Baseball is such a funny game.
Sometimes the ball flies out of the park, bangs off the walls, rattles around in the corners while the runners circle the bases and the runs tally up. But then you get a game like tonight’s.
This was a game in which two swings of the bat, one in the Toronto first, and one in the Tampa second, produced three runs, and that was it for the whole game.
Tonight, after fill-in starter Nick Tepesch stranded a Lucas Duda single and retired the Rays in the top of the first, Toronto came to the plate against Jake Odorizzi, a long-time linch-pin of the Tampa rotation who has always pitched well against the Blue Jays.
For the second game in a row, Jose Bautista ran up a multi-pitch walk to bring Josh Donaldson to the plate. And for the second game in a row, after working the Tampa starter for eight pitches, Donaldson lashed a fast ball high on the outside corner to right field for a two-run homer. Down 2-0, Odorizzi quickly retired Justin Smoak and Kendrys Morales on easy fly balls, and Steve Pearce on a liner to third.
With the two-run lead, Tepesch came out and started throwing bombs, but luckily for him only one of them left the park. Steven Souza hit one to deep right that Bautista hauled in. Brad Miller hit one to deep centre that Kevin Pillar hauled in. But Tepesch’s luck ran out with catcher Wilson Ramos, who reached down and golfed a low slider to dead centre that Pillar tracked to the wall and leaped hopelessly after as it smacked off the facing of the 200 level to cut the Jays’ lead to 2-1. It only took one more pitch for Tepesch to pop Peter Bourjos out to Smoak at first to end the inning.
Not to spoil the suspense, but that was it for the scoring. For the next seven innings, Odorizzi and three relievers, and Tepesch and two relievers, kept the scoreboard clean, racking up an unbroken string of goose eggs between them.
Odorizzi only had to deal with base runners in the third and the sixth innings. In the third, Rob Refsnyder led off with a base hit that was followed by another walk to Bautista. But Odorizzi retired Donaldson, Smoak, and Morales to strand the runners without advancing.
In the sixth inning, with two outs Steve Pearce hit a long drive into the right field corner. Steven Souza just failed to track it down after a long run, and the ball rebounded back past him, allowing Pearce to go all the way around to third. But Odorizzi had more magic in his glove than the two-out black arts in the bat of Ryan Goins, and struck him out looking on a curve ball that just nicked the outside corner, to leave Pearce at third.
In a game that either pitcher could have won, Jake Odorizzi went out after six innings bearing responsibility for the lead run. He’d given up only three hits and three walks
while fanning four on 110 pitches.
As for Tepesch, he skated around trouble in both the third and fourth innings, in the third giving up two-out base hits to Duda and Evan Longoria, and in the fourth walking Brad Miller and Ramos with one out, and hitting Daniel Robertson with a pitch to load the bases before getting Corey Dickinson to fly out to right on the most fraught at-bat for the Rays in the game.
Tepesch finished strongly, retiring the side in the fifth and the sixth, though there was a moment of cold chill with two outs in the sixth, when the same Wilson Ramos who’d taken him out to centre in the second, got into another one to straightaway centre, but this time it stayed in the park for Pillar to haul it in.
Speaking of home runs and fly balls, it’s interesting to note that in Tepesch’s first outing against the Yankees he threw only four ground balls and seven fly balls, counting the three that went out. Tonight he threw twice as many ground balls, eight, and the same number of fly balls plus homers, seven, but only one of the seven went out. So the improvement of getting a few more grounders and mostly keeping the ball in the park made the difference between going four and a third for a loss and going six for a win. He’ll have to confer with his fellow fly ball-ers Marco Estrada and Jay Happ to work on keeping the baseball in the park, if he’s to stay with the team.
Tepesch finished up at six innings plus two batters, and gave up one run on four hits with three walks, two hit batters, and a partridge . . . er, no, on 96 pitches to notch his first win in the majors since September 16, 2014.
Just because the game was scoreless after Ramos’ home run in the second doesn’t mean that it was devoid of interest. Manager John Gibbons hopefully sent Tepesch back out for the seventh, but he hit Peter Bourjos and walked Daniel Robertson on four pitches, and that was enough to call it a night for the starter. Aaron Loup came in to face the left-handed slugger Corey Dickinson.
There ensued one of the oddest plays you could imagine. It was a play that illustrated why the infield fly rule exists, because if it could have been called, a whole lot of confusion would have been avoided.
Basically, the infield fly rule was instituted to prevent infielders from deliberately dropping a popup to be able to force out a faster lead runner, or even turn a double play if the hitter is lazy out of the batter’s box. Paraphrasing, it reads that if a ball is a fair fly ball, and can be caught with ordinary effort by an infielder, the batter will be called out automatically with runners on first and second or the bases loaded and less than two outs.
Loup sawed off Dickerson, who pushed out a little hump-backed liner toward second, where Rob Refsnyder was playing fairly deep both for the double play, and because Dickerson’s a left-handed power hitter. Refsnyder charged the ball, but didn’t quite get to it and took it on the short hop. Problem was, it wasn’t a fly ball, and Refsnyder never really had a chance for it, so the condition of catching it with ordinary effort didn’t apply. Correctly, no call was made, except that the second-base umpire gave the safe sign to confirm that Refsnyder had trapped the ball, and not caught it.
Refsnyder quickly flipped the ball to Ryan Goins, already on the bag at second. The second-base runner, Bourjos, before realizing that the ball had been trapped, correctly retreated to second, and arrived on the base before the throw came from Refsnyder, which was actually irrelevant. The runner from first, Robertson, with the play in front of him, was caught in the classic no-man’s land; he had to hold first until he saw the ball wouldn’t be caught, and then take off for second. The matter should have been simple: with Goins on the bag when he caught the ball, the force was off for Bourjos, and he could run or hold at will, and just had to avoid being tagged while off the bag. Robertson was forced out, and Dickerson, of course, was on first.
Goins, however, ended up standing on second, between Bourjos and Robertson, comically tagging first one, then the other. One of them had to be out, right?
For some reason the video review took a long time, perhaps because one of the umps, or maybe two of them, had signalled more than one out, and they needed a reset: Bourjos at second, Dickerson at first, and Robertson out.
As it turned out, Loup took matters into his own hands, fanned Lucas Duda and got soft contact from Evan Longoria, who hit an easy liner to second, which was caught on the fly by Refsnyder, for the third out.
This was one of those games, it seems, and John Gibbons was prepared to go all out. Loup came back out for the eighth because two of the first three batters were left-handed, and he did his job, striking out Logan Morrison and Brad Miller, but walking Steven Souza in between. With the dangerous, right-handed Ramos due up, the call went out for Roberto Osuna to come in and try for a very unusual for Osuna four-out save. The short term worked, as Ramos grounded out to short on the second pitch.
He came back out for the ninth and quickly ran the table in eleven pitches, two ground balls and a strikeout, for his thirtieth save in 37 chances.
Meanwhile, Sergio Romo had stranded a single by Kevin Pillar in the seventh, but Brad Boxberger had a more adventurous eighth. He still managed to keep Toronto from adding an insurance run, with the help of Tampa’s newly-acquired lefty, Dan Jennings. Josh Donaldson led off with a ground-rule double to left. Justin Smoak grounded out to first, with Donaldson moving up to third. Kendrys Morales hit one in the hole between first and second that should have scored Donaldson, but Brad Miller made a great grab and threw him out at first while Donaldson had to hold at third, with no contact play on. Then Jennings came on for the lefty matchup and retired Goins on a comebacker to save the run.
So thanks to the combined efforts of Tepesch, Loup, and Osuna, Donaldson’s first-inning shot stood up for the win, and the Jays held on for a somewhat unusual in these days 2-1 win. It was good enough to push Toronto’s record to five of seven in its last seven games, and gave them an important first win in this crucial series with one of the key teams ahead of them in the wild card race.
And, they managed to steal a win with one of their fill-in starters on the mound, a real bonus.
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