After the mess and the drama of the last three nights, this should totally have been Marcus Stroman’s night. Unfortunately for Stroman, the ugly hangover from last night’s game and the off-field repercussions today of what went down then took most of the oxygen out of the world of Toronto baseball long before the game started.
We found out what Kevin Pillar said to Jason Motte in the seventh inning last night, and it wasn’t pretty. In fact, given the incredible popularity of the feisty centre fielder with Toronto’s fans around the country, it couldn’t have been worse.
It’s been a frustrating week losing three sloppy games to the rebuilding Atlanta team, and emotions were at a peak after Aaron Loup had hit Freddie Freeman on the wrist and, as we subsequently learned, put Freeman out with a broken bone. Then Atlanta pitcher Mike Foltynewicz delivered some payback to Devon Travis in the top of the seventh.
At the end of the Jays’ seventh, Motte struck out Pillar with a caught foul tip, but Pillar thought Motte had quick-pitched him, and lost it in the worst way possible. He shouted something at Motte, but we only found out later that it was some version or other of calling Motte a “fucking faggot”.
From all reports it was immediately apparent that Pillar realized that he had put himself into a really bad spot with his outburst. His immediate response after the game was that he was appalled that he had lost control of himself. He reported that he had already conveyed his apologies to Motte and the Atlanta organization, and he had made a passionate declaration that this was not who Kevin Pillar was, and that he had lost control out of frustration in the heat of the moment.
The only problem was that he didn’t directly address the essential awfulness of what had come out of his mouth in his moment of frustration. In 2017 in western society, regardless of what retrograde infant has managed to bamboozle his way into the White House, there is a huge difference between calling someone, for example, a “fucking asshole”, and using the homophobic slur used by Pillar.
Had he said in his immediate comments something to the effect that “what bubbled to the surface in my moment of frustration was a reflection of the casual verbal homophobia that I have not yet been able to expunge from my private persona. My embarrassment over this having happened in such a public way will inspire me to make a real change not only in the way I express myself about other human beings but in the way that I actually feel about them”, he would have hit the mark, and, along with accepting whatever punishment was meted out to him, would have gone a long way toward defusing the storm that raged around him for the next twenty-four hours.
But, he didn’t manage all of that in his first comments after the incident. Perhaps it’s not surprising that he didn’t. He is, after all, a ball player, a young guy who has devoted his life to perfecting his craft on the field, not to perfecting a public relations strategy that would enable him to handle successfully any and all problems that might arise in his public life without the aid and guidance of advisers wiser than he.
By the next day the story had changed. His formal response, his public statements, and the team’s response had all been brought into alignment to make the best out of a bad situation. General Manager Ross Atkins, who had booked a quick flight to Atlanta (he wasn’t travelling with the team, not even on their first visit to Atlanta’s new stadium?) presumably spearheaded the rescue operation when he arrived.
A most proper public apology, including a specific reference to what he said, was issued. “I had just helped extend a word that has no place in baseball, in sports or anywhere in society today.” He went on specifically to add “most importantly” the LGBTQ community to the list of entities to whom he was apologizing.
In comments to the press that I heard on the radio, he expressed the odd but extraordinarily humbling acceptance of whatever treatment would be meted out to him by the public. In essence what he said was “I have been given the opportunity to be made an example of how not to show respect to a valued segment of society, and I embrace that opportunity to be made an example of.”
Now, I’m a retired high school teacher, as you might have guessed. One of the more onerous experiences that all teachers have had to endure from time to time is to have to sit and pretend to accept a faux apology leveraged out of a misbehaving student who feels no remorse whatsoever over what she or he has done, and has no intention of actually apologizing. This situation would always result from the administrator recognizing that she or he had no other choice than to pretend to support the teacher but actually not being willing to risk evoking a complaint to either a superintendent or a trustee from a student backed by parents not willing to concede the error of the student’s ways.
As you can imagine, the “apologies” I have been pressured to “accept” in my career ranged from the almost real to the laughably inadequate. The worst, or funniest, depending on your point of view, was the hand-written note I received saying “Sir, I’m sorry for you thinking that I was rude to you but I wasn’t.” Whatever vice principal was involved in that transaction assured me that it was a perfectly acceptable apology. Maybe that’s why I retired early . . .
After consultation with whomever he met on Thursday, the statement issued by Pillar was spot on. If its essence had been delivered spontaneously by Pillar the night before, it would have gone much farther to defusing the situation much more quickly.
In addition it was announced that Pillar would serve a two-game suspension starting immediately, a suspension imposed by the team, not MLB headquarters. This was done, it was said, after consultation with the player, the team’s manager and coaches, the offices of MLB, and the players’ association. Kevin Pillar would not appear in tonight’s series closer with Atlanta, nor in Friday night’s series opener in Baltimore. The fact that the team imposed the penalty rather than MLB makes it appear to be very proactive, but there was something self-serving about it as well.
In short, if the league imposes a suspension on the player, the team has to play with a short bench for the duration of the suspension. If the suspension is imposed by the team, the playing roster remains at 25.
The Jays called up Dwight Smith Jr. to fill the roster spot vacated temporarily by Pillar. When the lineups were finally released for tonight’s game, though, Smith was on the bench, Zeke Carrera in left, Jose Bautista in right, and Darrell Ceciliani, who had been recalled recently from Buffalo to help cover the shortage caused by the injury to Steve Pearce, in centre. With Dalton Pompey still in rehab from his spring-training concussion, it was easy to imagine the Buffalo outfield being patrolled by an army of yellow rubber duckies.
There are some advantages to being behind in my reporting. I’m actually writing this piece on Sunday morning, I blush to admit, and the news has just come out that Ryan Getzlaf of the Anaheim Ducks, currently playing in the Western Conference Finals of the Stanley Cup Playoffs, has been fined $10,000 by the league, but not suspended, which says something about the National Hockey League, for uttering a homophobic slur at a referee.
I just caught an interview clip in which Getzlaf was “manning up” and “taking responsibility”, and the contrast was interesting. The best Getzlaf could say about taking something positive forward from the incident was that it showed that “we all have to show a little bit more respect”. This sounds a little closer to some of my old high school students. Respect toward whom? Refs, or the LGBTQ community? A little bit more? What, softer homophobic slurs? More inclusive ones?
Sorry, hockey fans, I’ll take Kevin Pillar’s response, scripted or not, over Ryan Getzlaf’s any day.
So with that last sentence I’m at nearly 1400 words, and not a word about the first game of the two games that would be played without Pillar in the lineup. I’m sorry, Marcus Stroman, it’s not often that your exploits take a back seat to anything.
And tonight they shouldn’t have taken a back seat to anything on earth. Oh, it wasn’t like he mowed Atlanta down or anything like that. Oh, well, in one respect he did: he went five and two thirds innings, that’s seventeen outs, fanned six, and got ten ground ball outs. So what he did on the mound today was to deliver the very best Marcus Stroman performance that he could. He did it with electrifying stuff, mesmerizing to watch from behind the hill as his slants darted, dived, hooked, backed up, and went any which way but straight.
So, why the quibble about his performance tonight at the beginning of the last paragraph? Simply enough, these Atlanta hitters just don’t go down quietly, and he not only gave up seven hits in his five and two thirds, he did not have a single three-up, three-down inning in the entire stint. Which also would explain why he ran up his pitch count to 103 to get those seventeen outs.
I’m not complaining, mind you; it can be highly entertaining to watch a talented pitcher dodge bullets (not literally at him, but situations, right?) through an entire start, and get away with it.
It also didn’t hurt that his team-mates posted a three-spot for him in the top of the first, before he even took the hill, and never looked back.
Julio Teheran had the start for Atlanta, a guy the Blue Jays have handled reasonably well in a few encounters in the past. He’s a lanky, right-handed Cuban with really good stuff but a tendency to be all over the place.
However, after the innocent Zeke Carrera, leading off in lieu of Pillar, skied out to right, Teheran had to fine-tune his aim, er control, a little, to settle a matter that was palpably hanging over the game. In the midst of all the controversy about Pillar’s outburst and suspension, it hadn’t been forgotten that there was unsettled business between the teams.
Not only Pillar’s words, but Freddie Freeman’s broken wrist bone and Jose Bautista’s unnecessary (in the circumstances) bat flip were all still in the ledger book, and one thing yet was needed to balance things out in the cockeyed world of baseball logic: Bautista had to feel the sting of a baseball on a fleshy part of his body.
Maybe Teheran really does have control problems, because it took him two shots to hit Bautista in the thigh, putting him on with one out. Baseball logic’s one thing, but putting yourself in the hole is another. Somebody should do a study of what happens after a payback pitch is made. You wonder how many times the hit batsman comes around to score, and/or it leads to a rally.
I don’t think it’s ever a great idea if the payback is made by a guy who doesn’t really know where his next pitch is going to go. In Teheran’s case, with Bautista on first and one out, we only know what happened to the last pitch to each of the next three batters: it touched green, and Toronto had a quick and satisfying three run lead. Kendrys Morales singled to left, bumping Bautista up to second. Darrell Ceciliani, the callup hitting cleanup, pulled a double into the right-field corner, scoring Bautista.
When Chris Coghlan’s hitting fifth, you gotta know the lineup’s depleted. With all the other injuries, and Pillar out, and the pitcher hitting, this is what you get. But he’s got some pro chops, this Coghlan guy. He was with the Cubs last year, you know. Instead of being an automatic out, Coghlan hit one the other way for a second consecutive double, plating Bautista and Ceciliani. I certainly hope the Atlanta players and coaches felt vindicated by their retaliation against Bautista. I imagine it didn’t bother him all that much.
While Stroman bobbed and weaved his way through the fearsome Atlanta batting order, Teheran managed a quiet second, and then got rocked again in the third. It was another quick-strike attack. Bautista led off with a double (maybe Teheran should have aimed for his butt again), Kendrys Morales singled down the left-field line, showing a continued penchant for hitting hard opposite the shift while hitting from the left side, and callup cleanup man (I just like writing that) Ceciliani drilled one over the right-field fence and it was 6-0.
Bizarrely, in this season of injury after injury, Ceciliani, at the moment of his first real triumphs at the plate for Toronto, six total bases and four RBIs, became likely the first Blue Jay in Toronto history to put himself on the disabled list by hitting a home run.
As soon as he left the batter’s box after putting a tremendous swing on the ball, Ceciliani grabbed his left shoulder, and held it all the way around the bases. After being gingerly greeted by his mates in the dugout, he disappeared down the tunnel, and did not return. The rookie Smith would end up making his MLB debut under less than positive circumstances. We later learned that Ceciliani’s left shoulder had been dislocated.
So, back at the baseball game, once again Teheran settled in and retired the side, now down 6-0. At this point, clearly, the intention on the part of Atlanta manager Brian Snitker was to raise the white flag, in the sense of leaving Teheran out there to absorb whatever, while saving the rest of his pitching staff.
But after Stroman’s realitively easy bottom of the third inning, in which he only had to pitch around a walk to Brandon Phillips, Toronto forced Snitker’s hand and drove Teheran from the game.
The Jays employed the most unlikely of all weapons to finish off the Atlanta starter, Luke Maile’s first home run as a Blue Jay, after previouslyarnering only two base hits, both balls dropping in the outfield after bouncing off charging fielder’s gloves. And then—wait for it, as if you didn’t already know—Maile’s blast was followed by Stroman’s second at bat of the game, his third of the season, during which he delivered his second base hit, his second extra-base hit, and his first major-league home run—to the opposite field.
Were it not for the Kevin Pillar story, surely the story of this day would be the Maile-Stroman back-to-back jacks. But, life has a way of interrupting . . .
Brian Snitker, who may have a bit of sadist in him, didn’t even pull Teheran after Stroman took him downtown. Oh, no, he let him pitch to, and walk, Zeke Carrera before taking him out for left-hander Sam Freeman, who is not related to Freddie Freeman. To add insult to injury, Freeman proceeded to give up base hits to Bautista and Morales, the latter of which brought in Toronto’s ninth run, also charged to Teheran.
Atlanta relievers Freeman, Josh Collmenter, and Ian Krol managed to keep the Jays off the board for the rest of the game. Ryan Tepera picked up Stroman in the sixth inning and pitched the seventh. Joe Smith pitched the eighth, and Jason Grilli the ninth. Notably, Smith struck out the side in the eighth, putting down Nick Markakis, Matt Kemp, and Tyler Flowers.
So this day that started so badly for Kevin Pillar and the Toronto Blue Jays ended on a positive note for Marcus Stroman and his team-mates, but if we look back on this day and try to remember why it was significant, while we may remember Marcus Stroman’s home run, it will be far overshadowed by what happened off the field in the Blue Jays’ family.
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