I hate to keep reverting to Yogi-isms, but it looked like “déjà vu all over again” after the top of the first inning of tonight’s home stand opener between Toronto and the equally-struggling Oakland Athletics.
Francisco Liriano, whose last two starts for Toronto had totalled three and two thirds innings, walked a couple, gave up a stolen base, threw a wild pitch, and chewed through thirty pitches to get out of the inning. He only gave up one run, but he needed a bit of luck on his side, or rather old friend Rajai Davis’ foolhardiness, to keep the Athletics to just the one tally.
Toronto caught a break when after Liriano walked the first two hitters Rajai Davis decided to break for third and was thrown out on a close play by Russell Martin. Marus Semien subsequently stole second and scored on Ryon Healy’s base hit that would have scored Davis as well.
Not to mention that Steve Pearce let Healy’s RBI single bounce over his head in left field for an error that in the end had no effect on the scoring, as Liriano worked his way out of the jam without further damage.
My son and his wife and their two little boys were over for dinner this evening, and he watched the first part of the game with me on the big 4K screen, a treat he likes to sneak in when he visits. He doesn’t see too many games these days, but he played when he was a kid, and knows baseball. He couldn’t believe how troubled and distracted Liriano looked during that inning, and agreed with me that he was doomed to another short outing.
J, our older grandson, who’s almost five, likes to cuddle in with his dad to watch, but he’s far more interested in the commercials than the game. He likes the inventiveness and the graphics. I’ve never seen a kid beg to see one more round of commercials before going to put his PJs on . . .
So, yeah, it wasn’t looking good going to the home half of the first. The A’s had long-time minor-league journeyman Chris Smith making a spot start tonight. (How often has it been that we’ve had to explore the background of a mostly unknown veteran minor leaguer? This should be the year of the understudy, as far as starting rotations are concerned.)
About Chris Smith, the first thing to remember is that he’s Oakland’s Chris Smith, and not Toronto’s relief pitcher currently on the major league roster of the Blue Jays. The second is that if he’s not grizzled, and he is, kinda, he should be. He’s made 66 mound appearances in the majors, twelve for Boston in 2008, 38 for Milwaukee in 2009-2010, thirteen for Oakland last year, and three for Oakland so far this year. In the meantime, and think about these numbers, he’s appeared in 316 games in the minor leagues, starting in 2002, and started 164.
And Chris Smith is still trying to catch on with a major league team, at the age of 36. You have to take your hat off to him, and I do. Such players are the bedrock of professional baseball. Without them, the whole edifice crumbles.
And how many times this year have the Jays been stonewalled by a guy like Chris Smith? After Liriano’s rough start, would the Jays’ lineup go down meekly and set the stage for another frustrating game?
Well, no, they came out and hit the ball hard. Really hard. They only got one run to show for it, but they sure rattled Oakland’s cage. In fact, if it weren’t for not one, but two sparkling running grabs in left by the normally lacklustre left fielder Khris Davis, Russell Martin’s solo homer would have scored two, and Josh Donaldson would have been on second with nobody out and two runs in. But, wishes and horses, and all that stuff, Davis made the two plays, and Justin Smoak hit an easy fly to centre to let Smith off the hook.
(If you want a measure of Khris Davis’ defensive liabilities, the Athletics regularly insert Rajai Davis in left as a late-inning defensive replacement. Anybody who watched Rajai play the outfield when he was a Blue Jay will get the irony of this.)
So after one inning we had a slightly altered script from Toronto’s recent past, and a new ball game, all tied up. The question now became which pitcher would settle into the game, and which would not, or maybe it’s the other way around . . .
Strangely, Liriano started throwing strikes, and Smith stopped inducing hard contact. Liriano set the Athletics down in order in the second, third, and fourth, retiring eleven in a row after the run-scoring single in the first. Smith gave up only a two-out single to Zeke Carrera in the second, and retired the side in order in the third. After three innings, the pitch counts had evened out pretty well, Liriano at 53 and Smith at 46.
In the top of the fourth inning the Jays’ spirits had to be picked up by Ryan Goins’ effort to flag down a popup just inside the right field foul line. Playing in the shift for the right-handed Ryon Healy, that is, behind second, Goins had to go an immense distance to make a sliding catch of a ball just inside the line that no one else had a chance on.
Unlike Liriano, Smith ran into trouble in the bottom of the fourth as the Jays rallied for the two runs that would put them in the lead for good. In fact, the A’s were lucky that the damage wasn’t worse, as the Jays came up with two hard-hit base hits with the bases loaded that only scored one run each.
Josh Donaldson led off with a double, and Smith walked Justin Smoak to set up the double play before retiring Steve Pearce on a short fly to left. Troy Tulowitzki then drew a walk to load the bases, and Zeke Carrera, and then Ryan Goins, the latter with two outs, knocked in runners from third with base hits to centre. Smoak had to stop at third on Carrera’s hit, and Tulowitzki had to stop at third on Goins’ hit. With a little more speed on the bases, Toronto could have built a bigger cushion, but you play the cards you’re dealt, right?
The A’s cut the lead to one in the fifth on Mark Chapman’s solo home run off Liriano in what turned out to be his last inning. Despite the rocky start, Liriano had settled in to the point that he went out after five innings with the lead, having given up only two runs on two hits and two walks. He’d only reached 86 pitches, but manager John Gibbons wasn’t going to press his luck.
After Joe Biagini benefitted from a double play that erased a leadoff walk and finished his inning on only ten pitches, Chris Smith returned for his sixth inning, which he survived without giving up another run thanks to a baserunning mistake by Steve Pearce. After leading off with a double, he had moved to third on a groundout to short behind second by Tulowitzki. Gibbons put on the safety squeeze with Pillar at the plate, a bit of a surprise from the Toronto manager, but not a bad idea. Except that Pearce did not break immediately for the plate when Pillar got the bunt down, and Smith cut him down at the plate with a nice play.
With both bullpens in play, once again it was the Toronto relief corps that prevailed. Biagini finished the seventh, throwing only sixteen pitches over his two innings. Ryan Tepera likewise breezed the eighth in thirteen pitches with a strikeout, and Roberto Osuna blew the visitors away in the ninth by striking out the side for his twenty-fifth save in twenty-nine opportunities.
If you’re counting carefully, the Toronto relievers pitched four innings and faced the minimum number of batters. Only Rajai Davis reached, in the sixth, when Biagini walked him, saw him erased by a double play. For a team whose fans have always complained about its bullpen, that’s a pretty impressive show, and not for the first time this years, either.
The Jays added an insurance run off Canadian John Axford in the seventh. Axford allowed the first three batters he faced to reach, on two walks and a single, and left the bases loaded for Josh Smith, who walked Smoak to force in the fourth Toronto run.
Well, that was different: a neat, well-pitched game in which Francisco Liriano resurrected himself from the dead and passed off a lead to a perfect bullpen, and a game in which not once, but twice, Jays’ hitters came up with base hits with runners in scoring position.
Could this be the start of something? Is it too late? Stay tuned: Sonny Gray goes for Oakland tomorrow night in his last audition for a playoff role, er, his last start before the trade deadline. He goes up against the Toronto version of Oakland’s Chris Smith, another grizzled veteran of the minor league wars, Cesar Valdez. Valdez impressed over four innings picking up Aaron Sanchez’ short start against Boston on the nineteenth. Let’s see what he can do covering Sanchez’ next scheduled start.
Leave a Reply