Long Ball Stories

One of the odder things about being a baseball writer “of a certain age”, to use the elegant French phrase, is that sometimes I am brought up short by the realization of exactly how much water has passed under the bridge.

My perception of the Los Angeles Angels, the California Angels, or the Los Angeles Angels of Anaheim, or whatever iteration of their name might be just down the road, will probably always be that it is an expansion franchise. So as the camera panned around Angel Stadium last night during the pre-game, as Buck and Pat, or Puck and Bat (better names for sports broadcasters, no?) blathered on about this and that, I suddenly noticed that they were highlighting the big logos around the stadium with the number 50 emblazoned on them. The reason for the 50 on the logos, so I learned (the twin hairdos are occasionally informative, I admit) is that this year the Angels’ franchise is celebrating the fiftieth year of its stadium, which opened for the 1966 season.

This puts Angels Stadium in the top tier of senior citizens among stadia currently in operation in the big leagues. Not only is it a shock that the franchise is 55 years old and the stadium 50, it’s also a shock that they haven’t torn down and replaced their ball park with something new and glitzy, more suitable to the Hollowood vibe that inevitably hovers over any team playing in the L.A. area. That being said, it should also be noted that when the Disney people took over the franchise, they completed a significant renovation of the park in 1997, so in that regard it’s more up-to-date than our concrete canyon on the lake.

It also made me pause to reflect on the creation of the Angels franchise, which was very much rooted in the desire of the American League owners to access the cash bonanza of the California market for baseball that had first been breeched by the more adventurous ownership of the Dodgers and Giants franchises of the National League. There were franchise moves prior to the two New York teams moving west; it’s not like they were the first. The Boston Braves had already moved to Milwaukee, the St. Louis Browns to Baltimore, and the Philadelphia A’s to Kansas City in the early fifties. But those were all nearly moribund franchises, second clubs in cities where the other franchise had become dominant. In the case of the Braves, the Brownies, as they were affectionately known, and the A’s, it was simple: move, or fold. Sadly, the whole peripatetic franchise thing erased one of the pillars of the eternal stability of baseball as it once was. And, as you are aware, only the Browns remained in Baltimore, while the Braves and A’s also fled their second homes for newer, more lucrative surroundings. If nothing else, the baseball fan of the modern age is sure to be more cynical by a large margin than the fans of those earlier, more innocent days.

But after that first wave of moves, necessary for franchise survival, the moves of the Dodgers and the Giants in 1958 were very different propositions indeed, as the two franchises both sought a wider fan base and new stadia in order to improve an already good financial situation. The general distaste among traditional baseball fans on the East Coast to the hijacking of the beloved Dodgers and Giants was to put quite a damper on the notion of moving successful franchises. From this point on, groups hoping to see a major league baseball franchise in their city would pursue the route of trying to acquire an expansion franchise. One of the first and most successful of such ventures was the pursuit by famous cowboy singer/songwriter Gene Autry of an American League franchise for Los Angeles, which resulted in the birth of the Angels in 1961, with Autry as their owner and chief executive.

Thus we have the Angels of today, one of the oldest of the “new” teams in the big leagues.

The good news that greeted the Blue Jays as they reported to the ball park in Los Angeles was that the MRI on Josh Donaldson’s hip was negative. The better news was that he was back in the lineup as the designated hitter. The best news of all was that not only did he break out of his horrendous 0 for 23 slump, but he did so with a vengeance, hitting two doubles and a single with two walks in five plate appearances.

Not coincidentally, Toronto played a very solid game on both sides of the ball to support the oh-so-reliable Jay Happ as he pitched six innings of one-run, three-hit ball to earn his nineteenth win of the season.

It was a win the Jays badly needed after their terrible showing against the Tampa Bay Rays in Toronto this week. More so, it was a modest offensive breakout that was even more badly needed after the utter hopelessness they have displayed at the plate since the beginning of September. It’s amazing how a few well-placed base hits and the odd RBI can do so much to dispel the gloom hanging over a slumping team.

Despite being twenty games below .500 after tonight’s loss to the Jays, the Angels represent a difficult and at times dangerous challenge. First off, you should score some runs off their pitching. They have had a horrendous string of injuries to their pitching staff, and have lost most of their pencilled-in rotation from the beginning of the year to season-ending injuries. They’ve lost their closer, Huston Street, for the year. It seems like almost every game they trot out a starter who’s just been signed, or activated, or acquired at the trade deadline.

However, that is not to say that the Angels are incapable of finding a starter who can throw together a decent performance against a team in the throes of an extended team-wide batting slump. And we know just which team we’re talking about here.

So there’s still a premium on getting a very good performance out of Toronto’s starter, because all of their other woes aside, the Halos still have one of the most fearsome 2-3 or 3-4, as the case may be, combinations in all of baseball, in Mike Trout and Albert Pujols. The key to beating the Angels absolutely lies in not letting these two hurt you, and especially not letting them come to the plate with base-runners already on.

Over six innings plus a couple of batters Jay Happ allowed only one earned run on three hits. He was only touched up in the seventh by a homer to left off the bat of shortstop Andrelton Simmons, which unfortunately followed an error by Darwin Barney at third on a hard-hit ball off his glove by Jefry Marte. By then, as we’ll see, Happ was working with a five-nothing cushion, courtesy of two runs scored off Angels’ starter Daniel Wright in the fourth, and a three-run Russell Martin homer off reliever Jose Valdez in the sixth that cashed Donaldson, walked by Wright as the last batter he faced, and Bautista, walked by Valdez.

The fact that Happ carried a shutout into the seventh on a night when he didn’t have his best stuff, witnessed by three walks and only three strikeouts, can be attributed largely to the fact that he managed to keep Trout and Pujols from hurting him. Trout went 0 for 1 with two walks against Happ, and Pujols got two hits, both singles, neither with runners on base at all, let alone in scoring position. It wasn’t for lack of trying on Trout’s part, mind you. In the third he drove Jose Bautista to the wall in right where Bautista made a nice running catch. In the eighth, with Grilli in the game, he hit one even harder, and Bautista had to leap at the wall to haul it down. It’s a measure of Bautista’s struggles this season that he allowed himself a shrug and a sheepish grin after the second catch, I think in honour of the fact that he had shown that he could still contribute defensively.

BenGriNa did a good job following Happ, though both Joaquin Benoit (pinch-hit single by former Jay Cliff Pennington) and Grilli (sawed-off—seriously sawed off—bloop single by Pujols followed by a solid single by C.J. Cron) were touched up a bit. Osuna breezed in the ninth with a strikeout and a couple of easy grounders on eleven pitches, which is fine, but once again why was he out there in a non-save? (Since the Jays had scored two more in the top of the ninth to extend the lead to 7-2.) In the first game of a four-game series?

As for the Jays’ hitters, it sure looked like another round of being stifled by the unknown pitcher tonight. Daniel Wright was making only his second start for the Angels after being traded from Cincinnati, where he’d also made two starts in his rookie year. He came into the game with a record with the Angels of no wins and two losses, and an ERA of 7.50. That’s right, 7.50. Now, how did he do?

Well, not bad at all. In the first three innings, he walked two and gave up one hit, a single to Jose Bautista in the second. Bautista was erased on a caught stealing. Before you have a stroke, let me say that it was a botched hit and run with Russell Martin at the plate, as Manager John Gibbons tried to “stir things up”. The first walk was erased by a double play, so he only faced one batter over the minimum through three. Happ, by the way, also walked two and gave up a hit in the first three, on seven pitches more than the Angels’ hurler. So we had an incipient pitchers’ duel between Jay Happ and Daniel Wright (huh?)

The Jays finally broke through against Wright in the fourth, and for once they did it without leaving the yard.

Josh Donaldson lashed a double to left centre, his first of three hits, to lead off. Edwin Encarnacion moved him to third with a single to left, as Donaldson had to contain his usual aggressiveness on the bases because of the hip issue. Jose Bautista singled to right opposite the shift to score Donaldson and send Edwin to third. Russell Martin cashed Edwin with a sac fly to right. Going with the pitch. Situational hitting. Not wasting the leadoff double. Didn’t somebody just write about all this recently?

Still following Wright, he retired the side in order in the fifth, and came to the sixth inning, which would be his last, down only 2-0, but about to have his good start messed up by the Angels’ suspect bullpen. Manager Mike Scioscia pulled Wright immediately after he walked Donaldson to lead off the sixth. He went out with a line of 3 runs (Donaldson would score on Martin’s home run), 4 hits, 3 walks, 3 strikeouts, and 79 pitches. Jose Valdez came in and had to retire Edwin twice. First he popped him up to the catcher but Jett Bandy misjudged the ball behind the plate, got to it too late, and muffed it. So Valdez took matters into his own hands and retired Edwin on a called third strike. Then he went a little hairy, and let the game get out of control. He wild-pitched Donaldson to second, walked Bautista, and grooved his first pitch to Martin, who gleefully tomahawked a no-doubt line drive out of the park for three runs, watching it with admiration as soon as he hit it. Valdez walked one more then closed out the inning, but the horse was gone.

Happ retired Kole Calhoun leading off the Angels’ sixth on a great play that was totally unconscious. Calhoun hit a hard one-hopper back to the mound, on the first base side. Happ, falling off toward third, and seeing the ball hit to the other side, continued to turn until his back was to the plate and his glove dangling open. He glanced back at the ball just as it slapped into his glove for an easy pitcher-to-first groundout. A definite improvement over his having to feel like a bumper pad in a pinball game. Happ would walk Mike Trout following, in this case a good move as he was able to retire Pujols and cleanup hitter C.J. Cron after.

After reliever Mike Morin stranded Donaldson’s second double, a two-out shot to right centre, Happ faced his last two batters, retired neither of them, and yielded to Benoit with the lead down to 5-2, but it wasn’t all on him. The first hitter, Jefry Marte, hit a hard grounder right at Darwin Barney at third, but Barney booted it, in what was later ruled an error after the scorer had originally given Marte a hit. Andrelton Simmons promptly lined one out to left field for two runs, and Happ was finished, having given up one earned run, on 3 hits, 3 walks, 3 strikeouts, throwing 92 pitches. A tidy performance worthy of win number 19 for the season by Happ.

Benoit, Jason Grilli, and Roberto Osuna finished up on the hill for Toronto, as described earlier, with Osuna’s save opportunity already off the table when the Blue Jays added two more runs in the ninth off Deolis Guerra before A.J. Achter came in to bail him out. Once again the runs were counted without benefit of the long ball.

With one out Kevin Pillar hit a ground-rule double to right. Barney moved him to third with a hard single to centre, then advanced on a Guerra wild pitch. The Angels played their infield in for Devon Travis, who bounced one through the left side to drive in both runners and extend the lead to 7-2. Guerra gave up Donaldson’s third hit, a single, and walked Edwin to load the bases before Achter came in to induce Bautista to ground into a double play.

Nothing like an opponent having a bad year, a little California sunshine, and a little time away from the packed pressure cooker of their home park to give Toronto’s struggling heroes a new lease on life.

R.A. Dickey will have to be good tomorrow night to keep the good vibes good.

They have to do something! Incantations? Ritual sacrifice? Voodoo? Sprinkle pixie dust on the bat rack? Have the pitching coaches and the batting coaches swap jobs? Lock the manager in the john before the game? Who cares? Just do something, anything to rid this team of its accursed batting slump and get it back on track! One idea I had was to sacrifice a pure white chicken and pour its fresh blood over the barrels of all the “gamer” bats belonging to the team’s stars. But then, you might have trouble with PETA, right? Besides, I hate it when the blood stains rub off on the baseballs . . .

The trouble with modern-day baseball management is that its leading lights may have all the smarts in the world, but they utterly lack imagination. Where is Bill Veeck when you need him? Now there was a guy with imagination!

If you know anything about the legendary owner Bill Veeck at all, you probably know that he was this wacky guy who once sent a midget up to bat in a major league game. (Eddie Gaedel, who wore the numer 1/8 on his uniform, walked on four pitches and was lifted for a pinch runner.) Or the guy who in the mid-seventies, near the end of his riotous career, sponsored a Disco Demolition Night promotion at Comiskey Park in Chicago that resulted in a full-blown riot and caused the White Sox to forfeit that night’s game.

But Bill Veeck was a pretty smart guy who was responsible for a lot of innovations in major league baseball. It was his idea to plant the ivy along the wall at Wrigley Field. He was the first owner to have the players’ names put on the backs of their uniforms. He integrated the American League in July of 1948 by signing Larry Doby, and in fact was apparently thwarted by the commissioner of baseball in 1943 when he let his intention be known that when he took over the Philadelphia Phillies, a team he was going to buy on a fire-sale basis, he was going to stock the team with stars from the negro leagues and forcibly integrate baseball. The story goes that the commissioner, Judge Kenesaw Mountain Landis (I’m not making this up) an old-school segregationist, had the league take over the franchise from its previous owners so another buyer could be found who would keep the team in Philadelphia, and keep baseball white.

One of his more memorable ideas might have a certain attraction for Blue Jays’ fans, especially in the throes of the current slump. In St. Louis he sponsored Grandstand Managers’ Day: placards for voting were handed out to the fans as they entered the stadium and the stadium announcer offered them the opportunity to vote on various decisions that arose in the course of the game, such as whether or not to bunt. Relevance to Jays’ fans? First, it would give them a chance to have their say on the spot about some of Gibbie’s stranger decisions. More importantly, the Brownies won that day, 5-3, to break a four-game losing streak.

If we could just figure out how to summon the spirit of Bill Veeck, I’m sure he would come up with some ideas for solving the current mess the Jays are in.

As you can see from my title, I’ve decided to write about the second and third games of the just-completed series in Toronto with the Tampa Bay Rays in a single piece. There is a practical reason for doing this, in that I won’t have to spend quite as much time wallowing in the dismal reality of the last two days (sometimes, folks, this is hard, really hard. Sometimes I feel like I’d rather write about what a sweet guy Roughneck, er, Roughned, Odor is than write about yet another in the recent string of dispiriting Blue Jays’ losses.) The second reason for lumping the games together (and lumping is just the word, isn’t it?) is thematic, in that the two games were so similar, like baseball peas in a pod.

In both games, the Blue Jays’ starter looked up to throwing a shutout from the first inning. In both games, a shockingly sudden lightning strike by Tampa Bay’s offence jumped them into a quick, unexpected lead. In both games, the Jays’ hitters utterly failed to put up any meaningful threat, and in both cases, deprived of their ability to turn to their high-leverage relievers, the rest of the Toronto bullpen allowed the Rays to tack on runs until the game was out of reach. Both games, especially in the context of Toronto’s recent batting woes, were, in short, frustrating, despressing, and all too predictable.

Marcus Stroman wasn’t perfect through the first four innings last night, giving up three walks and a base hit, but he was supported by three double plays. Two were of the conventional variety, as Stroman benefitted from his ability to keep the ball on the ground, while the third resulted from a base-running gaffe by Kevin Kiermaier that was capitalized on by an alert Zeke Carrera, who threw behind him to first after a not very difficult catch to double him off the bag. Of the four base-runners allowed by Stroman, only one ended up being stranded, as a consequence of the double plays. Not pretty, necessarily, but this is how you win, with pitching that plays into your defensive strength.

In the fifth, though, the Rays started measuring Stroman’s offerings, and when they did his fourth walk of the game added to his problems. Nick Franklin led off with a liner toward the left-field corner on which Melvin Upton moved quickly to his right, dove, and made a nice catch. The left-handed Corey Dickinson then took advantage of the shift and poked one into left field that went for a double. Stephen Souza walked on a three-two pitch, bringing the number eight hitter, utility shortstop Alexei Ramirez, to the plate. On an 0-2 pitch, instead of wasting one, Stroman was too good with a two-seamer and Ramirez drove it over the left-field fence. To be fair to Ramirez, who’s just signed with Tampa, this may have been only his sixth homer this year, but he does have 115 in his career. Suddenly, Stroman’s one-hitter was a 3-0 deficit, one run contributed by his fourth walk, and the Jays were once again looking up from under.

Meanwhile, facing a workmanlike left-handed Drew Smyly, the Blue Jays displayed at least one each of their typical slump-prolonging behaviours. These include the lead-off hitter making an out, usually on soft contact, a double play immediately following a leadoff walk or base hit, or a two-out double being wasted. There wasn’t even an opportunity for the classic two-out strikeout with a runner in scoring position. After the Ramirez home run, in the home half of the fifth Melvin Upton led off with a single, Kevin Pillar grounded into a double play, Zeke Carrera, he of the pinch-hit heroics on Monday night, doubled to right, and Darwin Barney flied out to end the inning.

To his credit, Marcus Stroman finished well in the sixth, and qualified for a quality start, giving up three runs on only four hits, though the four walks were telling. He struck out Kiermaier swinging, retired Evan Longoria on a grounder to third, and then pitched over an infield single by Brad Miller by getting Nick Franklin to fly out to centre. He finished with only 92 pitches, and I imagine we would have seen him in the seventh if he had been pitching with the lead.

Very few games are without at least a glimmer of hope, and Toronto’s moment came in the bottom of the sixth, when they finally broke through against Smyly, forcing Manager Kevin Cash to remove him from the game, and closing the Tampa lead to 3-2. With one out, Smyly walked Jose Bautista, then got Edwin Encarnacion to fly out to right, bringing Russell Martin to the plate in yet another two-out, man-on-first situation. This time, though, it was different. Martin launched a high, booming drive to left that reached the 200 level and finally brought the fans out of their stupor. Cash brought in impressive callup Ryan Garton, who gave up a single by Troy Tulowitzki to right, before Melvin Upton grounded into a fielder’s choice for the third out.

Manager Gibbie is very predictable in his use of the bullpen, and his trust is hard-earned. With a lead or barely trailing, if his starter goes six innings, it’s a no-brainer, BenGriNa has been great. But tonight Joaquin Benoit was not available, having pitched in three games in a row for the first time this year. So next up was Joe Biagini, who has developed beautifully, and is clearly one of Gibbie’s main men in the pen. This time, though, with the Rays painfully close in our headlights, he didn’t do it. After finally giving up his first home run of the season in his last outing, Stephen Souza hit the second off him with one out. Biagini escaped the inning without further damage, but the disheartening extra run had negated half of Martin’s blast. It almost seems as though the Jays are tempting the fates when they start to rally, and the fates delight in smashing them back down.

The Jays had one last gasp in the bottom of the seventh. Kevin Pillar led off with a single against Garton, which brought lefty Dana Eveland in to face—and fan—Zeke Carrera, after which Danny Farquhar came in to face the pinch-hitting Dioner Navarro who popped out to short left. Then, as so often, things stirred further after the second out. Travis singled. Farquhar walked Bautista, bringing Edwin to the plate, two outs, bases loaded, down by two. Big inhale. Edwin takes a hittable strike one. Edwin swings over a breaking ball in the dirt. Edwin takes two balls out of the zone. Edwin fans on a high hard one. Big exhale.

And that was it for Toronto on this night. One more base-runner, Tulo with a single in the eighth, erased on a double play. Seven up, six down.

Meanwhile, down by two, Gibbie finished up with Brett Cecil pitching the eighth. Cecil escaped without damage, despite giving up a bloop single to the left-handed Kevin Kiermaier, the one guy he was supposed to get. In the ninth, he went through Matt Dermody, whose lefty-lefty faceoff with Corey Dickinson resulted in an infield single, Scott Feldman, who walked a couple, yielded a sac bunt, and a run on a fielder’s choice, and Aaron Loup, who wild-pitched a second run home before Ryan Tepera came in to get the last out. The Rays picked up two insurance runs on an infield hit, two walks, a wild pitch, a hit batsman, and two stolen bases.

Such is the fate of the blue Blue Jays these days.

Today’s rubber match of the Toronto-Tampa Bay series in Toronto opened with the most exquisite first inning a lover of good baseball would want, if that lover were also a Blue Jays’ fan.

After a number of starts in which he has been less than his best, the real Marco Estrada opened the game by mesmerizing the Rays’ tough top three hitters. Knowing that teams, especially the Rays, had been keying on his changeup, catcher Dioner Navarro wisely switched to Estrada’s oft-maligned 88-mph fast ball as the go-to pitch, and he fanned both Logan Forsythe and Kevin Kiermaier before catching Evan Longoria looking at a called third strike. It was as precise a demonstration of pinpoint command and the ability to throw the hitters off balance as you would ever hope to see.

Then the Blue Jays came to the plate, and the magic of perfect baseball continued. Alex Cobb, who had settled down to pitch a solid five innings for the Rays against the Jays in Tampa in his first appearance since 2014 following Tommy John surgery, was on the hill, and threw a first pitch strike to Devon Travis who hit a solid line drive to right centre field on the second pitch. Stephen Souza in right, who, along with the entire Tampa outfield had been playing Travis extremely shallowly, finally got burned as the ball got past him and Travis hustled into second. On the first pitch to him, Michael Saunders laid down a perfect, and perfectly unexpected, sacrifice bunt toward third that moved Travis to third with one out. On the first pitch to him, Edwin Encarnacion hit a solid line drive to Kevin Kiermaier in medium centre, on which Travis easily scored.

Four pitches, one hit, two pieces of exquisite situational hitting, and the Blue Jays had a 1-0 lead crafted on perfect baseball. It mattered not a bit that Troy Tulowitzki flied out to centre to strand Jose Bautista, whom Cobb had walked after Edwin’s sac fly. This one was going to be different!

Oh, if they had only just awarded the game to the Blue Jays on the basis of the first inning! Unfortunately, they had to play out the rest of the game, and that did not work out very well at all for the struggling Torontos.

Here is what the woeful (have I used that word already in this piece? This week? This month? Doesn’t matter. It applies) Blue Jays’ offence produced for the rest of the game: zilch. Nada. De rien. Oh, sorry, Dioner Navarro hit a one-out single in the seventh. Here is what the Jays’ offence produced today against the combined efforts of Cobb (six and a third innings) and relievers Ryan Garton (one and a third innings) and Steve Geltz (one inning): one run, two hits, four walks, six strikeouts, and eleven runners left on base. Travis had the only (!) extra-base hit, and Edwin had the only RBI.

So, could the Jays still have won today’s game? Sure, if Estrada and/or Estrada and relievers pitched a complete-game shutout. And for the first three innings, not only did he throw a shutout, he threw a perfect nine outs. He also set a franchise record when he struck out the first two batters in the second inning, giving him five consecutive strikeouts at the start of a game. In all, he struck out six of the nine batters he faced.

Unfortunately, though, major league baseball for some unfathomable reason has declared that ball games are nine innings long, and that above all the fourth inning must be played. So Marco Estrada returned to the hill in an effort to extend his perfect string.

But it stopped right there, because the second time through the order it was a very different story for Mr. Estrada and his adversaries. If we go by the pitch tracker, Estrada’s catcher Dioner Navarro, hadn’t relied very much on the changeup to chalk up the nine outs in a row. In the first inning, for example, when he struck out the side, he threw 20 pitches, but only four changeups, and none of them were strikeout pitches. Presumably the changeup was avoided because Tampa had been waiting on it in his last start; the switch to well-placed fast balls was very effective in the first three innings. (I refer to Navarro as the one making all the pitch decisions because Estrada has told reporters that he always throws what the catcher calls for, whether it’s Navarro or Russell Martin.) In any case, Navarro started going with the changeup for the knockout pitch, and it would seem that the Tampa hitters anticipated the change over to the changeup. (Are you following this?)

So Estrada started Logan Forsythe with a curve ball outside the zone, then got a swing and miss and a foul on two fastballs. Navarro called for the changeup to put him away: line drive single to left. Then he tried to start Kevin Kiermaier with a change, and it was promptly looped over the right-field fence for a short but shocking homer and a sudden two-run Tampa lead. Unfortunately for Estrada, who had to rely on the anemic bats of his team-mates to bring him back to square one, he proceeded to give up a third run, which might have been the nail in the coffin for this day.

After the home run, Evan Longoria flied out to centre, but Brad Miller walked. Nick Franklin managed to hit behind the runner, grounding out to Edwin Encarnacion unassisted while Miller moved up to second. Then in what might have been the key at bat of the game, Corey Dickinson swatted a 1-2 curve ball up the middle on the ground to score Miller with the third Tampa run.

Estrada’s pitch count had been a middling 63 after four innings, but he laboured in the fifth, while not being hit, walking two and allowing the count to rise to 89. In the sixth it took him six pitches to get Brad Miller to ground out to second, and Nick Franklin worked him for six more, singling to right on the sixth. That was it, at 101 pitches, and Manager John Gibbons was out to take him out. Strangely, for a pennant race, down 3-0 in the top of the sixth, he chose to bring in his rookie left-handed callup, Matt Dermody to match up with Corey Dickerson. I’m not sure what he was saving Brett Cecil for, but this was definitely not a move of genius. Dermody’s first pitch to Dickerson was a slider for a called strike. That worked, so they tried another one, but it disappeared over the centre field fence and the Rays lead, if it loomed large at 3-1 over the punchless Jays, became a mountain at 5-1. Dermody’s night was quickly done, and it was Danny Barnes’ turn. I can’t quibble with going to another callup here; at this point the issue was damage control, and by that I mean damage control to the bullpen arms, not to this ball game. Well, Barnes got out of the inning, but not before conceding run number six. He gave up singles to Stephen Souza and Bobbie Wilson, and then an infield hit to good ol’ Logan Forsythe, to score Souza from third.

The Forsythe RBI dribbler was the epitome of this entire two-game sequence for the Jays. He topped the ball, and it rolled up the cutout between the third-base line and the turf. Darwin Barney, still playing third because of Josh Donaldson’s hip issue, had no choice but to let it go. It came agonizingly close to the edge of the turf, which would have ticked it into foul territory, but never touched it, and it rolled, and it rolled, and it rolled until it stopped dead when it rolled right into the bag at third. This was like watching the entire month of September so far for the Blue Jays, condensed into five seconds. By the time the ball hit the base, Wilson had scored, high-fived, danced in the dugout, and started to don his catcher’s gear.

When Cobb exited the game with two gone in the bottom of the seventh, he left Dioner Navarro at second after his lonely single, and Kevin Pillar, whom he had walked, at first, with two outs. I’d give you Cobb’s impressive pitching line against Toronto, but really, it was no great shakes. The Jays’ sixty-year-old batting practice pitcher could have done as well against these guys the way they’re hitting. Gibbie sent Justin Smoak up to hit for Ryan Goins under the faint hope clause, but Ryan Garton popped him up to end that foolishness.

It hardly mattered that Tampa Bay scored two more “insurance” runs in the ninth off Bo Schultz and Ryan Tepera. The Rays employed three singles, a sacrifice fly and an RBI to plate two more, just to add insult to injury.

After going down meekly and mildly in the bottom of the ninth, despite a leadoff walk to Troy Tulowitzki, the Jays had to be happy that they were looking at the back ends of the Tampa Bay Rays for the last time this year.

They had to be equally happy that they were getting out of town too, heading for the coast, lighting out for the territories, where they wouldn’t have to hear all of the weeping and wailing and gnashing of teeth they left behind in Toronto.

Postscript: You’re right, it’s not fair that I am so strongly critical of the Jays’ offence without at least offering an analysis of what’s wrong. They’re over-swinging, trying to fix the problem with one blast. Cut down on the swing. They’re swinging at marginal first-pitch strikes, making soft contact, and taking ones right down Broadway. They’re begging for walks, more upset about the fact that the umps don’t see things their way, than that they’ve fanned with runners on in scoring position. Jose, are you listening here? There’s no change in approach when the situation changes. Seasoned professionals should not fan going for the downs with a runner on third and less than two outs. When you’re hitting second behind a leadoff hitter who’s gotten on base, it’s not the same as if you were leading off. Don’t perform like it is. This is all easy, elementary, and obvious. Easy to fix? Not so much.

It’s the bottom of the eighth, tied 2-2, your team’s still in an incredible hitting slump, you’ve got your super-utility infielder, right-handed hitting Darwin Barney leading off against righty reliever Brad Boxberger for the Tampa Bay Rays, and you want a left-handed batter off the bench to try to inject a little life in the game. Who ya gonna call?

You’ve got three switch-hitters on the bench, two with serious pop and one with electrifying speed, who can be on third base in a New York minute if he beats out a little nubber at the plate. By the way, must google “New York minute”: what does that even mean? You’ve got an earnest but weak-hitting designated catcher. And, oh, yeah, there’s always good ol’ Ezequiel Carrera.

So, who ya gonna call? (Insert Batman theme) Zeke-man!

Going into tonight’s game one of a three-game set between Toronto and Tampa Bay at the TV Dome in Toronto, the Jays were mired in a serious offensive slump that coincides exactly with the start of the stretch-run month of September. Just to recall the tawdry details, in nine games the Jays had scored 8, 6, and 5 runs in losing causes, and 5 runs in one win. In the other five games, they scored only 3 runs four times, and were shut out once.

Tonight they were up against tough right-hander Jake Odorizzi, and things weren’t going much better for them, as he shut them out for five innings, giving up one hit and one walk, facing only two batters over the minimum. Amazingly, though Francisco Liriano, dropped back into the rotation tonight in place of R.A. Dickey, was having his best outing of the year since before mid-season with the Pirates, and was matching Odorizzi pitch for pitch, also having allowed just a hit and a walk over six innings.

Then, in the bottom of the sixth, Jose Bautista jolted the crowd out of its worried stupor by stroking a two-out homer to left field, which scored Devon Travis, on second with a leadoff double, just the second hit allowed by Odorizzi, the third being the home run by Bautista, of course.

Suddenly a new prospect opened up: going into the seventh, with the entire BenGriNa combo primed and ready to go, was it possible that our heroes might be able to offset the continuing batting struggle by winning a shutout, or a 2-1 squeaker?

Oh, sorry about that. We forgot it was the Rays we were playing. Nothing’s ever easy with the Rays. Only 67 pitches under his belt, Liriano must have felt great coming back out for the seventh with a brand spanking new two-run lead over the Rays. But in just three pitches, the game was tied, as Evan Longoria and Brad Miller hit back-to-back homers to lead off the inning. Two pitches later, after Edwin Encarnacion had made a nice back-to-the-infield grab of a foul popup by Nick Franklin, Liriano was out of the game, having given up only three hits and a walk over seven innings. Joaquin Benoit came in and allowed two more base-runners before extracting himself from the inning.

Liriano had no chance for a victory he richly deserved, and the Jays were yet again back at square one, all thoughts of winning a squeaker jettisoned. They would need to manufacture another run somehow from their largely dormant bats, off either Odorizzi or his successor(s).

It wouldn’t be off Odorizzi, though He finished his night’s work by breezing through Troy Tulowitzki, Kevin Pillar, and Melvin Upton in the seventh on only seven pitches to finish his night’s work.

After Jason Grilli made short work of the Rays in the top of the eighth, on two fly balls and a groundout, it was time for Gibbie’s momentous decision. Like many of Gibbie’s decisions, the reasoning for this one was a bit murky at the time, and he certainly didn’t say anything to clarify it in his post-game scrum. (Does he ever?) All he did after the game was ramble through a list of all the ways that Carrera could contribute offensively to the team, even though some of them, like laying down a sacrifice bunt, don’t exactly conform to the position of leading off an inning.

Whatever his reasoning, whether his decision was tinged with brilliance or madness, Zeke Carrera it was, digging in to the plate to lead off the bottom of the eighth against Brad Boxberger. And there he was, swinging a bit late on an outside first pitch, and sending a classic slice toward left field. Though it started out not heading for the foul line, you could tell right off the bat that it had a lot of spin on it, and it was heading for the corner. The big questions were, would it be caught? Would it be fair or foul? I don’t think anyone in the park, save, perhaps, for Carrera who seems an eternal optimist, gave any thought to it going out. But it carried and sliced, sliced and carried, until left fielder Corey Dickinson ran out of room and had to watch it barely clear the fence, barely fair, for the improbable home run that would decide the game. He slumped against the wall in dejection, an abject image.

After Carrera’s heroics, Boxberger gave up an infield single to Travis, and watched him advance to third during the subsequent ground ball out and fly ball out to right, but stranded him there by fanning Jose Bautista on a 1-2 pitch. Not to denigrate Zeke Carrera, who has shown clutch power more than once since he’s been with the Blue Jays, but I imagine Brad Boxberger going into the visiting clubhouse and dunking his head in the toilet a few times.

Roberto Osuna came on in the top of the ninth to try to secure his 32^nd save, and managed to do it, but not before strangeness and some serious drama had taken place.

But of course two outs had to be recorded before things could get nail-bitey. Brad Miller bounced the first pitch right back to Osuna for the first out. Nick Franklin fouled one off on a strike-two count, and then flied out to Upton in left. Then Corey Dickinson hit a grounder up the middle for a base hit, bringing Stephen Sousa to the plate.

Sousa took the first two pitches, blazing four-seamers, and was down 0-2. Then he took a cutter that fell out of the strike zone for ball one. Then Osuna stopped messing with breaking balls and threw four more four-seamers to Sousa. He fouled the first one off. He swung mightily at the second one, and seemed to have tipped it into Martin’s glove for the strikeout. Osuna turned around to say his thank-you prayer too soon, and was the only person in the ball park who didn’t know that the ball had popped out of Martin’s glove, and Sousa was still alive.

Finally Osuna realized something wasn’t quite right, looked around, and realized that the game wasn’t over. After much embarrassed grinning and tapping himself on the chest in the “my bad” gesture, he had to settle in and try once more to retire Sousa, who took the third four-seamer for a ball. On the next one, he went for the downs, and the crack of the bat and jump of the ball gave you this sick feeling, that it was gone. And it almost was. But Kevin Pillar went all the way back to the wall, reached up, and pulled it down for the third out.

The stats geeks later reported that there have been ten similar balls hit to centre field in Toronto this year with the same range of exit velocity and angle of elevation off the bat, and all the others left the park. They can’t explain why this one didn’t, which suggests that their analyses can’t answer everything. But what do I know? I’m just an old guy who sure as hell thought he hit it out, and was just as glad that he didn’t.

The weirdness didn’t end with the end of the game. Both benches cleared as the Jays were coming off the field in celebration mode, apparently because of a misunderstanding that turned nothing into something. There was some kind of apparently comradely exchange between Souza and Russell Martin after the ball was caught, so they both said later, something to the effect of “Geez, I thought that was out!” “Geez, So did I!” Pretty profound stuff for cerebral ball players. But then Troy Tulowitzki, who I think is a bit tightly wound in his quiet way, came in and confronted Souza, about what he thought was a verbal attack on Martin. It was all clarified afterward, although comments by Souza suggested that he felt Tulo was being overly aggressive. What a bunch of kids in the sandbox, eh? What would Ty Cobb make of it all?

So Zeke Carrera was the unlikely hero, delivering a big W for his team and for Jason Grilli, Liriano and Odorizzi pitched very well but neither of them figured in the decision, and Roberto Osuna got to celebrate his 32^nd save in 35 opportunities twice, once by way of rehearsal, once for real.

Whatever will they think of next?

Weather recording stations across Canada recorded a wind surge at about 1:10 p.m. today. Veteran meteorologists were unable to come up with a scientific explanation for the huge gust of wind that swept across the entire country at that moment.

Obviously, the meteorologists aren’t baseball fans, because the explanation is readily at hand. At approximately that time, at the TV Dome in downtown T.O., Boston leadoff hitter Dustin Pedroia swatted an 0-1 pitch into the turf in front of home plate. It bounced directly into the glove of Jays’ starter Jay Happ, and Happ calmly threw Pedroia out at first.

At that precise moment, every sentient baseball fan north of the border let out a huge sigh of relief: Dustin Pedroia was indeed human, the Boston dismantling of another Toronto starter was not a foregone conclusion, and it was not out of the question that the Jays just might be able to even the series with Boston at a win apiece. And the “after-shock” surge of slightly lesser force reported by meteorologists at about 1:12 p.m. was simply another reaction from the Blue Jays’ hordes of fans, this time to the slap of Xander Bogaert’s hard-hit line drive into the glove of Troy Tulowitzki.

The difference between last night’s contest between Boston and Toronto and this afternoon’s was, well, the difference between night and day. The pitching held Boston in check, the Jays’ defenders gut-checked themselves into bracing up and acquitting themselves properly, and Melvin Upton dispatched his personal gremlins of Friday night with a two-run home run in the second that gave the Blue Jays a lead that on this changeable early fall day was never relinquished.

Besides the fact that Toronto’s pitchers actually held the fearsome Sox lineup to only four hits and two runs, thanks to a stellar start by Jay Happ and near-perfect relief work by the Bengrina (Benoit/Grilli/Osuna, if you haven’t read much of my work before) combine, the story of this game had to be the redemptive work of Upton, who had been singled out by the home crowd as the chief culprit in last night’s defensive collapse. Though, to be fair to the fans here, it was his dropped fly ball that seemed to be the harbinger of doom for the Jays, at a point at which the outcome of the game was still very much an open question.

Subsequent to his miscue, every play involving Upton elicited seldom-heard boos from the gathered multitude, whether in the field or at the plate. Derisive applause rained down on him when he caught subsequent flies hit to him. This was a strong reaction from a usually generous and forgiving crowd, and I’m not sure why it happened, though I have the sense that Upon has taken a good bit of abuse from the haters on social media since his arrival in Toronto. I have my own ideas about why Melvin Upton has not been particularly accepted by Blue Jays’ fans, but it’s a very sensitive topic, and I would reserve it for possible treatment in a side article, but I need to consider first whether it’s a topic I can raise.

In the second inning, when Boston starter Eduardo Rodriguez, after walking Russell Martin and retiring Troy Tulowitzki on a fly ball to left, served up a juicy one to Upton who promptly parked it in the left field seats, the Toronto fans being what they are (forgiving? or hypocritical?) were delirious with joy. The Jays jumped out into a two-nothing lead over the hated Sox, and last night was forgotten. It will be interesting to see how long the good will for Upton will last.

The pitching matchup today was a good news/bad news story for both sides. Jay Happ has been a rock the entire year. With Marco Estrada struggling a bit lately, R.A. Dickey fallen back into an on-again, off-again routine, and Marcus Stroman gradually recovering from his earlier struggles, Happ and Aaron Sanchez are clearly numbers one and two in the rotation, in whichever order you choose. You didn’t think it was a coincidence did you, that the assignments for the second and third games of this Boston series just happened to fall into the laps of Happ and Sanchez? Yet Happ has been labouring lately, trudging valiantly along from inning to inning, his starts a little shorter, his control fraying at the edges. We only need mention that today was his fourth attempt to go beyond the 17-win mark. He was ahead of Rick Porcello in wins all season, but Porcello reached 20 last night, and Happ was still looking for 18 today.

Eduardo Rodriguez had his worst outing of the season earlier against the Blue Jays, giving up four homers, the only four hits he allowed, in his only start against Toronto. He’s also recently spent time on the disabled list. However, looming large in the minds of the Toronto hitters, surely, were two facts. First, Rodriquez is a lefty, and for whatever reason, with all their right-handed firepower, the Jays haven’t fared well against lefties in the last while. Also, Rodriguez just happened to carry a no-hitter into the eighth inning in his last start at Oakland, finishing up with one hit allowed and eight innings of shutout ball.

As it turned out, the matchup was a good news story for both teams; both Happ and Rodriguez pitched well enough to win. In fact, their pitching lines were almost a perfect match for one another, which is surprising, because as you were watching the game you had the sense that Happ was much more effective. But see for yourselves: Happ went 6 innings plus 2 batters, gave up 2 runs, 4 hits, and a walk, and had 5 strikeouts on 95 pitches. Rodriguez went 6 innings, gave up 2 earned runs, 4 hits, 2 walks, and struck out 5 on 100 pitches. Both pitchers gave up a home run, Happ to Dustin Pedroia in the sixth inning , and Rodriguez to Melvin Upton in the second. The difference in the game came down to the fact that the additional walk issued by Rodriguez preceded Upton’s home run, and that Toronto’s winning run scored in the third inning was unearned, resulting from a rather tough error given to third baseman Aaron Hill on a bullet of a ground ball off the bat of Edwin Encarnacion.

This was in fact Jay Happ’s most effective start in some time. The Pedroia homer in the sixth was only the second hit he gave up. In four and a third innings the only base-runners he allowed were Mookie Betts with a walk and Chris Young with a hit-by-pitch in the second inning. Young broke up the string and the developing no-hitter with a one-out single in the fifth, but he ended up stranded at first base. In fact, in a rather strange play, Young chose to stay at first when Edwin Encarnacion made a nice stab of a grounder by Jackie Bradley just in front of the bag at first. Young wasn’t particularly quick off the bag, and as Encarnacion set up to throw to second for the force, he broke back to the bag. This upset Edwin’s concentration, he didn’t make the throw, reached to tag Young and missed, and then stepped on the bag to retire Bradley for the second out. Non-plussed, Happ struck out catcher Ryan Hannigan for the third out.

This base-running thing by Young seems to me to be an injection of a bit of anarchy into a game that is played in a certain way. There’s no rule that says that a runner has to proceed to the second base on a ground ball, unless the batter/runner reaches first safely. If two runners ended up “safe” on the same base, the bag belongs to the lead runner. But in this case as Young broke back to first there was no question that Edwin would get an out. Somewhere. If Bradley ran like a plow horse, there could be some rationale for the runner on first to maneuver to keep the bag, rather than being forced at second and yielding first to the batter. Yet it is called a “force play”, and obviously the batter has to be able to take first base. Do we need a “Chris Young rule” to go with the “Chase Headley” rule (aggressive slide into second base), and the “Buster Posey” rule (base-runner plowing the catcher)?

By the way, I’d like to add to the curious lexicon that may be used exclusively in Canadian amateur, i. e. kids’, baseball. I’d earlier noted the use of “back catcher” to identify the catcher, and “decker” to refer to the catcher’s mitt. When I referred above to Happ hitting Young (that guy again) with a pitch, I thought of the term “pinged off” to refer to being hit by a pitch. And just now I used the verb “plow” to denote a runner/catcher collision initiated by the runner when the catcher is blocking the plate.

Back to the game. After Pedroia’s home run in the sixth, Happ retired the side, and with a 3-1 lead and only 86 pitches under his belt, he looked pretty good to go at least seven innings. But leadoff singles by Ramirez and Hill brought Manager John Gibbons out with his famous hook, and Happ was finished for the day. Joaquin Benoit came on and took a good shot at keeping the runner on third, but with nobody out it’s pretty tough. He got Chris Young on a short foul fly to Jose Bautista in right, on which the Sox chose not to test Bautista’s arm. But then Jackie Bradley squared up a pitch and drove Bautista back to the wall and up against it for the catch, allowing Ramirez to score easily on the sacrifice fly.

If the pitching lines of the two starters were near mirror-images, so had been their first innings of work. Happ retired the Sox on 9 pitches, oh happy day, and Rodriguez retired the Jays on twelve, after Devon Travis reached on a soft looper into right. The Upton homer in the second and the run the Jays scratched out in the third allowed Happ to pitch on the lead for the rest of his outing.

The add-on run in the third started with a good play by Travis, as his hustle turned a leadoff hit to left centre into a double. Then it featured a really bad play by Travis who TOOBLANed himself right off the bases when Josh Donaldson hit a grounder to short. For absolutely no reason, Travis took off for third. Xander Bogaerts threw to Aaron Hill at third, the throw was a bit off, and Travis was first called safe, then out, on review. Edwin Encarnacion followed with a smash on the ground to third that ticked off Aaron Hill’s glove and ricocheted into short left centre field. Donaldson ended up on third, with Encarnacion safe at first on a very harsh error decision. Jose Bautista followed by fighting off a not-great pitch and looping it into centre for a run-scoring single. But that was all the Jays got, as Rodriguez reached back and fanned Russell Martin and Troy Tulowitzki.

Incidentally, Sportsnet’s Hazel Mae filed an in-game report on how Travis had spent some time working on ground balls with infield coach Luis Rivera before the game. Hmmm. I would say “about time”, except that if Mae’s report was accurate, apparently Travis took about 25 or 30 ground balls under Rivera’s tutelage. When some players will take 100 balls in a session to work on something, that 25 to 30 sounds more like normal infield practice. Oh well, baby steps.

Though the Sox made it close with the run in the seventh, they were only able to muster a base-runner in each of the eighth and ninth, David Ortiz in the eighth on a rare muff by Tulo of his grounder off Jason Grilli, and Ramirez in the ninth on a leadoff walk from Roberto Osuna, after which Osuna closed it out for the tense save.

The Jays’ and Donaldson’s, frustration over the failure to cash in an insurance run in the seventh helped to make it tense in the ninth. After Matt Barnes fanned Justin Smoak leading off, Pillar singled to left and Travis to centre on the hit and run, Pillar reaching third. But Donaldson hit one right on the button, right at Bogaerts at short, and Edwin hit one right on the button, right at Mookie Betts in right field, to end the inning.

So, great pitching and a well-timed blast from Melvin Upton led to a series-tying win, and the future looks a bit brighter, with Aaron Sanchez shrewdly placed to try to pitch Toronto to a series win on Sunday, and a tie for the division lead.

At the end of my last post, after the Blue Jays were swept in the Big Apple, I posed the question, “Can they regroup?”

After tonight’s shambolic and embarrassing loss to the surging Boston Red Sox in the TV Dome, the answer is “not any time soon”. All we can hope for after tonight is that the clock runs out on “any time” tomorrow afternoon at 1:07 p.m.

The smart guys who get paid to talk and write about these things have been full of comments about how this year’s Red Sox resemble in so many ways the Toronto team of 2015, getting by as they are on better-than-average starting pitching, good defense, adequate relief pitching, an awesome offensive array and the killer instinct to pounce on any openings they are given. Well, I beg to differ. Those attributes certainly define pretty accurately the successful playoff formula for the Blue Jays last year.

These Red Sox are a different hue of hose, however. Though they can certainly sting you with the long ball from almost anywhere in the batting order, they hit for much higher average than last year’s Jays. They can put up a big inning without the long ball, and they have batters all up and down the order who can confidently spray line drives all over the field. I find it hard to imagine what it’s like for a Red Sox fan, not having to go into pessimist mode every time one of their hitters has runners in scoring position with two outs. They’re also a much faster team than the 2015 Jays, and they employ their speed very aggressively on the bases. In short, think the 2015 Kansas City Royals, with much better numbers one and one-A starting pitchers (Price and Porcello) and a hell of a lot more muscle.

Being a control and finesse pitcher, Marco Estrada has had considerable success in the past against the typically free-swinging Red Sox. But the Marco Estrada who faced Boston tonight, is not, for whatever reason, the same Marco Estrada that made the All-Star team this year, and became the rotation’s go-to guy in the playoffs last year. And the Sox offence that lined up against Estrada is most assuredly not the same offence he had faced in the past.

Since Toronto was just flat out beaten in every aspect of the game last night, let’s give the devil his due and look at what Boston brings to the table, at the moment, to borrow the term from English football, what they bring to the top of the table. With the revival of David Price, the emergence of Rick Porcello as a legitimate front-line pitcher, the apparent recovery of Eduardo Rodriguez from his recent ailments, and the occasional appearance of the Clay Buchholz of old, the Boston rotation is good, probably good enough to pitch over the loss of knuckle baller Stephen Wright, apparently for the season. The Boston bullpen might be a weak spot. Batwing-Man Craig Kimbrel was untouchable earlier in the year, but after some time on the DL he’s shown himself considerably more mortal than before.

Porcello did his job efficiently tonight. As the Sox scrambled into a lead over the first couple of innings, he kept Toronto off the base paths and unable to mount an immediate counter-attack. When they did strike to get a couple of runs back in the third inning, he was effective in limiting the damage. After that, he went into cruise control, as the Sox’ lead mounted toward the end of his outing. There’s hardly any point in mentioning Boston relievers Brad Ziegler and Koji Uehara. By the time Ziegler came in in the eighth it was 11-2, and relievers could hardly make a difference.

We saw a typically solid, if not awesome offensive display from the Red Sox tonight. They did manage a few lucky bloopers and were able to take advantage of two Toronto errors and other miscues (we’ll get back to those), but they also wasted little time letting Estrada and his successors know who was boss. In the first it was Dustin Pedroia, who led off with a single, the baseball equivalent of the crack of doom descending on the TV Dome. Pedroia is a great hitter and a fine, old-style hustler who plays a nifty second base without earning any style points. Any team that can keep him off the bases has a big step up on beating this Boston team.

But I’m ashamed to say that watching the swaggering Pedroia dig in at the plate arouses something visceral in me. I find myself pining for the old days, not so far back, really, when a Jack Morris or a Randy Jackson would have used the first pitch of every at-bat to knock him on his kiester until he stopped digging in like he does. Nothing dangerous, mind you, just a little token reminder that all good hitters need a little dust on their uniforms, just like the oregano in a nice Italian sauce. I’m not talking about going all Yordano Ventura here. I’m just talking about pitching tight, the inner half and beyond, standing him up a bit. Ventura’s another story altogether. If his career had been set in the pre-DH era, when he would have had to hit, Ventura would have been a very different pitcher—and person—indeed.

Xander Bogaerts is a bit of a free swinger, a good shortstop, though given to the odd lapse of attention, with good power, but he’s not matured quite to the point that Mookie Betts has. He’s still susceptible to the big-swing punchout from time to time.

David Ortiz is David Ortiz, and we have to hope that he sticks to his retirement plans, so that the seats in the TV Dome can get a break from the battering that he has given them over the years. But I’m not really sold on the value of his work in terms of career stats, or in terms of his actual value to the Red Sox this year. I have some ideas about that that may take shape in a supplementary article some time soon. For now, just thinking about tonight’s game, it’s important to note that with an average of just under .320, he can hurt you big time with singles and doubles, as well as homers, though I’m sure Manager John Farrell would rather not see him gum up the works by hitting a single, unless, of course, he cashes in a couple of runs with it.

Hanley Ramirez is a guy that I want not to like, somehow, but there’s no good reason for it. Maybe it’s the floppy dreads. They just don’t look terribly good flowing out from under a baseball cap. I thought at the beginning of the season that moving him to first to accommodate Pablo Sandoval (who?) was going to weaken the Sox at two positions, but he’s turned into a pretty good first baseman besides being a reliable power guy who drives in runs, especially in clutch situations. Turns out that his move to first only leaves them a hole at third, since Sandoval is AWOL, but when Travis Shaw is hitting he’s an upgrade on the Panda, whose time, irrespective of injuries, seems to have passed.

There’s not much to say about Mookie Betts that hasn’t already been said this year. He’s played like a bona-fide superstar, and he’s only twenty-three. It says all you need to know about Betts that he’s now batting cleanup, to protect David Ortiz. In fact, at two full years younger than Mike Trout, a comparison of their 2016 seasons to date is instructive. Betts has over 100 more at bats, has scored 3 runs less, has 32 more hits, 3 more homers, and 12 more RBIs. Trout has 2 more stolen bases, and is hitting .324 to Betts’ .315, albeit with 112 fewer at bats. Interesting.

Jackie Bradley Jr. is an outstanding centre fielder and a real asset on the bases, but I’m not convinced he’s the real deal at the plate, incredible hot streak earlier this year aside. I’m not sure in the long haul that he’s going to differentiate himself significantly from the two Kevins, Kiermaier and Pillar, the other young centre fielders in the AL East. (I know Kiermaier is barely hitting over .200 at the moment, but he’s also recovering from a serious injury and a long stint on the DL. If he played against the rest of the league the way he plays against us . . . )

Sandy Leon doesn’t have enough of a track record to support whether or not he’s a flash in the pan, but on both sides of the ball he has certainly answered Boston’s questionable catching status for the moment. One sign of encouragement for Boston fans is that his numbers this year are unprecedentedly high, but this is also the first time that he has been basically a full-time catcher.

The other players with regular roles for Boston, Travis Shaw, Brock Holt, and the veteran former Jay Aaron Hill, while each may have his partisans among the Boston fanatics, are basically interchangeable journeymen at this point in their careers, though both Shaw and Holt have shown considerable promise in the past.

When you combine better than average starting pitching with a lineup that includes in any order Pedroia, Bogaerts, Ortiz, Betts, Ramirez, and Leon, you are going to win some games, especially when your home is friendly Fenway. That’s what the Sox have done. They’re a formidable foe, and the last twenty games of the season are going to be a pretty rocky ride for the Jays if they hope to take the division.

If it was a rocky ride tonight (If??), it wasn’t so much the Red Sox that were making the waves, as it was that the Jays were swamping themselves. Estrada has been struggling since the All-Star break, and since his recovery, if it has been a recovery, from his mid-season back problems. Tonight there was no great mystery to his lack of effectiveness: he couldn’t throw strikes (he also couldn’t get a call from plate umpire Chad Fairchild on anything that wasn’t three inches in from the black—all the way around the plate, which didn’t help). Without overpowering stuff, if Estrada has to steer the ball to get a call, he’s in big trouble, especially against a hitting team like Boston.

None of this is to say that tonight’s game wasn’t close until the Sox blew it open in the seventh inning. For all his struggles, Estrada left in the third down only 4-0, and then watched as his team picked up two right after he left. And Aaron Loup, Danny Barnes, Brett Cecil, and Scott Feldman, who followed him through to the end of the sixth, did what they could to keep it close, and they were only down 5-2 going to the seventh.

The Sox had taken a two-run lead on sloppy Jays’ play, one run in each of the first two innings, but that hardly put the game out of reach. In the first, Pedroia scored from first on Betts’ “double” that embarrasingly hopped over Saunders’ head in right. In the second, Bradley led off with a walk, benefitting from some of the most egregious squeezing of the zone that Fairchild exhibited all night. He advanced to second on a passed ball by Dioner Navarro, and scored on Pedroia’s single under Travis’ glove. More craziness ensued when Pedroia hit first base, but luckily it ended up with two outs and the bases empty. In an effort to get Bradley at the plate, Pillar threw wildly off line to the plate, allowing Pedroia to take second. Pedroia got greedy and wanted third, too, but he didn’t get it as Navarro tracked the ball down and threw him out.

All sloppiness aside, this game was still an open book, if Estrada and the Jays could settle down, and if the offence could start to solve Porcello.

If you asked what the turning point was in tonight’s game some might repeat that old joke that it came when the umpire hollered “Play ball”, but that’s a stretch. If there was a turning point in the game before Scott Feldman threw a gopher ball to Bogaerts leading off the seventh, extending the Sox’ lead to 6-2, there are several possibilities.

One would be the embarrassing error committed by Melvin Upton in the third that permitted the third Sox run to score, and greased the skids for Estrada’s departure. With one out, truly soft base hits by Betts and Ramirez had put runners on first and third. Betts hit a looping sort-of-line-drive that fell in front of Upton for a single. Ramirez then launched a teasing popup to right field that fell between Travis, Saunders, and Encarnacion just inside the foul line. It should have been Travis’ ball all the way, but the aggressive Sox had started Betts on the pitch, and with Ramirez’ right-handed power at the plate, the second-base coverage was the responsibility of Travis, so he started the play headed in the wrong direction.

Then came the Upton faux pas that set the tone, really, for the rest of the game : Travis Shaw lofted a short fly to left, not very deep, on which it was questionable whether Betts would even try to challenge Upton’s strong arm. But he didn’t have to worry, because to Upton’s and everyone else’s horror, the left fielder muffed the catch, which also gave away the Shaw out, besides allowing the run. When Ramirez scored on Leon’s single, that was the night for Estrada. Manager John Gibbons wasn’t about to let the bleeding go on. Aaron Loup came in and got a double-play ball from Bradley to end the inning. Finally, a left-left matchup that worked. Mark that one down in red.

Rick Porcello had breezed through the first two innings, retiring six in a row with two strikeouts, and ordinarily, with the fine season he’s had thus far, you could have closed the book on the game, but despite having been set back on their heels, Toronto wasn’t quite ready to roll over and play dead.

The first four Jays’ hitters reached base, scoring two runs, and it looked pretty good for a swift recovery from a terrible start. Would this be another one of those Toronto-Boston 10-8 affairs? Michael Saunders beat the shift and singled to right. Upton walked. Pillar lofted a loop single to right. Saunders had to hold up on the ball, and only checked in at third. Travis bounced one hard through the left side, scoring two runs. You can take your pick as to whether it was Josh Donaldson looking at a fast ball in the zone on an 0-2 pitch, or Edwin Encarnacion grounding into a double play to end the inning that was a possible turning point. Either one will do.

Danny Barnes took over from Loup in the fourth and gave up a highly-tainted run to extend the Red Sox lead. Following immediately after the killed rally, this one pretty well nailed the coffin shut, with over half the game to go. Leading off, Brock Holt was generously awarded a double when Upton misplayed his single in left. He then went to third on a passed ball, the second allowed by Dioner Navarro, both of which contributed to Boston runs. Pedroia hit a deep fly to right that easily scored Holt.

Still, the Jays held them at 5-2 until the awful Boston seventh, as Barnes, Cecil, and Feldman for the last out of the sixth showed that you could keep the Red Sox off the scoreboard at least some of the time.

But not for the rest of tonight. In the top of the seventh, not only the wheels, but the doors, the mirrors, the steering wheel, and the roof rack fell off the Toronto bus, and what had been a messy but not unwinnable game turned into farce. Anything resembling a major league baseball game came to an end when Feldman returned to the hill after closing out the sixth.

Bogaerts homered down the line, barely inside the foul pole. Ortiz doubled to right centre. Betts hit an easy grounder to Travis, which he booted, yet another painful error on a must-make play. Ramirez homered to right centre, finishing Feldman’s night. The only out he recorded was the one that ended the sixth. He faced four batters in the seventh. They all scored. Ryan Tepera came in to pitch, and it started all over again. Shaw singled. Bradley doubled, Shaw to third. Pedroia knocked them both in with his third hit, counting his third and fourth RBIs. When it was all over, the score was Boston 11, Toronto 2, and the fans in the park started to relax and have fun. What else could you do but knock back a couple more beers at a time like this?

In keeping with the kind of game it was, the Blue Jays did score another run in the bottom of the eighth, on an error by second baseman Deven Marrero, in for Pedroia, on a ground ball from Dioner Navarro. The Sox added two more in the ninth, just to make sure, off rookie call-up Matt Dermody, making his second major-league appearance. Dermody should be glad that he managed to limit Boston to two runs, because I don’t think Gibbie was about to burn another pitcher to finish up this dog.

At the end of the night, Baltimore had lost and the Yankees had won, so the Red Sox were up by two over the Jays, three over the Orioles, and four over the Yankees, in the tightest division in baseball.

It may not be time for drastic measures, but soon . . .

There are lots of things worse in baseball than losing a thriller like last night’s Jays’ 7-6 loss to the Yankees, that went down to the very end, and depended on no more than the circumference of the baseball, before the win was recorded for the Yankees. For example, coming out flat as a pancake the next night. For example, doing absolutely nothing at the plate against yet another pitcher making his first big league appearance of the season. For example, continuing the offensive futility against a guy who was supposed to be the team’s two/three starter yet couldn’t even hold onto a place on the big-league roster for the whole year. For example, going down in the ninth inning on two strikeouts and a popup when you’re only down 2-zip and the closer is a guy you’ve pounded regularly in the past.

Shall I go on? I thought not. Yes, my faithful followers, tonight’s was as feckless and insipid a performance by a team full of offensive superstars as you might ever want to see. Or not.

And while Marcus Stroman, Joe Biagini, and Roberto Osuna did everything you could ask of your pitchers, and turned in a combined effort that 99 times out of a hundred would result in a solid W for their team, the Jays’ hitters gave them nothing. Every at bat that gave even the remotest hope that a breakthrough might be in the offing was followed by a lame and ineffectual effort that whooshed the air out of our hopes as instantly as a balloon that gets away before you can tie it off.

First inning: Devon Travis leads off with a single. Josh Donaldson waves at strike three down and away (way down and away). Edwin Encarnacion grounds into a double play.

Second inning: With two outs, Troy Tulowitzki doubles to right, a gift extra base because the inexperienced Tyler Austin dives for a ball he should have blocked. Michael Saunders works the count to 3-2 and eight pitches, then rolls over on one and grounds out weakly to second. (Note: “rolling over” on a pitch means weak contact creating by rolling your wrists in the contact zone and hitting it weakly on the ground.)

Third inning: Leading off, Melvin Upton walks. Kevin Pillar walks. Travis grounds into an around-the-horn double play. With Pillar on third Donaldson rolls over and grounds out to shortstop.

Wait. Time out. Scoreless game, we’ve been struggling to score runs for what seems like weeks, the first two hitters walk, and your leadoff hitter swings away and hits into a double play? What book on how to play baseball did that come from? Oh, we don’t bunt. We don’t give up outs. Stats show there’s a better chance of scoring when we have a guy on first and nobody out than with a guy on second with one out. Bunts are rally-killers, even if you do it right and score a run, you hardly ever score two. What if he screws up the bunt and then has to face an 0-2 count?

All of this may be true and legitimate, but the fact is that they didn’t bunt and the leadoff hitter, arguably the best contact guy on the team, hit into a DP. Oh, and what’s wrong with one run? It was scoreless at the time, and the Yankees won with only two runs. I’ll take a shot any day at having one of Donaldson, Encarnacion, and Bautista doing something to score a runner from third with one out. As for screwing up the bunt, if you create a culture where the bunt just isn’t on, ever, who’s going to put the effort into learning how to do it properly? Self-fulfilling prophecy: if you don’t bunt, ever, you won’t bunt successfully, hardly ever.

Where were we: oh, yes, fourth inning: with one out, Bautista slaps the ball through the empty right side for a single. Russell Martin lines out to left. Tulo grounds into a fielder’s choice.

Russell Martin’s at bat in the fourth was a worry because he lost his balance on a very hard swing, and went down awkwardly on his back leg. The knee collapsed again on the ball he put in play and he hobbled badly toward first. More worrying was the fact that with two other catchers on the bench he insisted on staying in the game. Most worrying was the fact that Manager John Gibbons apparently told him that he was coming out of the game, and he apparently convinced—or told—the manager that he wasn’t coming out. He was finally pulled for pinch-hitter Dioner Navarro in the ninth inning.

Fifth inning: In order, strikeout, 2 ground outs.

Sixth inning: Travis leads off with a double inside the bag at third that somehow doesn’t carom off the seats that jut out to the foul line. Then bizarre happens. Donaldson hits an easy high one-bouncer right back to pitcher Luis Severino. Severino dutifully checks the runner at second, only to discover to this delight that he’s half-way to third. Travis is caught in a rundown, and the only saving grace is that he dipsy-doodles just enough to allow Donaldson to get to second. Never make the first out at third . . . Encarnacion grounds out to the third baseman, the runner holding. Bautista strikes out.

Seventh inning: with one out Tulo splits the outfielders with a double to left centre. Saunders ostensibly beats out a little nubber while Tulo goes to third. But the call is overturned on review; Tulo’s at third, but with two outs. Upton fans.

Eighth inning: the only time when something almost happened. Donaldson walked with two outs. Encarnacion got into one that drove Aaron Judge back to the wall against the fence in right.

Ninth inning: shut down by Tyler Clippard, their erstwhile cousin.

In the face of this, it hardly mattered that the Jays pitched really well. Marcus Stroman only went five innings because his pitch count was high, 97, after five. When you walk one and strike out eight, it will elevate the count a little bit. The Yankees scored their two runs off him in the third inning. With two outs and nobody on, Stroman threw a 1-1 slider in the zone to Starlin Castro, who jumped on it like a puppy on a milk bone, a particularly vicious puppy with a particularly tasty milk bone. Note to Marcus Stroman: never throw a pitch in the strike zone, or anywhere in the same postal code as the strike zone, to Starlin Castro. He swings at junk. Throw him junk. Probably a bit rattled (Castro’s homer was like a rifle shot), Stroman gave up a double to Didi Gregorius, walked Mark Texeira, and gave up a single to Brian McCann to score Gregorius. The Yankees had two runs, and that’s all they needed.

Here’s a disturbing thing about Marcus Stroman’s performance tonight, which wierdly mirrored Aaron Sanchez’ last night. Twice in five innings he allowed base-runners to reach after two were out. Is this a young pitcher thing? Maybe not. R.A. Dickey does it all the time.

Here’s another disturbing thing. Stroman didn’t give up a hit or a walk with two outs in the first. But Didi Gregorius did reach with two outs and Gardner already on. He reached when Travis couldn’t handle his ground ball and was charged with an error. I repeat, a fielding error by Travis. Just sayin’.

For the Yankees’ part, Bryan Mitchell, making his first appearance of the season after breaking his toe on the last day of spring training and taking the whole season to recover, kept the Jays totally in check for five innings before departing after giving up the double to Travis leading off the sixth. In five plus a batter he gave up no runs, four hits, walked two, struck out two, and threw 80 pitches. I imagine the Yankees are happy to have him back, even if it did take until September.

Luis Severino, who was handed an important spot in the rotation and couldn’t keep it, was brought back up and sent to the bullpen. He came out of the pen tonight and did just fine, thank you very much. Three innings, retired nine of eleven, one hit, one walk, three strikeouts, 52 pitches. Not bad for a pitcher who was out of the loop for most of the year.

We went into New York with a 3-3 record on the road trip and alone in first. We came out of New York 3-6 on the road trip and alone in second. A day off, and then the big series with Boston at home. Can they regroup?

I was going to moan and groan over the crushing loss suffered by the Blue Jays tonight at the hands of the New York Yankees in the second game of the current series in the Bronx: Oh, what a disaster. It’s all gone to rat-shit. If we didn’t have bad luck we’d have no luck at all. I played around with variations on the idea of Game Five Redux: But Not in a Good Way as the theme. I pondered over all of the sins of commission and omission that brought us to the point that it mattered so much that Brett Gardner held on to his ice cream cone at the wall to end the game.

I was also thinking about Kevin Pillar, who in many ways is the heart and soul of this team, and how his legions of devoted fans so frequently resort to Superman references when they make up their signs and banners. It was, from that perspective, a game that was lost even with the intervention of Superman. It was a game in which Superman wasn’t enough.

The idea that Superman wasn’t enough summoned to my mind from I don’t know where the quirky phrasing of the title of a book of 1970s poems written by a proud young African-American woman, Ntozake Shange, a collection that was turned successively into a Broadway play and then a movie. The full title of all three versions of this work is For Colored Girls who Have Considered Suicide, when the Rainbow is Enuf. (Note: anyone reading this who is hypersensitive to covert manifestations of racism is asked to please google Ntozake Shange and verify that this title, with this wording, actually exists. Thank you.)

In thinking about Shange’s title I realized how appropriate its idea was for considering tonight’s game, but how it leads me in a completely different direction. No, I shall not mourn the what-might-have-beens of this wild night. Rather, I shall celebrate the crazy, awful beauty of baseball at its finest, at its ugliest, and in all of its manifest beauty. Why would I consider ending it all when there is always the prospect of another game as wondrous as this?

Mind you, it is not easy to take this approach. It means setting aside all considerations of trends and slumps and hot streaks, all concern over how the other teams did (they won, and so did they), all quibbles and criticisms (well, maybe not all. That is a bit much to ask.) It means setting aside fandom, or at least partisan fandom, and looking through the lens of “what is this thing of beauty”, rather than the lens of “what does it mean to our chances”. For those of you who think that there is no other way of looking at it except in terms of its consequences for the pennant race, well, you just don’t understand existentialism.

The other problem I face in writing about tonight’s game is that if I do my usual close narration of the course of a game that was so unlikely as to border on the fantastical, I would be here all night writing, and you would be all day reading, and we still wouldn’t do it justice. So I’m going to depart from the script tonight. In staying with the mood that a game like this needs to be celebrated, I can think of no better way for it to be celebrated than by singling out the notable characters, regardless of team, who contributed to the sum total of the night’s events. Since baseball is the most individual of team sports, this approach seems eminently suitable.

However, before I do, I should briefly outline the course of the game, in case you don’t know how it turned out, and also to make it clear why I’m not doing a play-by-play narrative.

Despite lacking command and allowing a number of base-runners, both starters, Aaron Sanchez and Luis Cessa, kept this a low-scoring affair into the seventh inning, Cessa with help from reliever Adam Warren in the sixth. An Edwin Encarnacion solo shot in the first was answered by a Brian McCann solo shot in the fourth, and the Jays had taken a 2-1 lead in the fifth on three straight singles, the RBI going to Jose Bautista. Sanchez ran into trouble with two out in the bottom of the seventh, as he gave up a single to rookie Aaron Judge and a two-run homer to the opposite field to rookie Tyler Austin to surrender the lead.

In the top of the eighth Troy Tulowitzki hit a two-out single to centre, and was replaced on the bases by Dalton Pompey. Melvin Upton followed with a tough base on balls while Pompey moved up to second on a passed ball. Kevin Pillar drilled a pitch from reliever Ben Heller into the gale in left that went right over Gardner’s head and hit off the wall. It took some funny caroms off the fencing, but with Pompey and Upton running it hardly mattered. Both scored, but Pillar was stranded at second, and with a 4-3 lead Manager John Gibbons turned to Jason Grilli to pave the way for Roberto Osuna in the ninth, but Grilli didn’t do much paving. He walked Ellsbury leading off, struck out Gary Sanchez, but gave up a triple to Didi Gregorius scoring Ellsbury. Gregorius scored on a sacrifice fly by Starlin Castro for the lead, Grilli walked McCann, and grooved one to Chase Headley who gave the Yankees a 7-4 lead.

It looked bad for the good guys as Dellin Betances came in to put them away. But a funny thing happened on the way to a save. Betances had finished the two previous games, and there’s no longer a Miller or Chapman to help out. He was wild as a March hare. He walked two, wild-pitched them up, let one score on an infield hit, walked another, let another score on an infield hit, and it was 7-6, bases loaded, one out. Betances had thrown 40 pitches and made his exit. The Yankees had to resort to call-up Blake Parker, who froze Kevin Pillar with a curve ball for the second out, much to Pillar’s fury with himself, and then gave up a deep, opposite-field, that is, into that wind, drive by Justin Smoak that took Brett Gardner back to the wall, up in the air, to make the catch and secure the most precarious snow cone you’ve ever seen, to end the game.

So, let’s look at the players that made this game one for the ages.

If in his first start after the Class A rehab stint, Aaron Sanchez showed that he hadn’t lost anything off his pitches, tonight he showed that he could persevere through whatever adversity he faced, even though his command was less than his best. He gave up a solo home run to veteran Brian McCann in the fourth, and then a two-run shot to rookie Tyler Austin in the seventh. He was in and out of trouble all night, with only one three up, three down inning, the sixth. He did only face three batters in the second but that’s because Starlin Castro, who runs like he swings the bat, i.e., wherever, whenever, decided that the rumours about Jose Bautista’s diminished throwing ability were true, and got himself gunned down at second by about four feet or so when Bautista played the carom of his line shot perfectly off the wall. Tonight Sanchez fell behind hitters, he got in trouble with two outs, but still persevered, and even despite all kept his pitch count down, throwing only 87 in seven full innings. It’s the mark of a pro to throw a quality start when you’re not throwing your best, and Aaron Sanchez is rapidly becoming a pro.

Brian McCann, who counted the first run against Sanchez in the fourth, is a guy who deserves the chance to do something once in a while, despite the changed circumstances in the Bronx. Unlike Alex Rodriguez, who had the good grace to accept his dismissal, and Carlos Beltran, who quietly rode out of town to the Rangers, McCann, a free agent at the end of the year, and his contemporary Mark Texeira, who has already announced his retirement, have had to hang around in significantly diminished roles while the new kids on the block get all, or most, of the playing time. So it was bittersweet to see McCann, relegated from catcher to DH, go deep on Sanchez. He erased the lead Sanchez had been guarding since the first inning, which hurt, but if somebody had to do it, why not him?

Not every individual who contributed to tonight’s proceedings did it in a positive way, and yes, we’ll eventually get to Dellin Betances, but right now I’m referring to Toronto’s dirty little secret, the evident defensive shortcomings of Devon Travis, a subject that no one seems to want to address. Twice tonight, in my opinion, Travis contributed to the accumulation of base-runners Aaron Sanchez faced. In the first inning he ranged quickly behind second to scoop a ground ball up the middle by Yankee rookie catcher Gary Sanchez, and given that it was Sanchez running, he had the time to plant and throw, or do a Troy Tulowitzki ballet move and throw across his body. Instead, he fumbled the ball away from himself toward second. Sanchez was given an infield hit, but dollars to donuts Ryan Goins makes that play. Every time. It’s no knock against Travis that he doesn’t field like Goins, but he’s deteriorated so far from the level of not-quite-Goins that sooner or later somebody should notice.

Then, in the fifth, perfectly positioned in the shift in short right field for Brett Gardner, he had to move just a little to his right, towards second, to pick up a sharply hit ground ball by Gardner. Gardner’s fast, sure, but Travis still had plenty of time to make a good throw for the out. This time he got an error for a throw that was so far toward the pitcher’s mound that Edwin Encarnacion had to come nearly two steps off the bag to flag it down.

With the Jays’ hitters struggling so these days, their pitchers have to play a tight sort of game, and they can hardly afford to have to deal with extra base-runners. I’m getting more than a little frustrated by the fact that no one is talking plainly about this problem of Travis’ defence that is going on right in front of our eyes.

Speaking of Encarnacion, coming to bat against hard-throwing young Luis Cessa, yet another rookie pressed into service by Yankees’ manager Joe Girardi, in the first inning, he might have been intimidated a little by the fact that Cessa had caught Jose Bautista looking, and fanned Josh Donaldson already. Or, maybe not. On a night with gale-force winds blowing in from left field, Edwin got hold of a 2-1 pitch that Cessa I’m sure wishes he had never thrown, and pounded it, “high and deep”, into the second deck in left. It was Edwin’s 37^th home run, but more importantly his 112^th RBI of the season, a new career high for Edwin.

Luis Cessa started for the Yankees and turned in a performance remarkably similar to that of Sanchez. Both starters tonight were exemplars of the old “bend, but don’t break” adage. It’s to Cessa’s credit that he managed to get the big outs when he needed them.

Kevin Pillar has been the anchor of whatever little offensive success Toronto has had in the midst of this bleak period of overlapping battings slumps. Despite the fact that he took minimal time to return from his thumb injury, and is clearly subpar physically as a result, he has had a number of key base hits since his return from the DL. In fact, despite their mutual tendency to strike out more often than you’d like, Pillar, Melvin Upton, and Devon Travis, to give him his offensive due, have at times put together exciting offensive sequences featuring tough at bats, good situational hitting, speed put to good advantage, and so on. They have been, at these times, a sub-set of small-ball players on a team of big-ball bashers. Whether they are hitting seven-eight-nine or eight-nine-one, they have shown the ability to shake things up when needed.

Tonight Kevin Pillar had a great game and contributed monumentally to his team’s efforts. Even when he failed, his failure was central to the drama of the game. When he came to the plate in the top of the eighth with Pompey and Upton at second and first and two outs, he’d already had two singles and a walk in three plate appearances, and his leadoff single in the fifth inning had started the mini-rally that gave the Jays their 2-1 lead. His shot over Gardner’s head in left and off the wall seemed at the time to be the clutch bomb the Jays had been looking for this entire road trip. For once the strange anatomy of Yankee Stadium gave us a break, as the ball caromed twice in opposite directions off the ledge and then the upright in the wall’s padding. This left Gardner with no hope of holding Upton at third to keep the game tied.

But sometimes the task is just too big, even for Superman (though don’t mention that inconvenient truth around comic-con!) Having vaulted the Jays back into the lead with his clutch blast, it was too much to expect that he coud also run down Gregorius’ shot over his head in the bottom of the eighth that tied the game. And while there was no poetry in it for Blue Jays’ supporters, there was a certain poetic justice when he couldn’t pull the trigger on a curve ball from Yankee newcomer Blake Parker, who spent most of the year in the minors, with the tying run only ninety feet away and one out in the top of the ninth. My kingdom for a fly ball . . .

We’ve completed our tour of the key players in tonight’s drama, all, that is, except for the three who made up the dramatis personae of the final, shocking, stark moment of the game. On the mound was Blake Parker, recent call-up, little-known itinerant bottom-of-the-bullpen kind of guy, with the wierdest herky-jerky, how-can-that-not-be-a-balk windup you’ve ever seen. At the plate was the much-maligned Justin Smoak, who this year, it seems, has never seen a clutch situation where going down on strikes with wild overswings was not the likeliest outcome. And in left field was one of the somewhat-forgotten Yankees, Brett Gardner, a mid-career veteran who’s too old to be part of the youth movement, and too young (and useful) to be shown the door. Decent hitter, good speed on the bases and in the field, and a guy who’s learned how to play the angles and the tricky spots of left field in Yankee Stadium about as well as anyone.

With, remember, two outs and the bases loaded, Smoak doesn’t waste any time at the plate. A mighty cut on the first pitch from Parker makes good contact, and our hearts jump. But we can see off the bat that it’s opposite field, and there’s the power-diminishing slice, and the wind to contend with, and as the scene shifts to Gardner racing for the fence, we know that it is not a no-doubter, and with the game in the balance and our hearts in our throats we watch with fascinated horror as Gardner reaches the fence, gathers himself—all of this taking an eternity—and leaps. And the ball lands in the pocket of his glove. With the impact of his body against the wall, we see the glove open, the ball start to roll up, teetering on the edge of the pocket. Staring intently at the ball as he drops back to the ground, Gardner rolls his glove around and under it; it drops back into the pocket, this time securely, as securely as the game is won for his team.

Nothing more need be said after describing the final act of this game for the ages. Yankees 7, Blue Jays 6.

For any sensible person, that is to say, someone who does not think that the New Year should be ushered in with a splitting headache while frantically deleting photos that shouldn’t have been posted and watching faux-students playing faux-amateur football representing big faux-academic institutions, Labour Day is the true beginning of the new year.

On Labour Day, Canadians return from vacation or their cottage rental, swim in the outdoor pool one last time, start looking around for something nice to do in the fall during their dwindling free time. Young Canadians organize their backpacks, sharpen their pencils, charge their laptops, hack the parental controls on their I-Phones, rip holes in their new jeans, frantically read Cole’s Notes on all their summer reading list books, all in anticipation of the first day of school.

The heat and humidity break (most years, anyway), the air is cooler and crisper, the morning light brighter and clearer, and there’s a spring in our step as we set out on new adventures or return recharged to our regular routines.

In France, where summer holidays are clearly delineated by the month of August on the calendar, as any Canadian visitor knows who drives miles out of their way to eat at that special new restaurant only to find it closed and deserted “pour les vacances”, they even have a name for the first week of September, “la rentrée” , the return to normal, to routine, to the bustle of life.

In short, about this time of year, change is in the air.

But not, it seems, for our beloved but oh so frustrating Toronto Blue Jays. Having escaped Tampa Bay with one win out of three and their pride barely intact, they took the field under a surprisingly bright sun, given the proximity of Hurricane Hermine, of a holiday Monday, eager to do better for themselves against a foe and in a venue where in recent times they have achieved a lot of success. Surely they would get a jump on this three-game series, and not start out in a hole again.

But it was just not to be. R.A. Dickey, whose recent outings have been very respectable despite the relative lack of results in the win column, would once again come a-cropper in the grandchild of the fabled House that Ruth Built, a venue that has of late been very friendly to his team, but decidedly inhospitable to his own pitching efforts.

Masahiro Tanaka, who continues not to impress me as a big-game pitcher despite his undeniably good stats, once again fussed and bothered like a pokey old grandpa and wandered haltingly through a Toronto lineup that at every moment threatened to expose his inadequacy, but that he knew he was fortified against by the protection of the baseball gods and, to be frank, blind luck.

It’s long been a cliché in sports that teams create their own luck. In the case of the current play of the Blue Jays that seems to be more than a little true. Despite being in every game and having every opportunity, they have done little to advance their cause at the plate, in the field, or on the base paths. Their pitchers have done the best they could to keep their fingers in the dike, but there’s only so many fingers for a lot of holes and a whole lot of water on the other side. Needless to say, the luck has not followed for them.

Tanaka started the game by not fooling anyone. Facing a lineup curiously devoid of three major bats, Troy Tulowitzki, Russell Martin, and Dioner Navarro all at the same time (at least partly caused by Dickey’s start and the concomitant need to have Josh Thole behind the plate), he served up a ringing double on an 0-2 pitch to the leadoff hitter Devon Travis, moved to the top of the order to compensate for some of the missing bats (I’ll leave Manager John Gibbons to explain that one to you, but he won’t), and then Jose Bautista ripped one past Chase Headley at third to score Travis, also on an 0-2 pitch—Tanaka hadn’t thrown a pitch outside the strike zone, and was down by a run already.

But here was the first instance of blind luck, not to mention the perversity of the planners of the Big Apple, that came into play. One of the architectural quirks of the original Yankee stadium was a strangely protruding bank of seats that jutted out almost to the foul line behind third, and then fell away again, creating a blind corner in left field. Not being ones to ignore tradition, no matter how stupid, the designers of the new ball yard thought it necessary to preserve this weird anomaly in the new ball park. So what happens is that a ball ripped past the third baseman often doesn’t make it into the left-field corner, into rattle-around territory, but caroms sharply off that stupid wall and back into the playing field. Yankee left-fielders, knowing this, will charge a ball that’s headed for the corner, rather than go into the corner to cut it off. Brett Gardner is a master at this move.

Thus Gardner raced in, judged the bounce, and hustled the ball into second to keep Bautista to a single, negating what should have been back-to-back doubles. After Jacoby Ellsbury flagged down a testy little looping liner by Josh Donaldson, Edwin Encarnacion slashed a hard line single into left centre that shoulda scored Bautista, but no, Jose was only at first, not second, and only made it to third, where he died. Michael Saunders followed with a bouncer to first, first baseman Tyler Austin came to the plate, and Bautista, running on contact, unaccountably stopped then started again and was easy prey for a tag play. With two out and two on, Kevin Pillar grounded out to first. An inexplicable TOOBLAN from a veteran, combined with a bad-luck bounce, ended up holding the Jays to their recent standard of scoring a run in the first but having bigger things escape them.

The Jays’ lost run in the first would have been a lot easier to swallow were it not for a bit of a problem, shall we say, that R. A. Dickey ran into in the Yankee half of the first. His first pitch to Brett Gardner was a knuckleball in for a strike. I always feel better when he throws a strike with it on the first pitch. But the next two pitches, also strikes, were something else again. Gardner lined the second knuckler into centre for a single. Jacoby Ellsbury jacked the third one into the short porch in right, and the 1-0 lead was overcome after three pitches.

About that famous short porch: it’s another architectural anomaly from the original Yankee Stadium that they just had to retain in the new structure, and why not? Isn’t it just thrilling to see how many hitters with warning-track power can chalk up homers on ordinary medium fly balls into the right-field corner? Sure, these oddities favour both teams equally, but the Yanks play 81 games here, so they get the advantage through their whole home schedule, plus the advantage of being able to adjust to them.

After the Ellsbury homer, hot rookie Gary Sanchez lined a single to right, still with nobody out, but Chase Headley, hitting fourth, grounded into a double play and Didi Gregorius flied out to centre, and it was two to one after one.

The Jays completely wasted an opportunity to tie the game in the second, as Melvin Upton led off with a ground rule double to right. This brought Josh Thole to the plate, and raised one of those existential crises that really seem to trouble Manager John Gibbons’ soul. Thole’s in the lineup because he can, for the most part, block Dickey’s knucklers. Playing once a week, it’s okay to ask him to absorb a bit of punishment to save Russell Martin from absorbing a lot. And being on the field means he has to hit. All understood. And my sense is that Thole has a good swing, and sometimes exhibits a good eye. But he’s just a guy who hits .159 and that’s not going to change without a massive increase in at-bats, and that’s not going to happen.

But Gibbie looks at the situation, and his player-loving little heart says, “aw, poor guy, he hardly ever gets a chance to knock in a run. I can’t take that away from him in the second inning. Maybe later if we need it.” But we needed it then didn’t we, to get the game back to even after the rocking of Dickey? Thole can bunt—he spent years with the Mets, so he knows how to do it. But, no, swing away, guy, give it a shot. And Thole popped out to the second baseman on the first pitch. Darwin Barney fanned for the second out, with Upton still at second, but Barney’s a vet who can go the other way. Maybe he changes his approach with Upton at third. And then Aaron Judge swoops his giant self in and launches an improbable swan dive to catch Devon Travis’ soft liner to right to end the inning. Bad decision by Gibbie. Bad luck for Travis. No tie game.

No first inning jitters any more for Dickey, he only needed ten pitches for the second. Starlin Castro flied out to left, and Austin Romine and the Giant Judge both fanned. Sometimes it’s almost amusing to see newbies try to make contact with Dickey for the first time.

In the Jays’ half of the third, Tanaka luck again came to the fore. With one out he walked Josh Donaldson, his first walk in his first start in September, which equals the total number of walks he issued in all of August, so there’s that about Tanaka. After Edwin popped out to second, Michael Saunders once again stroked a base hit through the shift-vacated left side of the infield, Donaldson stopping at second. Chase Headley then saved Tanaka’s sushi with a sparkling grab of a hard-hit ball by Kevin Pillar that he turned into an inning-ending fielder’s choice. More luck.

But the Yankees, well, they don’t need no luck. They’ve got Jacoby Ellsbury. Leading off in the bottom of the third was one of their fine prospects not named Gary Sanchez, Tyler Austin, today playing first for Mark Texeira. It’s a real sign of the Yankees’ turnover that Texeira, in his last days as a Yankee, is reduced to being the defensive caddy for a rookie hitting .205. But that doesn’t mean he can’t hit, oh, no. Austin, facing Dickey for the first time, wasn’t too fussy about what the knuckler was doing, and hit a double to left on a 2-1 pitch. Brett Gardner popped out, bringing Ellsbury back to the plate, where he singled in Austin with the third run. So in the realm of the mano a mano, the score was Jacoby Ellsbury 3, R.A. Dickey 0. After striking out Gary Sanchez, Dickey, incredulous at the indignity of it, was called for a balk by first-base umpire Mark Wegner. But Ellsbury was stranded at second when Headley popped out to second.

After three it was 3-1 for the Yankees, and Dickey had actually pitched as well as Tanaka, with a lower pitch count, the only difference being the first-inning gopher ball to Ellsbury, and Tanaka’s luck. The luck held in the top of the fourth, when Upton again led off with a base hit, only to be caught stealing by a very quick release and a strong, accurate throw to second by the rookie Sanchez. It’s not often that Upton gets a good jump but is thrown out by four feet. That little business taken care of, Thole, on another popup to second, and Darwin Barney on a grounder to second were quickly retired to end the inning.

Still essentially matching baserunners and pitches with Tanaka, Dickey was again walking the tightrope in the bottom of the fourth, but unfortunately, with two on, a base hit by Starlin Castro and a walk to Austin Romine, and two outs, bookend strikeouts of Gregorius and Judge, he had to face the unconscious who gives a damn Tyler Austin, who smacked another double to left, picking up two RBIs and extending the Yankees’ lead to 5-1. Dickey struck out Brett Gardner to end an inning in which he struck out the side, but Gibbie was unwilling to let the bleeding go on, and decided that Dickey had seen enough of the Yankees.

In the last two games in Tampa, the Jays had yielded early leads, only to have their bullpen close the door completely on the Rays and give their hitters a chance to get back in it. The first time it didn’t happen, the second time it did. With at least four innings to go, could they do it again, and in the meantime could they finally rough up Tanaka, or jump on his successors?

Well, yes, the bullpen was aces again, and yes, they did mount a challenge as Tanaka exited the game, but they couldn’t quite capitalize on enough chances to do anything other than make it close.

After his first disastrous outing from the bullpen, Francisco Liriano needed a confidence-builder, and with Dickey only going four, the Jays needed some innings. Both got what they were looking for. How about two innings, one base hit, a tainted infield single by who else, Ellsbury, who reached when the ball slipped out of Travis’ hand, yet again, and generously not counted as an error, and three strikeouts? The only blemish on Liriano’s performance came after the game, when we found out that he hadn’t gone out for a third inning because his back had stiffened up. Brett Cecil followed with an encouraging clean inning, and Joaquin Benoit finished up with his now-traditional one-walk but striking out the side.

As for the Jays’ offence, Tanaka drew on his personal bank of good luck again, accompanied by Jose Bautista’s second baserunning blunder, to survive another threat by Toronto in the fifth. After Travis grounded out, he walked Bautista, second walk of the new month for Tanaka, what’s the world coming to, then ducked a bullet as Donaldson hit a screamer right at Headley for the second out. This brought Encarnacion to the plate, and there arose again the spectre of the home-team-friendly box seats behind third.

Edwin hit another shot past Headley, and again hit the billiard rail and caromed right to Gardner who was perfectly positioned. Not only was Encarnacion held to a single, but Bautista, with the play right in front of him all the way, ran into the out at third by about a half a mile to end the inning. Never make the first or third out at third? Check. TOOBLAN number two? Check. Once again, we didn’t capitalize on baserunners, and once again our own sloppiness was the decisive factor.

Tanaka took on a second wind after that, and set the Jays down in order in the sixth, with two strikeouts. After Liriano’s second clean inning, we came to the seventh, which would be Tanaka’s last, going in with 98 pitches. The top of the seventh was the kind of inning that, in the American League, you only see after the September first callups. The Jays used three pinch-hitters, and the Yankees used four pitchers. When it was all said and done, Tanaka was of course gone but still in line for the win, the Jays had closed the lead to five-three, but the scoring was closed out for the night, whether the Blue Jays could admit it or not.

Tanaka walked Thole leading off. Dioner Navarro, hitting for Darwin Barney, hit a deep fly to right that the giant Aaron Judge reached up and plucked from the top of the wall. That was enough for Manager Joe Girardi, and he brought in Jonathan Holder, who got the second out on a short fly to right, and then the fun began. Holder walked Bautista and Donaldson to load the bases, and was replaced by Ben Heller, who gave up a single to right by Encarnacion to drive in two runs. Finally Tommy Layne came in and retired Martin on a little bloop to Castro at second. The Jays had closed the gap to two, but that was as close as they would come.

The Yankees bullpen was up to matching the success of the Jays’ relievers, and didn’t allow a base-runner in the eighth and ninth. Tyler Clippard struck out one and threw 14 pitches, while Dellin Betances struck out two on only ten pitches for the save. Andrew Miller? Aroldis Chapman? Who?

Well, here we are, Tampa Bay redux. We have to win tomorrow night to avoid the sweep. So far, we’re absolutely not out of it, but if we don’t start putting together good at bats, fielding the ball, and running the bases well, we soon will be.

You could have viewed today’s pitching matchup between Tampa’s Chris Archer and Toronto’s Jay Happ in two different ways.

Taking the long view, as in season-long, things looked pretty good for the Jays. Happ has had a surprisingly good, make that surprisingly superb, season for Toronto, while Chris Archer, already established as one of the premier starters in the American League prior to 2016, has had a shockingly bad season. But if you take the short view, as in the last month, or since the All-Star break, it would look quite a bit different. Happ has struggled in a number of starts since mid-season, perhaps reflecting the fact that he had logged a high number of innings in his excellent first half, and might now be facing the wall. Meanwhile, Chris Archer has recently looked like the Chris Archer of yore, or at least of 2015.

While Happ has gone 4-1 in his last seven games, and his ERA has risen by only about a quarter of a run, the telling figure is that he has averaged less than six innings a start in those last seven games, whereas in the first half of the season he was pretty well guaranteed to go seven, or even into the eighth inning. Meanwhile, though Archer has gone 3-3 in his last seven games, reflecting the fact that the Rays are sitting in last place, his ERA has been 3.00, he has averaged 6.1 innings a start, and most impressively he has struck out 56 in 45 innings while walking only ten. This is not the same Chris Archer that the Jays cuffed around earlier in the year.

Regardless of who would prevail, it looked pretty certain that neither team would score a bunch of runs early, and that this would be a day for the bullpens to step up, and a game that would likely be decided by a late-inning lightning strike. Luckily for our heroes after struggling through two losses under the Tampa ceiling, the summoner of lightning this day would be wearing road greys rather than powder blue.

So despite anticipating a tough go against Archer, the Jays once again managed to score in the first inning, but once again they didn’t start to rock and roll until two were out, limiting their chances to go big early on Archer. In fact, Jose Bautista and Josh Donaldson had both fanned already when Edwin Encarnacion came to the plate and pounded one to centre field that even Kevin Kiermaier couldn’t run down. On second with a double, Edwin was in position to score when Dioner Navarro singled to right. Navarro, inserted into the lineup as DH and cleanup hitter, took the central place in the Jays’ batting order thanks to his good numbers in the past against Archer, and the move paid dividends immediately in the form of an RBI.

The inning ended with Navarro being tagged out off first by the pitcher, but if this appeared to be a TOOBLAN, it was a TOOBLAN with a purpose. (Sorry to repeat for regular readers, but for the benefit of first-time visitors, a TOOBLAN is Thrown Out On the Bases Like A Nincompoop). With the play in front of him, Navarro could see that Souza, who has a strong arm, had made an accurate throw to the plate. It’s fairly clear that he intentionally gave himself up to protect Edwin’s run. As you would expect, catcher Bobbie Wilson, seeing Navarro in no-man’s land, stepped out from behind the plate, took the throw on the fly from Souza, and fired to Archer covering, who put the tag on Navarro.

With a one-run lead and knowing that his mates had hit a couple of solid shots against Archer, Happ took the mound and immediately had the lead taken away by the very aggressive top of the Tampa batting order. That second baseman blank blank led off the game with a single to left on a 2-2 pitch. Kevin Kiermaier hit a hot grounder off Edwin’s glove at first that deflected to Devon Travis, but of course there was no getting Kiermaier by then. The veteran Evan Longoria drilled a booming double off the wall in right centre, scoring that guy and moving Kiermaier to third. The latter would score on a sacrifice fly to right by Matt Duffy after Happ had caught Brad Miller looking. Happ then struck out Stephen Souza, but Tampa, and more to the point Archer, were up 2-1.

The second inning cemented the trend for both starters. Buoyed by the quick Tampa response in the first inning, Archer came out and blew the visitors away, Russell Martin grounded out to first, Troy Tulowitzki popped out to second, and Michael Saunders struck out. Though he didn’t give up another run, Happ continued to struggle as his pitch count rose like the tally of lies in the Donald Trump campaign. After getting the first two outs, he walked Curt Casali, the number nine hitter, and then the no-name guy, before retiring the side on a line smash by Kiermaier hit right at Travis at second. Alarmingly, after two innings Happ’s pitch count was at 61, and the writing was on the wall for him.

It wasn’t all beer and skittles for Archer, though. Like Happ he quickly dispatched Kevin Pillar on a popup to the shortstop, and Travis, who fanned. But like Happ he lost concentration with two outs and got in trouble for himself. Jose Bautista hit a ground single up the middle, and then, goodness gracious, Archer issued a walk to Josh Donaldson. Just so you know how well Archer had pitched in August, the walk to Donaldson equalled his entire total of walks for the whole preceding month. Presumably shocked by this unforgiveable lapse, Archer uncorked a wild pitch, bringing Encarnacion back to the plate with two outs and ducks on the pond. This time the spindly youngster with the fluid motion and the retro Afro peaking out from under the back of his cap got the better of Edwin, who went down swinging. The good news from Archer was that he still had the lead; the bad news was that despite being an inning ahead, Archer’s pitch count was also climbing quickly, and had reached 59 already.

Happ gave us some faint hope by retiring yet again the first two batters in the third inning, but that was his last hurrah; this just wasn’t his day. Longoria flied out to right; Brad Miller flied out to centre, but Matt Duffy, Stephen Sousa, and Corey Dickinson strung together three straight singles for the Rays’ third run, and that was it for Jay Happ. Manager John Gibbons, now having an expanded pen available to him, wasn’t about to draw out the agony for Happ. He only gave up three runs, but on six hits and two walks, and had already thrown 85 pitches, enough for a quality start, which this wasn’t. Gibbie called in Danny Barnes, one of the September callups who had impressed in a short visit in August, to finish off the third, which he did by retiring Bobbie Wilson on a fly ball to centre.

Well, that could easily have been the ball game. Archer settled in, the Jays’ bullpen did some great work to keep the game close, and the only issue lurking on the horizon was Chris Archer’s ominously rising pitch count, which would signal an early end to his day and perhaps change the complexion of the game. No insult intended, but the Rays haven’t sunk to the bottom of the division on the strength of a knockout bullpen, now have they?

Pitching on the lead, Archer certainly showed he still has his best stuff. Since fanning Edwin to end the mild threat in the third, he retired eleven out of twelve batters, only giving up a sharp base hit to Travis in the fifth. He also fanned five of the eleven outs. But when he came out for the seventh with 99 pitches in the books, the leash was pretty short. After Russell Martin flied out deep to left on a three-one pitch, Tulo rifled the ball into right through the vacated infield. That was it for Archer, and, as it turned out, for the Tampa Bay Rays as well. Brad Boxberger came in to face Michael Saunders, and it took just three batters for the Blue Jays to erase Chris Archer’s shot at a hard-won W. Saunders singled to right despite the shift. Kevin Pillar walked to load the bases. On a 1-0 count Devon Travis pulled a ground ball hard past Evan Longoria into left, and both Tulo and Saunders scored to tie the game. It took a little more work for Boxberger to extricate himself without giving up the lead. Jose Bautista hit into a fielder’s choice to move Pillar to third, and Josh Donaldson walked to load the bases again, but Edwin popped out to first in foul territory to finally end the threat.

Just a word about the shift, which Kevin Cash employs as much as anybody in the league. The Jays had three base hits in the inning, with the shift in place on all three. Tulo just laughed at it and hit through the big hole on the right side. But Saunders and Travis both pulled the ball through the shift. You still have to make quality pitches when you’re in the shift, because line drives and hard grounders will always find holes. If hitters start pulling the ball through shifts, and alternately crossing it up, I think the amount of shifting is going to decline, because what’s the point?

With Archer out of the game and the score tied, my bets were on the Jays beating the Rays’ bullpen, but nothing’s carved in stone, right?

In the meantime, Danny Barnes had done yeoman’s work to hold the Rays for another two innings after bailing out Happ. He left with a line of 2.1 innings, no runs, one hit, one strikeout, and 29 pitches. This fellow throws strikes and pitches to contact, and he does it with efficiency. Could he be a candidate for the post-season roster? Does his previous time up with the Jays qualify him? Hope so.

Scott Feldman retired the side in order with a strikeout and a couple of groundouts in the sixth, on 17 pitches.

With the game tied going to the bottom of the seventh, Gibbie turned to his high-leverage relievers, and the BenGriNa team came through in fine order. Let’s lump them together as one; it’s more impressive that way. Joaquin Benoit gave up a single to some guy I don’t recognize, and then struck out the side in the seventh. Jason Grilli retired Matt Duffy on a ground shot that bounced off the pitcher and caromed right to Donaldson at third. Then he struck out the next two, and gifted us with another gleeful fist pump. Roberto Osuna struck out two in the ninth, giving up a deep fly to right centre in between, and turned to thank his god, while we thanked ours for the gift of BenGriNa.

The drive to right centre by Nick Franklin off Osuna produced a scary moment, in more ways than one. First, it looked like it was going to the wall, but then, as Kevin Pillar and Zeke Carrera raced toward each other tracking the ball, neither backed off, and Carrera ended up plucking it out of Pillar’s glove as they collided. For a moment it looked like Pillar had taken the brunt of the collision on the same hand that had been recently injured, but luckily he was okay.

I don’t now whether it’s more impressive as narration or as numbers, but here are the numbers for BenGriNa: 3 innings, ten batters faced, one base hit, seven strikeouts in nine outs, 45 pitches thrown, 35 for strikes. And all of this after Barnes and Feldman went three and a third scoreless, giving up only one hit. Bring on the playoffs, the bullpen is ready!

But a shut-down bullpen don’t butter no turnips if the guys with the sticks don’t do something: this game was not over. After the Benoit whitewash of the Rays in the seventh, Kevin Cash called on Kevin Jepsen to keep the Jays in check. Don’t ask him how that worked out. Jepsen has managed the Jays well before, including a clean inning on Friday night. But this time it was another story, with a better ending for our side.

It was as quick as it was decisive. Jepsen walked Dioner Navarro. Dalton Pompey made his first appearance off the bench for the year to run for him and immediately stole second. He would have stolen third, too, but he didn’t have to, because Russell Martin, freed by his manager to call his own shot on a 3-0 count, hit a no-doubt blast to left for the lead, and the winning runs. After Jepsen gave up a following single to Tulo, Cash had seen enough, and brought in Danny Farquhar, who struggled to keep the score close, and succeeded, despite giving up another single to Pillar, and throwing a wild pitch to advance the two runners into scoring position with only one out. With his back to the wall, Farquhar fanned Travis, and got Bautista on a short fly to right.

Osuna scored his thirtieth save in thirty-three attempts, though maybe some of them should be divided into thirds and shared with his elderly uncles in the combine.

Thus the disaster of a sweep was averted, and the Jays could depart for New York, following Hurricane Hermine with a lighter heart and a good win under their belts. The lesson from the second and third games in Tampa Bay is that the modern game is still nine innings, but even the best of starting pitchers can only manage seven most nights. When you’re stonewalled by a good performance, you’ve only got a small window to recover, but it is a window. The best teams are the ones that can find a way to squeeze through more times than not. And nail some plywood over their own window in the meantime.