been stationed before he broke for the bag. In this case, Smoak had to stop at second because, well, he’s Justin Smoak, and also because the hit-and-run doesn’t work quite as well when there’s a lefty at the plate and the hit is to left, because the left fielder is so much closer to third base. But the secondary goal was met: if Smoak hadn’t gone with the pitch, it was a dead cinch double-play ball to Segura. Associate LB Boy (not sure if he qualifies yet, but he’s working on it) Travis ended the threat by popping out to Motter at second, but still, it was a moment.

Then in the seventh, as we’ve seen, LB Boys, Pillar and Carrera set the table for Bautista’s game-winning home run.

So now we come to the bottom of the eighth that I mentioned before, after LB Boys Maile and Goins had teamed up to gun down Heredia’s attempted steal in the top of the eighth.

So by now we’ve Jose’s second consecutive decisive blast, after Friday night’s two-run shot, and we’ve got a three-run lead, and the bullpen’s been golden so far. It’s still nice to tack on a couple of extras though, even if only to take a little pressure off your closer.

The big lefty James Pazos, who brings plenty of heat, got the call from Scott Servais to pitch the eighth. (Wish the announcers would pronounce his name right—they keep calling him Scott “Service”. ‘Course, that’s probably how he pronounces it. Americans. Sheesh.) Maybe Servais went with a lefty because LB Boy Ryan Goins was leading off.

Wow, is this a trend?

Anyway, Goins did it again and lifted one softly over the left side of the infield for a single. After LB Boy Barney fanned, aspiring LB Boy Devon Travis bounced a slow one towards second, where Taylor Motter was ready to gift the Blue Jays with an extra out. It was on his glove side, and he went in and picked it, and really only had the play at first. But he looked at second because Goins had to stop to let the ball go by, and made a late decision to try for a force on Goins. In his haste to turn and throw, his feet slipped out from under him and he embarrassingly spiked the throw into the ground. Everybody safe on the error and no place to hide for Mr. Motter.

With LB Boy Maile at the plate, Pazos, his back to third as a lefty, had a mental lapse and didn’t check Goins who easily stole third. Maybe rattled, he hit Maile on a hand with a pitch to load the bases. Long pause while we all thought, OMG, another injury, Mike Ohlman’s the starting catcher! But Maile shrugged it off and took his base.

With the lineup turned over that brought up LB Boy Pillar, who hit a sac fly to left that not only scored Goins but allowed Travis to move up to third, setting up what came next.

Would you believe a delayed double steal, with Zeke Carrera at the plate? Maile, of all people, broke for second when Pazos went to the plate. Travis broke down a bit from third and stopped. Catcher Carlos Ruiz stepped out, fired to second, and Travis broke for the plate. Motter, covering second and with his team down four runs, correctly ignored the easy out on the incoming Maile, and fired back to Ruiz. Unfortunately for him his throw took Ruiz a bit up the first-base line, and Travis slid across safely with no review even considered. My kids used to do that all the time in Peewee, but you don’t see it too often in the big leagues any more.

Okay, after that display we have to add Devon Travis to the LB Brigade, full patch member!

John Gibbons had both Roberto Osuna and the new guy Leonel Campos warming up for the ninth, but when they picked up the extra two runs, Campos got the call, with Osuna standing by.

Of course Jean Segura was leading off, and of course he shot a double into the left field corner. Campos, who was unable to match Thursday night’s performance, walked Ben Gamel on four pitches. In fact, the only strike he threw was the one Segura hit, which was on a 1-0 count. So, best laid plans and not taking any chances, Campos was out and Osuna in after all, probably because he was already hot, and also because he was maybe a little better rested than anybody else left in the ‘pen.

Well, that was the ticket. Osuna produced the final three outs on six pitches without letting in a run. Nelson Cruz hit into a highlight-reel double play featuring LB Boy Travis and LB Boy Goins, and a great scoop by Bomber (i.e., not LB Boy) Smoak at first. Travis picked it, fed a nice underhand flip to Goins who did an Ozzie Smith leap over the sliding Gamel and unloaded a low throw to first that Smoak scooped with panache. Kyle Seager, who was almost totally neutralized in this series, lifted a fly ball to centre on an 0-2 pitch, and this one was in the can. Easy-peasy.

So, we take three straight from the Angels, win our fourth in a row, and climb to within five games of five hundred, through a happy threesome of six good innings from Stroman plus two good innings from the bullpen, a big bash from a resurgent Jose Bautista, and lots of great old-timey style baseball from our very own Lunch Bucket Boys.

This is getting fun!

And Aaron Sanchez returns to the hill tomorrow on Mother’s Day. Yay!

Tonight the Blue Jays’ pitching staff continued its dominance of the theoretically potent Seattle lineup for the second night in a row, registering a crisp and clean 4-0 shutout.

The Mariners, who put four legitimate .300 hitters in the lineup even with Robinson Cano sidelined by a nagging leg complaint, have racked up seventeen consecutive goose egg innings against a scrambling and injury-riddled Toronto pitching staff.

In fact, they haven’t touched the plate since Nelson Cruz wasted Marco Estrada’s last “warmup pitch” in the first inning of Thursday night’s game.

Let’s get this out of the way right now: everybody loves Joe Biagini. He’s funny, insightful, inarticulate in an amazingly articulate way, and irrepressibly affectionate. Who else would ever even think of giving Jose Bautista a great big hug after one of Jose’s monster shots?

But we have to be honest, too. We wouldn’t love him quite so much if he wasn’t such a skilled, cracker-jack hurler. After all, as much as Muni Kawasaki made us happy, and still does, even as he recedes into memory, we still kind of cringed when he came up to the plate with the game on the line, even if he did come through in memorable fashion a couple of times.

So as we watched Joe Biagini grow into his important bullpen role last year, it quickly grew in the backs of our minds that we were looking at an important part of the future of the Toronto starting rotation. Well, folks, it’s pretty obvious that given the opportunity offered to him by the shocking rash of injuries suffered by our rotation, now three-fifths down, which is not as bad as BlackHawk Down, but getting there, that the future is here.

Two starts: nine innings pitched, one unearned run, six hits, no walks, seven strikeouts, 120 pitches, four innings against the pesky Tampa Bay Rays, and five innings plus a batter for his first win as a starter against these same potent (did I mention that?) Mariners.

‘Nuff said on Biagini. Welcome to the bigs, Joe, you’re ready.

Not quite enough said. There was a quintessential Joe moment after the game. Arash Madani was doing the post-game with him, and he asked him a silly question, really, whether, if the coaches came to him and asked him to join the rotation for the rest of the year, he would agree to it. And a perfectly straight-faced Biagini’s response was, “Well, first I’d come to you and ask you, and if you said it was okay, well, I’d do it.” Madani did not have an answer for that.

I have to talk about journalistic scruples now. When I write a long form story about a Blue Jays’ game, I have watched every inning of that game. I feel very strongly about that. If I didn’t see it, I don’t write about it. I’m so scrupulous about journalism that if I were in the White House press corps I would have been pitched from the first daily press briefing Sean Spicer ever gave.

I only saw the end of tonight’s game, from the bottom of the seventh on, so that’s all I’ll write about below. The intro stuff about Joe Biagini pitching tonight, you’ll notice, includes nothing about his actual performance, or the Jays’ taking a lead they never yielded, so that was fair game.

I had to make a choice tonight. My wife, who is an accomplished oil painter, working from family photos to portray striking moments in the life of our family, had three paintings in an art gallery show that opened tonight.

Now, baseball’s baseball, and it does consume a big part of my life, but loyalty to your wife of nearly 49 years is a pretty important thing, too, and besides, you know, someone had to take some pictures of this important event.

But I wanted to keep in touch so at the last minute I tossed my “ball game” radio into the bag with the camera.

Now we have to talk about my radio. We were having trouble pulling in 590 The Fan around the house early last season, because of that stupid weak AM signal they put out. Are they ever going to carry the Jays on a nice clear FM frequency? Probably not. I wasn’t writing daily stories yet, but as always I needed to hear the game, even if I was out gardening.

So I started looking for some 2016 version of the good old transistor radio with earphones that we used to have, a wearable earbuds radio that had an AM band. Well, guess what? There ain’t hardly no such thing out there. Any little unit with earbuds and a radio receiver only had FM. Really.

I did find something, though, and since it was the only thing out there, I ordered it. You wouldn’t believe these things. They are, in fact, industrial strength noise-suppressing earphones, which happen to be equipped with an AM-FM unit, so that your lawn maintenance guy or your flight line baggage worker can listen to the radio while he/she is on the job. They’re huge black things, with a bright yellow stripe around the earphone cups, presumably so that the airplane you’re guiding to a parking space on the tarmac doesn’t run you over in the dark. They’ve even got a stamp on the head band labelled “Work Tunes”.

The sound quality’s not all that great either. Look, these things aren’t from Bose, and they’re not from Blaupunkt, either. They’re actually produced and sold by DeWalt, the power tool giant.

So it was my seriously dorky ball game headphones that I packed off to the art gallery where my wife’s work was being shown.

The gallery is a magical place in a magical spot, hidden away in the northwest corner of Toronto in an amazingly natural setting running down to the banks of the Humber River. There are two main studios connected by a path through a little garden area tricked out with some picnic tables. When they do a showing, the first studio, closer to the road, is where they set up the customary coffee-and-treats station, and the second one is where the show is hung.

My role at these openings is to be a charming and supportive spouse, take pictures as needed, and (this is most importance), give serious consideration to all the lovely pieces on display before voting for one of my wife’s works for the “People’s Choice” award.

My presence is not required every minute of the opening, and my kind wife understands my dilemma, so it was okay to slip away once in a while and check in on the game. My plan was to slip my dorky ‘phones out of the camera bag, kind of hide them behind my back, slip out of the studio, and perch at the picnic table from time to time and check in on the game.

I wish I had a picture; I must have been quite the spectacle. To compensate for my utter aged ordinariness, I try to sport sort of an older, faded, semi-hip, faux European vibe. Grey hair, trim grey beard. Top this with the dorky DeWalts, and, well, you get the picture.

So, here’s what I got from the DeWalts: after the end of the first there was no score. There was still no score in the bottom of the second, but things were promising. As I tuned in, Ryan Goins had just snaked one up the middle for the back half of leadoff back-to-back singles. Add to the picture above my exuberant fist bump when Darwin Barney laid down a perfect sacrifice bunt on the first pitch (Small ball! Yay!) A woman and her husband walking down the path to the gallery pretended not to notice me. When Devon Travis followed with an up-the-middle groundout to score Pearce, I thought, “we’re good now”, and went back inside as things got busy with speeches and such.

I tried to listen to the game on the car radio on the way home—my wife was driving—but the animated conversation of three very creative artists on a night out was a bit too much for “listening quietly and not shouting”, as I had been requested, so out came the DeWalts again, through which I learned that Jose Bautista had hit a two-run dinger to make the score 3-0, and that Biagini had been really effective again. Christian Bregman for the Mariners a little less so, as witness the Bautista jack, but not bad.

By the time we got home, I’d listened as the bottom of the order produced another small ball run in the sixth to push the Toronto lead to four. Goins led off with a single, went to third on a single to right by Barney, and trotted in on Travis’ sacrifice fly to left. Nice and easy. Five moments like this in April, and Toronto would be only a game under .500. C’mon, guys, it aint’ rocket science.

So what did I see when I did watch baseball tonight? I saw the tidy wrapup to a tidy Toronto win. I saw “big Jean” Machi go two and a third innings to help out the exhausted and depleted Seattle pitching staff. He gave up the Travis sac fly in the sixth, and stayed on into the eighth, when he retired Steve Pearce for the first out, and then yielded the mound so that an extraodinary event could take place.

As Ryan Goins strode to the plate, here came Manager Scott Servais, with one out and nobody on, to summon Zac Curtis, a lefty, to match up with Goins. Even I, the unelected president of the Ryan Goins Fan Club, and the sole proprietor of the Write Ryan Goins in as the All-Star Shortstop web site (which I just made up), did not see it coming that an American League manager would actually hold up a ball game to play the percentages on the left-handed hitting Goins. Can it be anything other than onward and upward from here for our favourite cue-ball-shorn infielder?

Finally, I saw Roberto Osuna, in the non-save situation, chew through the Mariners in the top of the ninth as if they were a nice soft tortilla con queso that his mom had just whipped up for him: 14 pitches: a Danny Valencia groundout on the first pitch, a Guillermo Heredia punch out, a Taylor Motter strikeout.

Oh, and I also saw that Roberto and catcher Luke Maile have choreographed their own little victory celebration that we can enjoy until Russell Martin returns and brings back the Knock-Knock Play with him.

So there you have it. It was a great night all around. Biagini moving on up. A beautiful gallery opening in a bucolic setting. A Blue Jay shutout. And some serious respect for Ryan Goins. What more could you ask?

How ’bout Marcus Stroman on the hill tomorrow afternoon, with the Jays looking for their fourth in a row. And no, you’re not dreaming. And neither am I, I don’t think.

That Marco Estrada, he’s such a funny guy. He’s always got to have us over on whether he’s got it or not.

Look, he’s a fly-ball pitcher, though his strikeout totals are climbing with his age, quite an impressive accomplishment. So naturally when he looks in at somebody like a Nelson Cruz, early in the game, when his precision instruments, location, change of speed, and more location, aren’t quite precise yet, you can imagine that somebody like, say, a Cruz, might hit a fly ball that’s a bit, erm, prodigious in the scale of your ordinary fly balls.

So naturally when Cruz, casually reaching down in the zone with his mighty thunderstick and pounding a too-easy fast ball high and deep over the centre-field fence on a 1-2 pitch in the first inning, you weren’t all that surprised. You know that thunderstick bit is a metaphor, right? Nobody wields a thunderstick any more.

The problem, though, was that doggone Jean Segura, standing out there on second, just waiting to trot around in front of Cruz; the inevitable bomb cost Estrada two runs, not one, and there we were, down 2-zip in the top of the first again.

Let’s talk about this Segura guy for a minute. When I scored some good seats for my wife and adult son and me for a game at the Cable Dome last August, the Diamondbacks were in town with their eerie camo road uniforms, like the commandos come to town.

Now, I admit I don’t pay a whole lot of attention to the National League. Like our parliamentarians in Ottawa, who only ever refer to the other chamber (Commons or Senate) in terms such as “that other place”, I usually think of the National League as “that other place”, though when I catch a glimpse of an NL game once in a while I do find myself becoming a little wistful over the manifestation of “real baseball”, i.e., sans the designated hitter.

So to my shame I had never heard of Jean Segura. He was just some chap playing shortstop for Arizona against the Jays. But, and I promise this is true, a couple innings in, after two at-bats, some baserunning, and some sharp play in the field, I turned to my family members and said, “Damn, that Segura guy is one hell of a ball player. Where has he been all my life?”

And of course it was with mixed feelings that I heard about his trade to the Mariners in the off-season. On the one hand, I’d get to see him a little more often, but on the other hand he’d be plying his trade against my home town team.

So it wasn’t the Cruz homer that upset me, not at all. It was the casual way that Segura put the wheels in motion, waiting forever until he got what he wanted, and then making a silk purse out of a sow’s ear. Leading off, he’s up 2 and 1 on Estrada, and then he fouls one off for 2-2. Then he fouls off three more, three of Estrada’s best. Over here, down there, up here, no matter. A casual wave and another one spoiled. Finally he got one to his liking, and lifted an ordinary little single into short left centre.

But the cheeky Segura was having none of it. He was going for two all the way. When Kevin Pillar had to reach up to grab a tricky high bounce off the turf, the way was clear and he was in to second with a flourish. Later on in the game when Pillar was on second they had a little chat, and you just know Pillar was saying that Segura wouldn’t get away with that one again.

Well, look, Segura came in hitting .364 and came out hitting .369. Estrada only gave up two more hits after the first—we’ll get to that in a minute—and one of them was another double to Segura. Let’s just be thankful that this Seattle lineup isn’t filled up with Jean Seguras, as if a talent like that could be cloned.

So, like I said, Estrada sometimes needs a bit of a warmup. Maybe when he’s throwing his last pitches on the mound before the game starts, he should have one of his team-mates stand in at the plate and pound one into the stands, just to get it out of the way.

It’s not like Estrada was home free after Cruz pulled the trigger, either. Left-handed-hitting Kyle Seager came up next and pulled the ball into a natural deep second-base position, where, in the logic of the shift, tonight’s third baseman, Chris Coghlan, was stationed. The ball was hit hard, I’ll give you that, but Coghlan had a pretty good reaction with his glove, and the ball kind of clanked off it into right centre for what was definitely a single, but a ball that might have been catchable with a good grab.

A little aside here on the Jays’ infield situation as I see it with both Donaldson and Tulowitzki sidelined. They’ve got four players covering three positions, three of them flexible, and Travis only at second when he’s in the lineup. Now, Ryan Goins is non pareil wherever he plays, and Darwin Barney is pretty reliable, though the sidearm flip from third makes me a bit nervous. If you read my reports, you will know that I’m not convinced that Travis is up to making either the tough plays or the crucial ones. And Coghlan—here’s my point—who’s made 12 starts at third and one at second, and been subbed in 4 times at third, has 4 errors in 28 chances, a not great fielding percentage of .857. I like Coghlan’s hustle, I like his look; he’s all scrappy little infielder. But I’m not convinced he can handle the hot corner. In fact, if you look at his record, he’s spent most of his career in the outfield, overwhelmingly in left.

No error for Coghlan tonight, but I think Estrada lost an out on Seager’s hit. With Seager on first our old friend Danny Valencia mis-hit one of Estrada’s funny ones, and hit a short fly to left for Steve Pearce for the second out. Then Pearce had to get on his horse and go back hard to his glove side to haul down a wicked shot by Taylor Motter in a good running catch, even if it looked a little awkward and improvised. (Hey, I just noticed that Taylor Motter is just one letter off from the Taylor, Mottel in Fiddler on the Roof. Is this a thing, or not?)

Marco Estrada threw 27 pitches in the first inning. Three went for base hits. One left the ball yard, counting two runs. He struck out Ben Gamel, and gave up a really loud out to Motter.

This is what he did in the next five innings: he threw 80 pitches. Gave up no more runs. Yielded one more hit, Segura’s second double in the third, but you already know about Segura. Walked three, and yes his control was a little snaky tonight. But fanned seven more. Best of all, he hung on just long enough, and a bit more, for his hitters finally to solve rookie Chase De Jong, putting up a big five-spot in the fifth so that when he exited after six he had a 6-2 lead, and what a king he must have felt with riches like those!

Just to finish the story line of the Toronto pitching, the bullpen did another fine job of holding the fort for Estrada. Aaron Loup, interestingly, pitched the whole seventh, facing righty/lefty/righty/lefty, retiring catcher Tuffy Gosewysch and the two lefties, Jarrod Dyson and Ben Gamel, while perhaps wisely walking our friend Mr. Segura.

Jason Grilli looked much better this time out in pitching the eighth, though he did give up a leadoff double to right by Nelson Cruz that Zeke Carrera would have corralled but for banging into the wall and having it go off his glove.

As I used to say about Big Papi last year with the Red Sox, the thing about these aging crushers is that if they don’t hit it out and you need runs, they kind of hold you back, unless they produce the RBIs themselves. If the game had been closer at that point, now 7-2 for the Jays, I have no doubt that Manager Scott Servais would have run for Cruz, but behind by five his faint hope would have been that Cruz might come to the plate again in a rally.

But here he was on second base with nobody out. Kyle Seager flew out to Pillar in centre, but there was no thought of advancing. Danny Valencia shot a liner to left for a single, and here was Cruz jogging into third. I’m not saying he was dogging it, it’s just that it was a foregone conclusion that he wasn’t going to be sent. Motter then shot another liner to centre, his second loud out of the game, and Cruz stayed rooted at third while Pillar fired the ball in to the plate from medium depth. And there he stayed while Grilli fanned Mike Freeman, the second baseman, for a boffo finish to the inning.

Now, who was that warming up for the Jays in the ninth? Leonel Campos? What? Wasn’t he up for a cuppa in April? What’s he doing here now?

At this point I have a confession to make. Sometimes I turn Buck and Tabby off. For the whole game. A, I don’t need them, most of the time. B, their inanities are really distracting. C, my wife, who kindly indulges my passion for the Jays, is a lot more appreciative of a silent ball game than one “narrated” by our intrepid TV guys.

If something’s going on that I don’t get, I turn the sound up, otherwise, maybe not. It never occurred to me that the camera was spending a lot of time on Francisco Liriano tonight, until I turned it up to find out what Campos was doing there, only to learn that Liriano had been put on the DL just before game time, and Campos brought up from Buffalo.

Well, that explains why Liriano has been struggling so much. And it sure clarifies the Mike Bolsinger situation. After his good first fill-in start, he ain’t going nowhere folks, because we need him in the rotation, right now.

So, back to Campos. With a five-run lead, Manager Gibbons could afford to check out Campos and see what he has. And the short answer is “a lot”. He popped up catcher Tuffy Gowewysch on the first pitch, fanned Jarrod Dyson with Luke Maile making a really nice snag of the foul tip, and got Jean Segura to ground out to short. On 8 pitches. Sign this kid up!

The Mariners, who have four—count ’em, four—starters on the disabled list started former Jays’ prospect Chad De Jong tonight. This kind of thing always makes me a little nervous. Last year’s version of the Blue Jays made a big hash out of chances to go up against rookies or call-up pitchers. Cleveland’s Ryan Merritt, anyone? They might miss an early chance to put up numbers, but sooner or later they’d look like they were facing the reincarnation of old Cy himself.

So after the Cruz homer spotted the Mariners a two-run jump start, young Mr. De Jong came out and found it a little difficult, shall we say, to find the plate. Okay, a lot difficult. He was like the little girl with the curl right in the middle of her forehead. When his pitches were good, they were very good—check out that curve ball, you curve-ball sucker Torontos—but when they were bad, oh, my!

Kevin Pillar didn’t wait around but took a swipe at the second pitch from De Jong and smacked one toward Segura that took a wicked short hop and handcuffed him for an infield hit. Zeke Carrera went to three and two on two called strikes and three wild ones before dumping a Texas Leaguer, again, into left. Pillar, who had been set in motion on the pitch, made it around to third. Jose Bautista passed on three hairy balls before lashing the first one in the zone, but right at Kyle Seager at third.

Sticking with that hitter’s count theme, Justin Smoak went to three and one before lofting a soft liner over Segura’s head in short right field—of course he was in the shift—to score Pillar and cut the Mariners’ lead to one. Then De Jong caught a break as Steve Pearce turned a 1-0 pitch into an around-the-horn double play.

After rhe first the expected happened, and the Jays settled in to admiring De Jong’s mixture of breaking balls, so much so that they forgot that they needed to put a little pressure on the rookie before he ran out of gas. He faced only two over the minimum from the second into the fifth, stranding an infield single in the second and a walk in the fourth while retiring 11 of 13 batters he faced.

So there was no sense that much was amiss when he issued his second walk of the night to Kevin Pillar, with two outs already in the fifth. But in a classic example of the old expression “It all starts with two” (outs, that is), Zeke Carrera followed with a base hit to left about which there was nothing Texas-ish, or even Oklahoma-esque. Then De Jong’s troubles really started. He threw four straight bad ones to Bautista, maybe sort of intentional, maybe not. This brought up Justin Smoak with the bases loaded and nobody out. Smoak didn’t waste any time at all before knocking the first pitch from De Jong back up the middle into centre for two runs, a Blue Jays’ 3-2 lead, and all 3 RBIs for Smoak.

Next came Steve Pearce to the plate, in another one of those “oh, no!” moments for yer ever-gloomy humble scribe. But this time he didn’t disappoint, and hammered a 1-2 pitch into the centre-field seats for a three-run homer and a 6-2 Toronto lead.

Manager Scott Servais let De Jong finish up, what with his severely depleted pitching staff, and he got Ryan Goins to ground out to first to end the inning. So if De Jong could just have gotten that third out in the fifth, he would have had a tidy 2-1 lead, but his line ended up 5 innings pitched, 6 runs, 7 hits, 3 walks, and 1 strikeout, on 88 pitches.

This time the rest, they say, was denouement. You already know that the Jays’ bullpen was wipeout after Estrada finished up, and Seattle’s was almost as good. Zac Curtis pitched the sixth and retired the side with one strikeout after hitting Chris Coghlan frighteningly on the hand.

Then Seattle brought in Sam Gaviglio, a big, tall right-hander to make his major league debut. Gaviglio is not without high-stakes experience, though, having made a couple of appearances for Italy during the latter team’s rather exciting run at this spring’s World Baseball Classic.

Gaviglio had himself a mighty nice debut: two innings pitched, one hit, one run, no walks, and four strikeouts on 30 pitches. He fanned Zeke Carrera, the first batter he faced in the seventh, making a nice moment for tossing the keepsake ball out of play. Oh, the one hit and the run? Couldn’t blame Gaviglio for that one. In an odd display of bad ball hitting, Justin Smoak went after a high (shoulder-high) hard one on the outside corner and blasted it over the centre-field fence. Oh, well. Tant pis.

So, in the immortal words of Tony Soprano, whaddaya gonna do? Oh, yeah, that was when somebody got whacked. No one getting whacked here these days. Toronto’s pitchers made one mistake in nine innings. Young Mr. De Jong hung on by his fingernails until he couldn’t any more, the Jays’ surging hitters caught up with him, and we’re looking at another nice, solid win, against a good team that’s really suffering at the moment.

Tomorrow night it’s Joe Biagini, and I can’t wait.

You had to feel sorry for Francisco Liriano. Really, really sorry.

There he was all alone out there on the mound, three batters into the game, and he must have felt like he’d landed in some alternative universe, some topsy-turvy place where nothing, absolutely nothing, is the way it should be.

Where was Liriano’s Svengali, his archangel, his dramaturge, the saviour of his career, Russell Martin? Sitting on the bench nursing a sore left shoulder, that’s where.

And there in his place behind the plate was the newly-arrived-and-suddenly-promoted-to-first-string Luke Maile, shucking and jiving, dipping and diving, desperately trying to corral the wild and crazy slants of his pitcher.

Hadn’t he put all this behind him, after his horrendous start to the year?

Jason Kipnis was standing on second, having just delivered a ringing opposite-field double to left to plate Carlos Santana, who had walked on a 3-2 pitch, and Francisco Lindor, who had moved Santana up to second with a single to right that deflected off the glove of Justin Smoak at first. And who was coming to the plate but our dear old Edwin.

Well, let’s be thankful for small mercies. Edwin flied out to Kevin Pillar in centre, with Kipnis moving into scoring position with one out. Then Jose Ramirez rammed one hard on the ground to Devon Travis at second, too sharp for Kipnis to score, for the second out. And Brandon, Hit Me, Please, Guyer managed to avoid being plunked again and popped out to short to end the inning and leave Kipnis hanging at third.

Two runs in, 24 pitches from a very unpromising Francisco Liriano, and missing, let us remember, Josh Donaldson, Troy Tulowitzki, Russell Martin, and now Kendrys Morales, Manager John Gibbons hopefully, perhaps even wistfully, sent his diminished cohort out to face the slants of the formidable if a bit unpredictable Mr. Danny Salazar.

Well, what’s a bunch of lunch-bucket schmucks to do, but go out there and retake the lead before Salazar had even recorded an out? Kevin Pillar walked on a 3-1 pitch. The only ball that was even close was the 3-0 cripple that he maturing Pillar disdained. Zeke Carrera, our smiling little troublemaker, wasn’t so patient, looping an 0-1 fast ball that had nothing to recommend it, pitching-wise, into centre, where it dropped in front of Abraham Almonte for a good old-fashioned Texas Leaguer. By the way, I have decided to revive this charming term, which seems to have fallen into disuse for no good reason that I can discern.

In today’s sans-Morales world, this brought Jose Bautista to the plate. Now the cynics might think, oh, yeah, just because he finally broke off his oh for twenty streak last night with a solid base hit, he was getting rewarded by being dropped into the three-slot. But what was John Gibbons to do? As they say, ya gotta dance with the one that brung ya, and Jose has brung us an awful lot in the last five years. And, by the way, who else was gonna hit third, Steve Pearce? Devon Travis? No offence, guys, but Jose was it, and this time he was it, fer sure.

Salazar’s approach to Bautista had the mark of a guy desperate not to walk the bases full. Five pitches away, down and away. Every one of them. One was called in the zone. Bautista offered at another. The rest he laid off, as he will. So Salazar either made a huge mistake or basically said “here, I hope you pop it up.” And threw it 96, inner third, waist high. Boy, did Jose pop it up. He creamed it, and the only question was whether he hit it hard enough for it to stay straight and fair. He did, and it did. The drought was over for Jose, he now had as many home runs as Ryan Goins (!) and the Jays had a 3-2 lead.

Salazar, his demons exorcised by Bautista, fanned Smoak and Pearce, but Goins, believe it or not hitting sixth in this more than decimated* lineup, gave a little hint of things to come, by going with another fast ball up, and hammering it into left centre, where Abraham Almonte, playing Goins straight up with Salazar on the hill, was able to haul it in for the third out.

*Most misused word in the English language—it has never meant wholesale loss, but literally a loss of one tenth. The Romans took every tenth soldier, one tenth of the cohort, as hostages against cowardice by the rest. The way people use it, the victims of whatever terrible atrocity could only wish they had just been “decimated” rather than much worse. Sorry. Rant over. Back to baseball.

An apparently rejuvenated/relieved Liriano came out for the top of the second, and retired the side on 11 pitches. Groundout, fly ball, fly ball. To be fair, with the loss of Rajai Davis to free agency, and the temporary loss of Michael Brantley, whose ankle sprain Terry Francona doesn’t want to risk on the Dome’s turf, Cleveland’s lineup is also a little deprived after their famous five have had their ups.

I know it’s in retrospect, but in light of what happened in the Cleveland third, it’s really interesting to look at Liriano’s pitch chart on Yan Gomes’ leadoff at bat, in which he grounded out to second on a three-two pitch. If you look at the first pitch and the fifth, the fifth, a called strike, almost perfectly covers the first, called a ball. Both are on the black at the bottom middle of the zone. Hold that thought.

I’m not saying there’s a connection, but Cleveland handed Toronto’s Devon Travis a big gift leading off the home second, but Travis handed it right back. The Jays had a great shot at another good inning off Salazar, and it came to nothing. Maybe this turn of events spooked Liriano, but he never got an out in the Cleveland third as things got way out of hand.

Travis hit a solid but catchable drive to left, but Yandy Diaz, filling in for Brantley, took about six different routes to the ball, and then haplessly watched as it hit the turf and jumped over the fence for two bases. Darwin Barney, who I hoped would be bunting (curse you, John Gibbons, haven’t you ever watched a National League game?) was down 0-2 to Salazar, and then, as he so often does, he pulled a rabbit out of the hat, hitting a grounder in the hole that Francisco Lindor barely got to on his backhand, and had to have been an infield single. Except that Travis, broke from second, and stopped, deer in the headlights, five steps off the bag, looking at Lindor, who was holding the ball, and, I bet, smiling like the cat heading for the cream. Travis was trapped and run down, Barney’s hit became a fielder’s choice, and with number nine who can bunt (remember, Luke Maile came up in Joe Maddon’s system) coming up with a man on first instead of first and second and nobody out.

So whoosh, Salazar got his mojo back, fanned Maile, and then fanned Kevin Pillar. I hate to beat up on poor Devon Travis, but we’ve seen this exact same film before, at least twice last year, in the heat of the pennant race. What part of his baseball makeup doesn’t get not running into the first out after hitting a double?

Liriano came out for the top of the third, and with the customary nod to Yogi, it was dejá vu all over again. He walked Santana on a 3-1 pitch. Lindor singled to left, this time off the glove of Ryan Goins. Kipnis let down the side by just hitting a single to right, scoring Santana with Lindor moving to third.

Hang on, here, let’s go back to the Santana walk. Vic Carapazza was behind the plate. Vic is well loved by the folks here, after the horror show he put on last year on Canada Day, during the fabled 19-inning Toronto-Cleveland clash won by the visitors. His zone was so bad that he enraged Edwin, as if that were ever possible, to the point that he had to eject him. Then he pitched Gibbie for protecting Edwin. Later in the game, he pitched Russell Martin after a dispute over the strike zone, when Martin was actually walking away from him.

Now, Carapazza was also the guy who pitched Gibbie the other night over the obstruction call on Devon Travis. Well, guess what? From Canada Day to tonight, those four Blue Jays are the only players in all of MLB that Carapazza has ejected. Why is he on a crew covering Toronto at all?

So back again to that walk to Santana. 3-1? Really? We can’t get inside the ump’s head, so all we can do is look at the graphics so generously provided by MLB, which also of course hires and oversees the umpires. According to the chart, pitch two, called a ball, was clearly in the black. Pitch five, called ball four, was clearly touching the black. Ya wonder why a pitcher gets annoyed with the strike zone?

So after the Kipnis single ties the game, Liriano walks Edwin on 3-2. No beef with the zone this time, because he was losing it by now. But it loads the bases, and Pete Walker comes out to buy time and calm Liriano down. As he returns to the dugout, he detours a little toward the plate, and appears to say something mildly to Carapazza. Zing! He’s gone! Pete Walker! Who looks and acts like your courtly uncle who flew Spitfires in the Battle of Britain, but went to his death too dignified to ever make much of it.

Jose Ramirez hits a grounder through the right side that scores Lindor with the lead run and keeps the sacks loaded, and that’s the end for Liriano, two innings plus five batters pitched, 7 runs (because Brandon Guyer’s double off Dominic Leone will clear the bases), 5 hits, 3 walks, no strikeouts, on 53 pitches.

After Guyer runs himself into an out at third to let Ramirez score, Leone gives up a double to Gomes, but then shuts down the Cleveland side without further damage.

You can just imagine how the Jays felt coming off the field after the top of the third, their exciting 3-2 lead turned into a 7-3 deficit.

The rest of the game would see them acting out the old adage, don’t get mad, get even.

Before going any further, tribute must be paid to the Toronto bullpen, which stepped up yet again. When Ramirez scored the seventh Cleveland run with nobody out in the third, who could have imagined their offence would be stonewalled the rest of the night?

Leone threw an uneventful fourth, Danny Barnes bent but didn’t break, giving up three hits but no runs in the fifth and sixth, Ryan Tepera retired the side and fanned two on 17 pitches in the seventh, Joe Smith gave up a hit and fanned two in the eighth (how about those two, eh?), and Roberto Osuna, pitching in a tie, whipped through the ninth in 11 pitches with a strikeout, looking more and more like the Osuna of yore (can a 22-year-old even have a “yore”?) So, no runs, six hits, no walks, eight strikeouts over seven innings of relief.

Now, the Jays have nothing on Cleveland’s bullpen, which is the best in baseball. But funny thing about bullpens: sometimes when you have to make the call early, the pattern gets disrupted; strange things happen. You have to go to some of those other guys, who don’t quite make the 7-8-9 lineup. Like the ones that stood up for Toronto tonight.

The thing is, Danny Salazar didn’t make it out of the third either, against the depleted Toronto lineup, and that changed everything. After Zeke Carrera grounded out to short, Salazar walked Bautista, who still gets his bases on balls no matter what. With Smoak up against the righty, Cleveland went into the usual shift, but I have a question: if you’ve got the infield defense skewed all the way around to the right, why is the right fielder playing straight up on Smoak. So he hits one down the line and it goes for a double even with Smoak “running”, Bautista stopping at third. Steve Pearce hits a sac fly to centre to score Bautista, and here comes Smoaky, truckin’ on to third. No problem, eh? Next comes Ryan Goins with two away. Easy peasy. ‘Cept Goins confidently smacks a 1-2 pitch out over the plate into left centre to score Smoak, and it’s 7-5.

That was the end for Salazar, who outlasted Liriano by two whole outs despite the gift lead, and gave up five runs on five hits, walked two and struck out four on 69 pitches. Dan Otero came in to retire Travis, and after three innings it was 7-5 Cleveland with both starters out of the game.

We already know that the visitors stalled at seven, but the Jays had a few more tricks up their sleeve, most prominent a couple of secret weapons that are getting a good airing these days, Zeke Carrera and Ryan Goins. After Leone cruised the Cleveland fourth, Darwin Barney led off by turning a single into a double on sheer chutzpah. It looked like he was going to die there, as Luke Maile grounded out to short, though he did move up on Pillar’s nubber to third that went for the second out.

Then that wild and crazy Carrera decided to cross everybody up and actually pull the ball, right over the right field fence, and just like that the game was tied and everybody in the yard, and at least one old guy at home, went bonkers. Whimsical stat of the night: with their homers tonight, Bautista and Carrera both pulled into a tie with Goins with three homers on the season.

From that point Otero, Nick Goody, Boone Logan, and Brian Shaw kept it clean for Cleveland, taking us to the ninth, though Shaw had to skate around two hits and a walk in the seventh and eighth.

It’s now the fashion that you use your closer in the ninth in a tie game (are you listening, Buck Showalter?), so just like John Gibbons ran out Osuna in the top of the ninth, Terry Francona tabbed his closer Cody Allen, with awesome numbers so far this year, for the bottom of the ninth. (A friendly tip to Pat Tabler: the current Cleveland manager is Terry Francona, who never made much of a dint as a player. Tito Francona was Terry’s dad, and he was a pretty exciting ball player in his day.)

Funny with closers: sometimes they have a bad outing, and when they do, it can be a real stinker. And tonight Cody Allen limburgered the place up right and proper. Maybe he’d had too much rest, but he was overcranked and wild. He went 3-2 on Pillar leading off before the latter flied out to centre. He went 3-2 on Carrera before he hit a Texas Leaguer to centre. (There, I said it! With Carrera it’s easy, he does it all the time.)

Then he got a little breathing space by fanning Bautista on a 2-2 pitch. Let’s face it, that particular lightning wasn’t going to strike twice, was it? Ah, but then he went 3-2 on both Smoak and Pearce before losing them, loading them up for our newly-minted number six hitter, Ryan Goins.

Now Goins is nothing if not a sharp observer. He’d watched Allen throw 31 pitches, but only 15 for strikes. He knew that Allen was going to be desperate not to fall behind, or worse, bury one in the dirt with the game on the line. So Goins went up looking heater in the zone, and that’s what he got, 94 and up and in, but on the black, almost right on the corner. He put a good swing on it and ripped a vicious liner past Santana into the right-field corner, and the ball game was over. He was robbed of a double and a couple more ribbies because the game was over, but he had a ticket to ride, and he din’t care . . .

So you start out in a hole, a malevolent presence behind the plate helps dig the hole a little deeper, and then a bunch of unlikely heroes like Zeke Carrera, Ryan Goins, a badly slumping Jose Bautista, and Joe and Roberto and a whole bunch of other unheralded joes in the bullpen put their backs to it, and whattaya got?

One damn satisfying win.

Not to mention taking our first series from the blankety-blank Clevelands Who Shall Remain Nameless until They Scrap their Ugly and Offensive Logo. Begone, Clevelands! Your “tribe” is definitely not our tribe!

And how ’bout this: Let’s write in super-sub Ryan “Go-Go” Goins for the all-star team. He outplayed the vaunted Francisco Lindor in this series, didn’t he? Oh, yes, he did!

On the face of it, this looks like a candidate for submission to one of those short-short story contests; you know, the ones where they’re complete in one page, or one paragraph, or even, god help us, in a tweet:

“Carrasco pitching against Bolsinger. Cleveland won 6-zip. Move along folks. Nothing more to see here.”

But on the face of it, you’d be wrong.

Oh, sure, Carlos Carrasco stonewalled the Jays for seven innings, and the Cleveland bullpen sucked all the air out of the stadium in the eighth and ninth. And why wouldn’t they? Carrasco came into the game with an ERA of 2.18, and came out at 1.86. And before tonight’s added two scoreless innings by the Cleveland ‘pen, their combined ERA since April twentieth was 0.200. Yeah, read that again, that’s one-fifth of an earned run allowed per nine innings. Yup. And of course they were pitching against the hot-hitting Jays, right? Um, not.

But damn, this Mike Bolsinger pitched his heart out tonight, didn’t he? Not only did he give Manager John Gibbons a much-needed five and two-thirds innings, but he did it while allowing two earned runs on three hits against the defending American League champions, whose top five spots in their batting order, let me remind you, are pencilled in every night, like this: Carlos Santana, Francisco Lindor, Jason Kipnis, Edwin Encarnacion, Jose Ramirez. Don’t trust the reports that they’re having trouble scoring runs; it’s a subterfuge.

Let’s just get the Jays’ lack of offence tonight out of the way before going on to talk about Bolsinger’s debut with Toronto.

So Carrasco goes seven innings, throws 97 pitches, gives up three hits, and no walks, and fans seven. The three singles are scattered. Zeke Carrera bounces one up the middle in the first, but is erased on an inning-ending double play. Darwin Barney reaches out and smacks a nice liner to right for a hit leading off the third, but dies at first. In the seventh, Jose Bautista, hallelujah, hits a hard liner to left for a single with one out, and even steals second when Carrasco ignores him, but Justin Smoak leaves him out there when he goes down on strikes.

In the seventh, with the score only 3-0 Cleveland, Terry Francona has Andrew Miller up in the pen to do the eighth, but then Yan Gomes hits the three-run homer off Aaron Loup to ice the game. Well, what can Francona do? He’s got Miller hot in the ‘pen, but doesn’t need him any more. Best to add insult to injury and bring him in anyway, so he comes in and shrugs off our heroes on 8 pitches, getting the lefties Ryan Goins and Chris Coghlan to swing late and ground out the wrong way, while Darwin Barney makes himself the hitting star of the game by actually lofting one to fairly deep centre for a loudish out.

Sitting 6-0 going to the ninth, Cleveland closer Cody Allen can just sit down and work on his dinner reservations for after the game. Extra arm Nick Goody comes in instead, and despite giving up a single to the never-say-die Kevin Pillar, he mops up in good order, getting rookie catcher Mike Ohlman, making his major league debut, on a popup to first before Pillar’s base hit, and then converting Zeke Carrera’s sharp comebacker into a game-ending double play.

Now, about this Bolsinger guy. Drafted by the Diamondbacks in 2010, he stayed in their organization through 2014, making his big league debut in 2014, 10 appearances, 9 starts, 1-6, and a 5.50 ERA. This didn’t impress Arizona too much, so he was sold to the Dodgers after 2014.

He had a decent year with the Dodgers in 2015, going 6-6 with a 3.62 ERA in 21 starts, but he fell off in 2016, spent some time in the minors, and was only 1-4 in 6 starts with an ERA of 6.83 when the Dodgers traded him to Toronto for Jesse Chavez. To Toronto fans, it was a great trade: nobody had a clue who Mike Bolsinger was, but Jesse Chavez was going the other way, so it was all good for Mike in Mississauga and his hoser buddies.

Bolsinger never made an appearance with the Jays last year, and he spent most of the latter half of the season kind of hidden on the disabled list. It seemed like a good place to park a guy they didn’t need in the rotation, and weren’t going to throw into a pennant race in any case.

So, the guy’s 29, and this is his first American League start, against Cleveland. Now Mike Bolsinger’s not going to blow anybody away with any heat. He’s got a good curve ball and he relies on that, plus spotting what he can with his fast ball. If it works, it works okay.

In the first inning, it worked. His first pitch to Carlos Santana was up and away. The second one was up and in, and Santana lined a little chip shot to Darwin Barney at third. Then Bolsinger threw seven straight strikes to Francisco Lindor, the last one a fast ball up in Lindor’s eyes that he laughably swung through. Then he threw seven straight strikes to Jason Kipnis, the last one a curve ball in the dirt that the rookie catcher Ohlman had to track down and throw down to first.

Mike Bolsinger threw 16 pitches in the first inning. 15 of them were strikes.

When he came out for the second inning, Bolsinger threw two more strikes (that’s 17 of 18, if you’re counting), and then must have given himself a shake and realized where he was: facing Edwin Encarnacion after having mown down Cleveland in the top of the first. He threw four straight balls to Edwin, and four straight balls to Jose Ramirez, putting the first two batters on with nobody out.

Of course, Cinderella is just a fairy story, and we know Bolsinger didn’t throw a shutout, but those two walks both scored, that was all he gave up in the game, and if the Jays hadn’t been so hopeless at the plate tonight it just might have been enough.

Lonnie Chisenhall followed with a double to left centre, the first of three hits Bolsinger would give up. That scored Edwin with Ramirez stopping at third. Yandy Diaz grounded to Ryan Goins at short and Chisenhall wandered off second, getting himself caught in a rundown that allowed Ramirez to score the second run. Justin Smoak alertly raced, if we can put it that way, to second base to keep Diaz at first. Two popups later and the inning was over, and so were the Jays, though they didn’t know it yet.

And Bolsinger sure didn’t know it, because he recovered his composure and pitched his heart out for another three and two thirds innings, going out as the pitcher of record for the loss, but still down only 2-zip.

Starting with the popups in the second, he retired nine in a row, a string broken off by a Yan Gomes one-out single in the fifth, which he stranded with two quick outs.

In the sixth he came to the end of the line, as Manager John Gibbons, supremely grateful for the work he got from Bolsinger, wasn’t about to push him too far. It’s not that the rails actually came off for the fill-in right-hander. After all, he got Kipnis on a ground-out leading off before walking Edwin and then fanned Ramirez for the second out. That brought Lonnie Chisenhall to the plate, whose double in the second had cashed Bolsinger’s first walk. And didn’t he hit another double, the third and last hit off the Toronto starter, down into the right-field corner, with Edwin stopping at third. That was it for Bolsinger’s first start for the Jays.

Dominic Leone came in and got a fly ball to right from Yandy Diaz to close the books on the starter. Cleveland added another run in the seventh, once again taking advantage of a one-out base on balls by Leone to Yan Gomes, who eventually scored on Lindor’s ground-rule double to left off lefty J. P. Howell. Howell got Kipnis to pop out in foul territory before yielding to Jason Grilli, who came on to fan Edwin in another emotionally-charged at-bat to leave Lindor at third.

So going to the eighth, it was still close enough to think that the Jays could get Bolsinger off the hook for the loss, but as we were saying, they never did find the good bats they needed to get it done.

And just to make sure that they didn’t jump up and bite Cleveland’s bullpen in the late innings, Aaron Loup came in for an inning of work and helped the visitors put the game out of reach, though, truth be told, it might have stayed at three-nothing if Gomes hadn’t decided to practice his golf swing on Loup and loft a three-run five iron out of the park against his long-ago mates.

Loup had actually just about extricated himself with a clean inning when the roof fell in, in the person of human baseball target Brandon Guyer. After Ramirez led off with an infield single, Loup induced a smooth 6-4-3 double play before facing Guyer, who makes a tidy living getting various uniform parts brushed by moderately inside pitches. This time it was his left knee, or was it his right foot? Nobody could tell, even with the review, so in the absence of countervailing evidence he was awarded a decidedly cheap base. Abraham Almonte followed with a clean single to right, Guyer stopping at second, and that set the stage for Gomes’ Tiger Woods moment at the plate.

So when you look at the final score of 6-0, and who pitched for each team, it all looks like a forgone conclusion.

But it definitely wasn’t for most of the way. Just ask Mike Bolsinger.

He’s now given the Jays’ management a bit of a problem. What do they do with him, out of options, when Aaron Sanchez comes off the DL for a weekend start, especially with Joe Biagini already lined up for a second, longer start this weekend as well?

If I were a Jays’ reliever with options left, I think I might consider packing my bags for the shuffle off to Buffalo, because Mike Bolsinger just showed us all that he deserves to stay on this team, at least for now.

As great a game as Toronto turned in tonight, you have to start with Edwin.

I’ve always thought it was about his face, this love we Blue Jays’ fans have for Edwin Encarnacion. It’s a wise face, philosophical. It’s a sweet face, cherubic. It’s a face that lights up the whole stadium when it breaks into a smile.

As much as we respect the work ethic and achievement of Jose Bautista, his is the face of a warrior. In the heat of the moment or not, there’s nothing warm and fuzzy coming from Jose’s mien. But Edwin’s is the face of a friend, a brother, a beloved uncle.

For me, the best moment of last night’s emotional return to Toronto by Edwin as a member of the Cleveland team belied some typical inanity from our blathering broadcast crew.

It was the second inning, his first at bat, and Edwin, after being saluted by the crowd, had stepped into the box, lashed at the first pitch from Marcus Stroman, and hit a vicious shot off the pitcher’s glove that deflected to Ryan Goins at short, too late to get Edwin at first as he reached on an infield single. Buck and Tabby had just finished agreeing that, all sentiment aside, these guys were all pros, and once they got between the lines and the umpire called “play ball”, they’d be all business on the field.

Then Edwin and his old pal Jose Bautista turned the announcers’ platitudes upside down. Jose Ramirez stepped in on the left side and bounced one past Justin Smoak into right for a single. As Bautista raced in to pick up the ball, Edwin improbably rounded second and took a few steps toward third, as if to challenge Bautista’s arm. Of course he pulled up short while Bautista rifled a one-hopper dead to the bag at third. Trotting back to second, Edwin beamed a big grin out to Jose, and Jose’s fierce beak cracked into an answering laugh.

Not everything stops between the lines.

There was, of course, a ball game to be played last night, and leaving aside the significance of Edwin’s return to the house where he became a star, important story lines were rife.

How would Marcus Stroman perform after his tightness-abbreviated last outing in New York?

Would the Blue Jays continue their puzzling batting slump, which is so easy to relate back to their complete power outage against these self-same Clevelands in last year’s ALCS? (In fact, of course, the slump has endured unabated since at least the beginning of September last year.)

Would Toronto recover a measure of over-all respect after the humiliating elimination by Cleveland?

Would Trevor Bauer’s pitching overshadow the lingering gory image of his sliced digit drip-drip-dripping blood down his pant leg to mix in a ghoulish paste with the red earth of the pitching mound?

Interestingly, for a match steeped in such moment, and one that was never a given for the Jays, this game was somehow less fraught than so many of the close ones have been.

Sure, Stroman was having a bit of trouble getting his pitches down to his safety zone, and sure Bauer’s curve ball was at its mesmerising best.

But hard-hit balls by Santana and Kipnis found gloves deep in the field in the first, and the Encarnacion/Ramirez base knocks in the second were followed by a weak opposite-field fly from Lonnie Chisenhall, and a tailor-made double play ball by Yandy Diaz, and by the third Stroman was starting to cook, 2 grounders and his only strikeout of the night on thirteen pitches.

And he was pitching on the lead by the third, thanks to Ryan Goins seriously punishing a two-out mistake by Bauer. Bauer had started the third with a gift punchout of Steve Pearce by home plate umpire Mark Ripperger, whose faulty and biased outside corner, favouring Bauer and punishing Stroman, was continually shown up by PitchCast. Then Devon Travis did what he does best, line one into the gap in the opposite field for a double. Darwin Barney hit the ball on the nose, but right at Bauer who flipped to first for the second out.

This brought up Goins, who, as of tonight, has now started more games at shortstop than the injured Troy Tulowitzki. Despite his relative lack of success on balls in play, Goins has never swung harder and with better purpose than in this recent string of games. And when Bauer left one up and in, Goins pole-axed a two-run tater, and when he pole-axes a tater (messy image, that), he does a real job on it. StatsCast had it projected to 439 feet, more than enough insurance to reach any part of the park, let alone dead right field.

After the enlivened Stroman mopped the third, his boys went at it and picked up a couple more for him in the bottom of the inning. Kevin Pillar, who was fighting Bauer’s curve unsuccessfully all night, led off with a walk. Bautista popped up again; will his nightmare never end? Kendrys Morales followed with a double to right, Pillar stopping at three. This brought Justin Smoak to the plate, and I have to say it: at this time, in this crazy season, is anyone now seriously questioning the decision to resign Smoak for two years in the middle of last year?

Smoak, facing that crazy extreme shift to the right that they put on when he’s hitting left, turned in a veteran at bat, a pro right to the end. Sawed off on a high, inside 2-1 fast ball, he muscled a broken bat dying quail into short right for a single. Pillar trotted home easily, of course, but what about the ponderous Morales, steaming around third with a daring green light from Luis Rivera? Abraham Almonte was charging fast, and things looked dire for Morales, so Smoak forced Cleveland’s hand by heading for second, giving himself up to the easy cutoff, Almonte to Santana to Lindor, to protect Morales’ run.

Well done, Smoaky, and as it turned out we were damned glad to have that run!

There was no more to be had off Bauer for the night, as he toiled on through the sixth racking up the amazing total of 125 pitches. He had to pitch around some defensive sloppiness in the fourth, when the usually sure-handed Lindor bobbled the transfer and missed a sure double play on a good feed from his pitcher, and then Almonte, losing it in the lights in his first game under the TV Dome, had Luke Maile’s liner clank off his glove for his first hit as a Blue Jay. Not to worry, though, because that brought Kevin Pillar to the plate, and three tantalizing hooks later the inning was over.

For all of his six innings of shutout ball on only 94 pitches, Marcus Stroman needed a lot more help from his friends than Bauer, and boy, did he get it. There had already been the double play in the second. Then there was the fourth, when a sparkling grab of a Jason Kipnis liner by Goins almost led to Lindor being doubled off first. Stroman then got the ground ball to Barney he needed for the second DP behind him.

Sometimes it’s not enough to get the ground ball when you need it. Sometimes you need a little extra help, and Ryan Goins again provided it for Stroman in the fifth, when he found himself in another jam. Lonnie Chisenhall led off the inning by stroking a solid single into centre. Stroman compounded his problem by walking Yandy Diaz in a seven-pitch at-bat, and then bouncing one to Almonte, with Chisenhall taking third on a tough passed ball charged against Maile.

The pressure eased a bit when Almonte popped out to short for the first out. This brought the catcher, Roberto Perez, to the plate, and Goins back into the limelight. Perez hit a comebacker to the mound, a sure third double play for Stroman. But the pitcher, who usually fields his position like the shortstop he used to be, rushed a high throw to second. Goins had the bag, but the throw was high to his glove side. He calmly stretched like the first baseman he sometimes is, held the bag with his foot until he had the ball, cleared the sliding Diaz and, knowing his runner coming to first, finished the play with ease to Smoak. Cleveland manager Terry Francona briefly considered reviewing whether Goins had held the bag, but then waved it off.

Were it not for the heroics of Kevin Pillar to save Stroman’s bacon in the sixth, this would have been Goins’ night totally. But Pillar showed once again that a funk at the plate doesn’t mean you can’t give your all on the other side of the ball. As if Kevin Pillar ever failed to give his all in the field.

Protecting the 4-0 lead, Stroman was victimized right off the bat, the bat of Carlos Santana, that is. To be fair to Steve Pearce, he was never advertised as the defensive answer in left field for Toronto. A career infielder, his record in left was pretty thin coming in, but he’d passed every test to date, and had made some good plays, to boot. But Santana, hitting left against Stroman, sliced one high and deep toward the left-field corner. Pearce got a good jump on it, in fact, a great jump, as he over-ran the ball while hitting the wall. He reached back at the last minute in an awkward twist, but the ball hit the wall and bounced away for a double.

Stroman did his best to get out of it by himself. He got Francisco Lindor on a short fly to Pearce in left. He got Jason Kipnis on a groundout to Smoak at first, with Santana moving to third. Then he perhaps wisely walked Edwin. This brought Jose Ramirez to the plate with two on and two outs. No matter what, clearly Ramirez would be the last batter Stroman would face on this night.

The first pitch to Ramirez was down and in. The second one was a cutter, low and in but in the zone. Ramirez, who is as dangerous a hitter as Cleveland has, absolutely smoked it on a direct line over Pillar’s head. Pillar instantly turned in perfect line with the ball—I’m sure StatsCast’s “route efficiency” metric for his catch would be almost perfect. He raced back, appearing to be losing an impossible race with the flight of the ball.

Then, just short of the warning track, he launched, still in a direct line to the fence and with the ball. He sailed, he stretched, and the ball miraculously stuck in his outstretched glove as he landed chest down on the track.

Of course the place went crazy. The fans paid tribute with bows and salaams. Pillar back-bumped Stroman at the edge of the dugout, and was swarmed by his mates when he arrived.

If you were doing a top-ten all-time Super Kevin super play ranking, this catch, given the situation in the game and the pressure involved, would have to be top three. I leave it to the metrics geeks to sort that out. All I know is that it was a moment of pure beauty.

Sometimes, according to the deep thinkers, the past is prelude. In this case, the past was everything, even though there were some seriously tense moments still to be endured before the Jays nailed this one down.

We don’t need to spend much time on the Jays’ ups after Bauer left. Zach McAllister mopped up for Cleveland, and was quite the entertainer, wild, wooly, dangerous (just ask Bautista, who had to dive for his life in the eighth), and virtually unhittable. He walked two, struck out four, and only threw 22 pitches for six outs.

Danny Barnes took over for Stroman, and had a great seventh, retiring Chisenhall, Diaz, and Almonte on 13 pitches. Manager John Gibbons sent him back out for the eighth, and why wouldn’t he, but it just wasn’t the same.

While Buck and Tabby blathered about Barnes being a real “strike-thrower”, the pitcher was issuing a five-pitch walk to number nine hitter Roberto Perez. This brought Santana back to the plate, and this time he doubled to right, sending Perez to third and Barnes to the bench, as Gibbie brought Joe Smith in to put out the fire.

Which Smith did, but not before some very strange happenings happened at the ol’ ballyard. Smith jumped ahead of the left-handed Lindor, who fouled off two of his nasty sidearm down-and-aways, but then he tried to slip a slider by him on the inner half, and Lindor got enough of it to hit it safely into right.

Perez scored on the hit, but Lindor got hung up between first and second, while Santana held at third. It looked like the same tactic used earlier by Smoak, but it wasn’t, because of one big difference: this time there was nobody out, and with Kipnis and Encarnacion coming up, you don’t get hung up on purpose. This was a flat-out mistake, but Lindor got away with it, because once the Jays decided to concede Santana’s run, they made the one mistake they’d make in this game, and botched the rundown.

Somehow, Devon Travis sort of didn’t get out of Lindor’s way when he didn’t have the ball, and somehow, in the opinion of crew chief Vic Carapazza, he sort of impeded Lindor on the base path, though without making contact with him, so no how was Lindor going to be out on the play, but rather was awarded second base. And no how was John Gibbons going to stay in the game after that travesty, so he shouldn’t have bothered trying to be polite about it anyway. He did try, though, didn’t he? Didn’t he?

So with Lindor on second, nobody out, and the score 4-2 for us, Smith had to face Kipnis, Edwin, and Ramirez. Gulp. Isn’t this why we watch baseball? So Kipnis grounded out to Smoak at first and Lindor managed to find his way to third without bumping into anyone. And here came Edwin to the plate.

It was the best of times, the worst of times.

And how many times have we seen this quintessential matchup between a tough pitcher and the oh-so-still Edwin? And yet, this, this was all new, for he is not ours, no longer the repository of our hopes and dreams. His familiar classic stance is no longer dressed in royal Blue Jay blue, but in a darker, alien blue.

As much as we love him, we want him to lose this battle. Joe Smith is new to us, but he is ours, and we want him to prevail. It is a classic battle, one for the ages. Edwin swings over a sinker. He lays off a sinker. He swings over a sinker, and fouls one off. He lays off a sinker. 2 and 2. Then he fouls off three in a row, in the dirt, one of them off his foot; he walks around to shake it off. Finally, finally Smith throws him that killer, sweeping slider, the one that starts low in the zone and then just dives and dives, generally in the direction of Lake Ontario. That was the trick: a mighty, reaching whiff, and Smith had won the battle and sent Edwin back to the sad confines of the enemy dugout.

As much as Goins’ homer, as much as Pillar’s incredible catch, that moment was the ball game. It hardly mattered that Smith went on to fan Ramirez on a 3-2 pitch with the sinker that couldn’t fool Edwin. When the mighty parrot failed to appear, the game was done.

After Zach McAllister finished making mince meat of the Jays’ hitters in the bottom of the eighth, the rejuvenated Roberto Osuna came on in the ninth and, no drama this time, finished off Cleveland on nine pitches, fanning Chisenhall on a 1-2 pitch and getting weak grounders from Diaz and Almonte to Travis to ring down the curtain. There was, alas, on this night no Russell Martin to play the knock-knock game with Osuna.

Retribution for the dismal playoff loss last fall? Sure. Signs of hope for better days for Toronto? Absolutely.

But remember this: on Edwin’s night, he shared the stage with three young knights named Goins, Stroman, and Pillar, and some guy named Joe Smith.

Note from yer humble scribe: I would not blame anyone for assuming that I have stopped chronicling the Jays because they are struggling so badly. Rather than being lost in a miasma of misery, unable to face the grim facts, I have been unable to write because I have developed an obscure skin condition, one of the side effects of which is the (temporary, I hope) loss of feeling in the tips of my fingers. When I dispatch my “D” finger, for example, it may land on “D”, or it may land on any one of the keys around it. There ensues lots of backtracking to fix typos. Nevertheless, like Elizabeth Warren, I have decided to persist. Today’s heroic effort by the pitching staff seems a good place to start.

Desperate times call for desperate measures. Jays’ management, determined not to derail Joe Biagini’s career by yo-yoing him between starting and relieving, finally saw their hands forced by circumstances, and slotted him in today to start the rubber game of this weekend’s series in Tampa Bay.

Of course Biagini was brilliant. We all knew he would be. He’s been golden from the moment he first took the mound for Toronto when he made the team out of spring training last year. So why not in his first start?

And really, what were the choices? Two fifths of the rotation on the disabled list. Marcus Stroman inexplicably ineffective and short in his last outing against the Yankees. The earnest and possibly talented Casey Lawrence not quite ready for prime time. Mat Latos giving one solid fill-in start, and then imploding beyond all belief the next time out, followed by his mysterious if not surprising departure from the roster.

So who do ya call when there’s nobody left? Just call Joe. Call they did, and there he was, chest-tapping, belly-billowing jersey wanting to be free, baggy-pantsed (his whole persona is kinda baggy, isn’t it?), off-kilter grin bemusing, the little kid who fell asleep in his trundle bed one night, and woke up the next day on a major league mound throwing to Russell Martin with Corey Dickinson standing in at the plate.

But when Joe Biagini threw the first pitch today he was all business. Oh, my, he was all business, wasn’t he?

Mind you, he wasn’t going to pitch a complete game, not fresh out of the pen. But he gave us four beautiful innings, and allowed a little hope to stir in hearts almost lost to despair.

Here’s what he did in four innings: first inning: Dickinson ground-out, Brad Miller weak opposite-field fly, Evan Longoria fanned, 13 pitches.

Second inning: Logan Morrison ground-out, star to Justin Smoak for handling a tough hop, Steven Souza, in his first appearance against Biagini since he was plunked in Toronto, screwing himself out of his shoes fanning on the Biagini curve ball, Colby Rasmus wisely deciding to admire the same pitch for strike three, so as not to embarrass himself.

Third inning: the fatal cheap run that has done in Toronto so many times this season.

Daniel Robertson grounding out on the first pitch, but Kevin Kiermaier hitting a sharp hopper to second that Devon Travis fumbles, letting Kiermaier reach. Jesus Sucre hits a topper in front of the plate that serves as a bunt. With two outs, Dickerson cashes Kiermaier with the unearned run, on the first hit allowed by Biagini. Miller grounds out to strand Dickerson.

Fourth inning: Longoria weak fly to left. Morrison wicked grounder up the middle but Ryan Goins in the shift makes a great back-handed stop and throws him out from his knees. Souza single to centre (Score: Biagini 1, Souza 1). Rasmus looks for that curve ball, flails at heater for strike three.

The line: 4 innings pitched, one unearned run, 2 hits, no walks, 4 strikeouts, 52 pitches.

Buoyed by his success, Biagini’s mates were almost perfect in his stead.

Aaron Loup, one long and typically Loup-y inning: a hit batter stranded and 27 pitches. (How do you throw 27 pitches to four batters and get three of them out?)

Ryan Tepera, two innings, one walk, four strikeouts, and 32 pitches, and I’m pretty sure Ryan Tepera has seen the last of Buffalo.

Joe Smith, one inning, one strikeout, 9 pitches, and an assist to Zeke Carrera for a nice running catch of a weak Dickerson flare. The side-armer has earned late-inning responsibility, for sure.

Roberto Osuna, a typical save. Longoria pops out on the first pitch. Morrison goes down in three—four pitches, two outs. Starts over-throwing and loses Souza on a 3-2 heater over his head. Two quick strikes to Rasmus and a cheap broke-back single to centre. Blows the rookie Robertson away on a 96 mph heater right down the pike.

So on the day, five Toronto pitchers give up one unearned run, three hits, two walks, and strike out eleven.

But hold on a minute, you rightly say. This was a ball game, not a pitching exhibition. What about the other side of the coin?

Well, Tampa righty Alex Cobb was either brilliant, or the Jays’ bats stunk again. I suspect a bit of both is the truth. Cobb was efficient and effective, if a little wild and wooly. He went eight innings and gave up two runs on four hits, and damn near won the game 1-zip thanks to Travis’ error on Kiermaier.

Let’s pause for a moment on Devon Travis. Likeable as he is, and with as much potential at the plate as he has, am I the only observer who thinks he’s not a major-league second baseman? He makes all of the routine plays, and even some great ones, but he almost never makes the crucial ones. Today is a case in point: the Kiermaier grounder was a tough but routine play, but Kiermaier’s speed was in Travis’ head. Also, twice in the last week he has fielded a sharp grounder with the infield in and played the ball to the plate with an out very possible. Both times his seventy-foot throw pulled the catcher away from the runner, allowing the runner to throw.

Can Travis become a reliable big-league second sacker? I don’t know, but with the team in a slump like this, his .15-something average is hardly justification for continuing his on-the-job training in Toronto. I’ve said it before and I’ll say it again: when Tulo is healthy, Goins has to play second for the Jays to win the close ones.

Back to the game,the top of the Jays’ first set the tone for most of the day. Kevin Pillar, continually brilliant in the midst of all this adversity, smacked Cobb’s first pitch into left for a base hit. Then he cheekily stole the first base so far this year off Jesus Sucre while Jose Bautista took a curve ball for strike three. Then he watched at second while Russell Martin took a curve ball for strike three. Then he trotted in to get his glove after Kendrys Morales flew out to centre.

Justin Smoak hit the first pitch of the second on the screws, but right at Morrison at first. Ryan Goins worked a walk to lead off the third, but Darwin Barney hit into a DP on his first pitch. Three up, three down in the fourth after the Rays took the lead. Pearce was hit by a pitch in the fifth but died at first.

Then, Barney led off the sixth by flying out to centre, but Pillar–god bless him, eh–ripped one off Longoria’s glove at third into the Tampa bullpen for a double. The frustrated Jose Bautista just missed a hanging curve and popped out to Longoria in foul territory. This time Martin didn’t wait around to be rung up on a curve ball. He hit the first pitch he saw from Cobb so hard into left that it bounced in front of Rasmus and deflected off his glove while Pillar scored the tying run.

It hardly mattered that Morales grounded out again: Biagini was off the hook for the loss, and the lowly Jays had a chance.

It took Cobb only six pitches to maneuver the seventh, but the signs were there: both Smoak (yet again) and Pearce hit the ball hard, but they were right-at-ems again.

Then, in the eighth, it happened. After Ryan Goins grounded out to second, Darwin Barney, of all people, punished Cobb for throwing a 1-0 fast ball down and in and smoked it deep into the left field seats for his first homer of the year. Cobb went on to walk Pillar, but retired Bautista and Martin to finish off his day’s work, down 2-1 and on the hook for the loss.

Maybe too bad for Alex Cobb, but how many times has it happened to Toronto pitchers this year?

So, still mired in this horrendous batting slump, our troubled heroes will make their way back to Toronto, ready or not to face the Indians and the lost Edwin for the first time since their loss to Cleveland in last year’s ALCS.

If you’re looking for optimism, Toronto went 3-3 on the tough road trip to New York and Tampa, and if you throw in the previous weekend in Toronto against Tampa, they’re now five for their last nine.

Light at the end of the tunnel?

Baseball’s a funny game, eh?

Wednesday night in New York it looked like the Jays were riding high to take the series from the league-leading Yankees, despite the havoc the Baby Bombers had wreaked on Mat Latos the night before.

Not only did they have Marcus Stroman going for them in front of his hometown crowd, but he had a 4-0 lead even before throwing a pitch, thanks to a two-out RBI single by Justin Smoak, followed by a two-out, three-run homer off the bat of Steve Pearce. Embarrassment of riches in these mean times!

But we know how that turned out, and it wasn’t pretty. So the Jays found themselves heading for an off-day in sunny Florida, prior to taking on the pesky Tampa Bay Rays inside the abominable tin can of the orange juice dome.

Worse, first up for the Rays in the weekend’s starting rotation would be Chris Archer, and that’s never a good thing.

And it certainly was not a good thing for our heroes on this night.

Archer, who presents on the mound like a cross between Spider- and Plastic Man, was, as usual, all elbows, knees, and spiky dreads, his pitch selection as eclectic and effective as his look. You’d sit on the wipe-out slider, and he’d smoke you with mid-90s on the corners. Guess at heat and you’d fall on your face chasing the breaking ball. Worst of all, I think, if I had to hit against him, would be the preternatural calm on his face as he goes about showing you who’s in charge. Most of the time, he looks like a bored high school kid at morning assembly, all the while playing with the stink bomb he’s about to release.

Tonight this went on for six innings, during which he gave up one run on three hits with no walks while striking out eleven. The three hits? Kevin Pillar led off the game with a bloop single into centre, but after Archer punched out Jose Bautista, Russell Martin grounded into a double play.

The other two hits came in the fifth, after a shaky Francisco Liriano had yielded a 3-0 lead to the Rays. Who knew that in signing Kendrys Morales Toronto had acquired a potent secret weapon against Mr. Archer? Morales’ stats going in against the lean righty were off the charts, and they only got better after tonight. Fanned leading off the second, Morales led off the fifth with a double to left. Justin Smoak crossed up the shift and singled to left to score Morales and cut the Rays’ lead to 3-1. Steve Pearce hit the ball hard to Kiermaier, but Archer struck out Ryan Goins and got Devon Travis to ground out to end the inning.

The lanky righty reasserted himself in the sixth, and could have left seven defenders on the bench because he didn’t need them. He fanned Chris Coghlan, knocked down Pillar’s hard comebacker, jumped on the ball like a cat and threw him out, and then caught Bautista looking.

So Archer came out for the seventh, his dominance absolutely restored, to be the prime figure in what we could call [Manager Kevin] Cash’s Folly. Archer issued his only walk of the game, on a 3-2 count to Russell Martin leading off, bringing guess who, Mr. Morales, to the plate once again.

Chase Whitley was ready to go in the pen. Ball four to Martin was Archer’s pitch number 102. Everybody in the ball park expected to see the hook for Archer. Everybody at home expected to see the hook for Archer. Dozens of Macedonian teen fake news creators paused over their laptops, expecting Kevin Cash to emerge from the dugout. The only person in the entire world who didn’t think Cash was going to yank Archer was Cash, and that surely included Archer himself.

So Archer’s great night ended on pitch number 107, a 3-1 fast ball down and on the inner half that jumped off Morales’ bat and headed for the seats, erasing Archer’s lead, and, for all practical purposes, his night’s work.

Then in came Whitley, to retire the side in order.

Francisco Liriano spent the entire month of April whittling his ERA down from the horrendous 135.00 that he recorded in his first start on April seventh against these same Tampa Bay Rays, when he retired only one batter while giving up five earned runs. Miraculously, by the start of tonight’s game, he had it down to 3.97. He even beat the Rays in Toronto last week, though they pushed him to 99 pitches in only five innings.

But there’s something about Liriano pitching in the Tampa Tin Can. He just couldn’t find the plate again tonight, though he managed to dodge the bullet for three innings. But after three, locked, if you will, in a scoreless tie with Archer, he had managed to strand two hits and three walks while watching his pitch count balloon to 62.

Things came to a head, and Liriano’s shaky start came to an end, after he fanned Rickie Weeks to lead off the fourth. Rookie Daniel Robertson took him deep. Derek Norris lasered one over Pillar’s head and over the fence in centre in about a nanosecond. Pillar might have caught it with a leap at the fence, but he didn’t have a chance to get back in time.

Even at this point, Liriano had a path to staying in the game. Peter Bourjos grounded out to Ryan Goins for the second out, so he was one out from walking off down 2-0, with nobody on base to boot. Then the roof fell in. Tim Beckham singled to left. He hit Kevin Kiermaier on the left hand. He walked Evan Longoria. He walked Steven Souza, forcing in Beckham with the third run. That was it for Liriano. He had thrown 96 pitches in three and two thirds innings. Only 51 of them were strikes.

Manager Gibbons brought Danny Barnes into the game, and in perhaps the key moment of the night, surrounded by Rays, facing Corey Dickinson, Barnes blew the dangerous left-hander away on a high, hard 1-2 pitch to end the uprising.

So the Jays’ bullpen took over the 3-1 deficit, and could only hope to hold on until Archer ran out of gas, or until the struggling Jays’ hitters might, improbably, figure him out.

Except for a number of, um, obvious differences, you couldn’t tell Barnes from Archer while he was in there: the big whiff of Dickerson, two and a third innings pitched, two strikeouts, and only 22 pitches. That, of course, brings us to the seventh, which marked the end of Archer, followed by the Rays retaking the lead in the home half on a cheap run that victimized Dominic Leone, who’d replaced Barnes on the hill for the Jays.

The only mistake Leone was made was giving up a leadoff single to Evan Longoria, hardly a major faux pas for any AL East pitcher. The disaster came next, when Chris Coghlan booted a sure double play ball from Souza. Gibbie opted for the matchup, calling on Aaron Loup to face Dickerson, who beat out a weak topper to short to load the bases. Loup fanned Rickie Weeks for the long-awaited first out, but with the bases loaded the rookie Robertson grounded out to Smoak, who had no chance for a play at the plate, Longoria finally scoring. Derek Norris flied out to right, but Loup left as the pitcher of record, though the unearned run meant Leone would be charged with the loss if the score stood.

But, it didn’t. Tampa’s bullpen blinked, the Jays’ didn’t, the Jays’ hitters raised some dust, and Morales delivered a second thunderous blast for the coup de gràce, and the game was in the bag for Toronto.

Chase Whitley, having settled the Jays’ hash after Morales’ blast knocked Archer out of the game, came back out for the eighth inning, now in gift of a 4-3 Tampa lead, which didn’t last much longer than Whitley not that it was all Whitley’s fault. Devon Travis led off the eighth with a drive to centre that clanked off the glove of Peter Bourjos and was generously scored a double.

Chris Coghlan then took a shot at redeeming the error he’d committed earlier by driving one deep to right centre, where Steven Souza made a near-Pillar quality running catch, with Travis smartly tagging and moving up to third.

The loud out brought Kevin Cash running for relief, and he called in Jumbo Diaz to face the real Kevin Pillar. Diaz quickly got two strikes on Pillar, but served up a slider that got too much of the plate, and the hot-hitting leadoff man ripped it past Longoria into the corner in left for a double that tied the game and took Leone off the hook.

But the surging Jays weren’t going to settle for a tie. Diaz froze Bautista for a called third strike, but walked Russell Martin, bringing Morales back to the plate with two on and two outs. Morales, who is beginning to resemble his predecessor with his flair for the dramatic, then put paid to any Tampa hopes of pulling out a late win with his second home run, and his third, fourth, and fifth RBIs in the last two innings.

In his second curious decision of the night, Kevin Cash brought in the left-handed Justin Marks to turn Justin Smoak around to his preferred right side, and Smoak made no mistake with the first pitch he saw from Marks, hitting it ten rows deep over the left-centre field fence for an 8-4 Toronto lead.

After that it hardly mattered that Marks retired Steve Pearce to end the inning and stranded a walk and a base hit to keep the Jays off the board in the ninth.

What did matter was that the Rays were done. Joe Smith struck out the side on 13 pitches in the bottom of the eighth, and Roberto Osuna set down three in the ninth in a non-save situation on only ten pitches.

Chris Archer kept the Rays in this one through the force of his brilliance, until he was asked to go one hitter too far, and that changed everything.

It also gave Toronto a very promising and much needed boost at the start of their weekend on the delightful Gulf Coast.

You’ll recall that for yesterday’s post I modified the title of the popular Lemony Snicket series of gruesomely sad tweens’ novels, A Series of Unfortunate Events, for my title. But this time I have to use it straight up. Unfortunate events indeed.

After Tuesday’s amazing leap-froggin’-Coghlan, pinch-doublin’-Stroman extra inning thriller, you could have been excused for having a bit of optimism for the first time this year.

Toronto was 3 and 2 with two games to go on their first tough road swing of the year, and the players must have felt like they had some momentum going for once.

I don’t know whether it was the seemingly spurious early cancellation of Wednesday night’s game, forcing the scheduling of a day-night doubleheader on Thursday, but the euphoria of Tuesday night’s win, while it might have carried the Jays for a while in the first game Thursday, gradually dissipated over the course of a very long day and night, and by its end the troubled crew of players who just couldn’t put it together were on their way home to Toronto having been swept in the doubleheader, with the promise of 3-2 turned into the reality of 3-4, and the deeper reality that there seems no end in sight to Toronto’s disappointing start for 2017.

It’s true there were no great omens to be found in the pitching matchups for Thursday. The Cards had staff bellwether Carlos Martinez going in the day game, and Adam Wainwright, admittedly no longer the Adam Wainwright of old but still an imposing puzzle on the mound, going in the night game. Meanwhile, it was fill-in day for the Jays, who, in the absence of Jay Happ and Aaron Sanchez, were forced to turn once more to the “Buffalo boys”, Matt Latos and Casey Lawrence.

Game one of the day was an object lesson in not making any bets based on the perceived merits of the starting pitchers. Latos, showing much better command than in his first start, despite walking four, went pitch-for-pitch with Martinez. This is not to say that there were any long strings of batters retired by either pitcher.

Both pitchers went six innings. Martinez gave up five hits and three walks, Latos gave up three hits and five walks. The only real differences between the two were that Latos never had a clean inning, while Martinez had two, and Martinez, as could have been expected, doubled Latos’ strikeout total, 8-4.

Er, except for the fact it was the Jays who nicked Marinez for three runs, while Latos kept the Cardinals off the board, so that when both starters finished up after six innings, Toronto turned a 3-0 lead over to the bullpen.

The Jays struck early when Russell Martin took Martinez out over the centre field fence leading off the second.

The 1-0 lead held until the top of the sixth, when Martinez’ command failed him, and he hurt his own cause with an ill-advised and errant pickoff attempt at second. But it came down to unlikely hero Ryan Goins grounding a two-out base hit up the middle to score two and extend the Jays’ lead to 3-0. The inning went down like this: Jose Bautista worked a walk on a 3-2 pitch. Justin Smoak popped up. Russell Martin walked on a 3-2 pitch. Chris Coghlan fanned. Then Martinez carelessly tossed to second, as if Bautista was a threat to steal, a move that caught his mates by surprise. It allowed Bautista and Martin to advance to second and third. On a 3-2 count to Devon Travis, Martinez sort of intentionally walked him to set up the two-out force-all-around, and bring the presumably weaker stick, Goins, to the plate.

But it’s best not to take Goins for granted these days, and he delivered Bautista and Martin with a clutch hit that stretched Toronto’s lead to 3-0.

With the callup Latos at 82 shutout pitches, Manager John Gibbons figured he’d gotten the best from his starter that he could, and decided that six innings was more than enough. Martinez had fussed his way to 97 pitches through six, so by the start of the seventh inning the game was in the hands of the bullpens of both teams.

The Card’s bullpen was the first to crack. Manager Mike Matheny went to Tyler Lyons, a left-hander who surrounded himself with trouble immediately, but pitched out of it relatively unscathed. Kevin Pillar led off with a single. Zeke Carrera walked. Lyons hit Bautista to load them up for Justin Smoak, who promptly delivered Pillar with a sacrifice fly, extending the lead to four. Carrera was also able to advance to third on the play. But the rising stopped with one run as Lyons steadied and struck out Russell Martin and Darwin Barney hitting for Coghlan, thus escaping a first-and-third with one out situation.

First out of the bullpen for Toronto was Joe Biagini, and the Cardinals finally got on the board against him. With one out, Jose Martinez singled to centre. Kolten Wong hit a grounder to Devon Travis’ glove side, and he wisely chose not to try for the double play, taking the out at first with Martinez taking second. This brought Randal Grichuk to the plate, and he came through with the two-out single that scored Martinez with St. Louis’ first run. But, like the Jays in the top of the inning, the Cardinals lost the chance to do more damage when Grichuk tried to advance to second on the play and was cut down by a well-executed cut-off play, Pillar to Smoak to Goins.

So, 4-1 to the eighth, and, as I like to do, time to count down the outs. Lyons came back out for the Cards in the top of the eighth and retired the side in order, though a couple of the outs were pretty loud. Joe Smith, who is gaining more confidence from Manager Gibbons by the appearance, was handed the ball for the eighth. Perhaps it was an omen that the low hard drive leadoff hitter Dexter Fowler hit to centre popped out of Kevin Pillar’s glove as he hit the ground, against all expectations, but there he was on second, to be delivered later in the inning by a Matt Carpenter single to right, so we went to the ninth still up 4-2.

So, 4-2, Osuna time; lookin’ pretty good, right? Well, yeah, until Yadi Molina hammered Osuna’s first pitch into left for a double, bringing the tying run to the plate with nobody out. But Osuna settled in, and soon enough Molina was still at second with two outs. He had to hold when Jose Martinez grounded out to short, and then Osuna fanned Kolten Wong. This brought Grichuk to the plate, who had victimized Biagini in the seventh for the Jays’ first run, but ended the inning with a bad baserunning mistake.

This time he victimized Osuna, and made no mistake about it. On one and one, Osuna left a 94 mph four-seamer out over the plate and Grichuk extended, getting all of it, and the Toronto lead nurtured so well the whole game was gone. It mattered little that Osuna ended the innng by fanning Dexter Fowler because the cat was out of the bag, and the chorus of concern over Osuna’s sagging fortunes started to grow louder.

It’s my sense that when you have a blown save in an away game it pretty much marks the end of the road, and that was the case in this one. The Jays went quickly and quietly in the tenth and eleventh, wasting a pinch-hit single by Kendrys Morales in the eleventh when Kevin Pillar hit into a double play.

On the other hand, the Cards knocked at the door in the tenth and Dominic Leone was lucky to escape with the game still tied, getting Jose Martinez on a fly to right after the Cards had loaded the bases with two broken-bat singles and an intentional pass to Molina.

Ryan Tepera came in to pitch the eleventh and was doomed from the start, as Kolten Wong led off by pulling an 0-1 fast ball right down the line that rattled around in the corner long enough for him to reach third. It would take a miracle to get out of this, but they were fresh out of miracles at the Hope Store on this day.

Following traditional strategy, the Jays put Grichuk and Fowler on, and pitched to Aledmay Diaz, who provided temporary relief by hitting a short fly to Zeke Carrera in left, with the Cards wisely holding Wong at third. This brought the left-handed Matt Carpenter to the plate, and the left-handed J.P. Howell, fresh off the disabled list, into the game.

Howell went to 3 and 2 on Carpenter. With the spectre of a second walkoff walk of the season looming, Carpenter threw a dinky curve that cut the heart of the plate. Carpenter timed it and parked it, unfortunately for the Cardinals wasting three extra runs they could have saved for the second game. Final score 8-4, now 6 wins and 15 losses and counting, and I don’t have the heart to count how many we should have won.

Lesson from today’s game one? Don’t blow a save in the other guy’s yard.

As soon as I saw the lineups for game two of today’s day-nighter I thought, okay, Gibbie’s resting important people, Casey Lawrence is pitching, and this game is gone already.

Though Toronto made it close at the end, I was right.

Look, I understand the basic principles of setting your lineup each game. Sure, double headers are hard, especially on catchers. So I was fine with Jarrod Saltalamacchia behind the plate. Fine, that is, with someone who’s leading the league in strikeouts and is zero for whatever in throwing out runners. Russell Martin wasn’t going to catch this game and that was that. But his bat was starting to get hot. Why not third base again? We got away with it Tuesday night; what’s to lose?

And why rest Bautista? In case you haven’t noticed, despite his hitting slump, he’s been as frisky as a young foal this spring, and surely would have been ready to answer the bell this time. Absent a stated reason for his sitting this one out, he should have been in there.

So we start with this black hole of strikeout prospects Salty and Steve Pearce hitting in the five-six holes, and you can just imagine the rallies going a-glimmering.

The thing is, Manager John Gibbons was really restricted in his pitching. I get that. He used six relievers in the first game, albeit some with a very light pitch count. And the Jays had a stretch of six games in six days coming up. Gibbie had to start Casey Lawrence and hope for innings, but he could have taken the approach of assuming the Cardinals were going to put up some numbers against Lawrence and try to stack his lineup in order to counter the Cards and turn it into a slugfest.

But—no Jose, no Martin.

Between the pitching issue and the lineup they put on the field, it was inevitable that the Jays would fall into a hole, and that’s exactly what happened. Sure, Lawrence could have been lights-out, but if he were ready to turn in a shutout, he wouldn’t be shuffling from Buffalo, would he?

On the other side of the hill, the Adam Wainwright of 2017 is not the Adam Wainwright of yore, but he’s still in the St. Louis rotation because he’s a veteran who knows how to pitch in the big leagues.

After the Jays wasted a single by Chris Coghlan in the first, the Cardinals went to work on Lawrence right away, and chalked up a big 3 in their half, though it was hardly Lawrence’s fault.

Dexter Fowler led off with a single. Shortstop Greg Garcia followed with a single to right, sending Fowler to third. Matt Carpenter, he of the walkoff grand salami in game one, hit a grounder to second that scored Fowler, but should have been a double play, except that Darwin Barney didn’t field it cleanly and had to take the out at first, Garcia advancing to second.

The Barney fumble was the first mistake Toronto made in the first. The second one can be attributed entirely to the coaching staff. With one out Garcia took off for third, and for once Saltalamacchia’s throw was good enough. But the ump called Garcia safe, and Gibbie waved off a review. The thing is, though, even the home replays had a perfect shot of Coghlan’s glove holding the ball, tagging Garcia on the helmet while his lead hand was still reaching for the bag.

So with Garcia on third when he should have been the second out, Piscotty lofted a sacrifice fly that scored Garcia. Okay, two outs, two runs in, let’s walk it off now. Um, nope. Randall Grichuk, the villain of game one, hit a teaser to third and reached with an infield single. Now there’s bad luck in the mix. With two outs, Grichuk could be off with the crack, and scored on Matt Adams’ double to left. If Grichuk doesn’t get on, Adams never comes to the plate. In the real world, though, Kolten Wong struck out to leave Adams at second, and a seriously hitting-challenged Blu Jay lineup was down 3-0 from the outset.

Like Chinese water torture, the Cardinals dripped, dripped away at Lawrence and the Jays. In the second, Dexter Fowler hit a solo homer with two outs. A big problem with Lawrence in this game was his inability to hold runners, which was coupled with Saltalamacchia’s inability to throw anyone out. In the third Piscotty walked, stole second, and scored on a single by Adams. In the fourth Lawrence let Wainwright get a leadoff base hit, and he came around to score on a broken-bat single, a walk to load the bases, and a fielder’s choice.

By the time it came to the top of the fifth, it was 6-0 St. Louis. Oh, and the Jays? It’s not like Wainwright was mowing them down, but they couldn’t come up with the base hit when they needed it. They loaded the bases in the second, just in time for Lawrence to come to the plate with one out. He hit a come-backer to the mound for the force at the plate, and Pillar flied out. In the third a one-out Zeke Carrera single was erased when Kendrys Morales hit into a double play. In the fourth they went down in order.

This brings us to the top of the fifth, with, remember, the Cards up 6-zip. Then the Jays came to life and made the game close before going back to sleep for the rest of the night. Darwin Barney led off with a double to left. Lawrence successfully bunted him to third. Kevin Pillar scored him with an infield hit. Chris Coghlan doubled to right, sending Pillar to third. Zeke Carrera struck out for the second out. That brought Kendrys Morales to the plate, and Morales brought the Jays within two with a two-out, three-run homer to right.

In the bottom of the fifth, Lawrence’s last, he finally managed to keep the Cards off the board, though he had to strand Matt Adams’ leadoff double in the process.

So at the end of five it was 6-4 Cardinals, and at the end of eight and a half, it was still 6-4, the Cards had swept the day/night double header, and taken the series. The Jays would head home with a 3-4 record on a tough road trip that could easily have been 5-2, with a little bit of luck, but there’s not a lot of luck raining down on Toronto these days.

The rest of the game? Oh, the Jays had exactly one base runner for the rest of the game. In the seventh, Devon Travis, the second last batter faced by Wainwright, singled to left. Kevin Pillar lined out to the left fielder, and Brett Cecil took over. Travis stole second and third almost at will off Cecil, but Cecil was focussed on fanning Jose Bautista, who hit for Coghlan, and popping up Carrera to the second baseman in foul territory. They had gone out in order in the sixth against Wainwright, again in the eighth against Kevin Siegrist, and the ninth against Trevor Rosenthal, who picked up the save.

As for the Jays’ bullpen, Aaron Loup managed to survive filling the bases with walks in the sixth, and then retired the side in the seventh. Danny Barnes had an adventurous ride in the eighth, but kept the Cardinals off the board, with the help of some timid base-running by the Cardinals, and an exciting tag play on the contact play at the plate. With Fowler parked at third instead of scoring on Matt Carpenter’s grounder to Morales at first, Piscotty hit a grounder to third and this time Fowler broke. But third baseman Jose Bautista (yes, that’s right; he stayed in to play third after hitting for Coghlan) made a great throw around the runner in time for Saltalamacchia to make the tag on Fowler.

You have to give Casey Lawrence credit for gritting out five innings, and saving a tired bullpen, as only Loup and Barnes had to be used and made unavailable for the first game with Tampa Bay back home tomorrow night.

Such are the small gifts you can take away from losing a doubleheader and falling to six and sixteen, heading into the last weekend in April. Can the train wreck be averted?