The way that Toronto roughed up Tampa’s starter Jake Odorizzi in the first inning this afternoon, it looked the the Blue Jays were on a mission to split the Tampa series, and come home looking at least a little more respectable than they did after the two-game sweep in Baltimore.
Devon Travis led off with a loud out, a liner right at first baseman Logan Morrison. Josh Donaldson followed with another shot to right. This one wouldn’t be caught by anyone, except maybe Cliff from Clearwater in row C, and the Jays had a quick 1-0 lead. After this rude greeting, Odorizzi walked Jose Bautista on a 3-1 pitch. Not one of the four balls was even remotely close to the plate.
This brought Kendrys Morales to the plate. Odorizzi went 3-2 on him. Again, none of the balls were close. Then he threw a splitter low and on the outside of the plate to the burly switch-hitter. Morales still managed to muscle it into the gap in right centre for a double, with Bautista stopping at third. Troy Tulowitzki didn’t wait to see what Odorizzi was throwing. He jumped on a first-pitch cutter that was thigh-high and on the outside corner, and drove it hard on the ground to rookie shortstop Daniel Robertson, who made the play and threw Tulo out at first while Bautista came in to score. Russell Martin fought back from an 0-2 count to 2-2 before striking out on a low outside cutter to end the inning.
You had to feel good about Toronto’s chances of bracing up and leaving Tampa with the split after five hard hit balls out of six batters in the top of the first. When Marco Estrada pitched over a Kevin Kiermaier infield single in the bottom of the first to preserve the 2-0 lead, you had to feel even better.
And you would have been foolish to be so optimistic after one inning.
First of all, Odorizzi settled nicely and retired the side in the second and third innings, with nary a hard-hit ball. He had two strikeouts, and took 31 pitchers to navigate the six outs, whereas he had thrown 25 in the first inning alone.
In the meantime, the home team generated some heat in its at-bats. In the second inning, the long-simmering feud between Troy Tulowitzki and Steven Souza reared its ugly head again. Souza walked to lead off the inning, and then Logan Morrison hit one smartly to Justin Smoak right at the bag. Smoak elected to take the out at first, removing the force and turning the play at second into a tag play for Tulowitzki.
Tulo completed the double play, and there was no question of a review, but the Jays’ veteran apparently took exception to the fact that Souza had started his slide pretty late, and came into the bag under a big head of steam. Souza jawed back at Tulo, the umpire was right there trying to cool things, and both dugouts emptied, but in a rather desultory fashion. Truth be told, it was so pro forma that if the two teams had been a fire brigade, the house would have been a heap of ashes by the time they got there.
For his part, Souza seemed to have been explaining to Tulo that he didn’t know the tag play was in order because he had no way of knowing that Smoak had taken the out at first. Not sure how that ‘splains anything, since a hard, late slide is a faux pas whether it’s a tag play or a force play . . .
In any case, after the double play, and the one-act farce, Estrada gave up a single to rookie shortstop Daniel Robertson, who looks pretty good with a bat in his hands, and Maxell Smith bounced one back to Estrada for the easy third out.
The next inning, the third, the Rays put up some heat of a more traditional kind, and erased once and for all the Jays’ lead. After catcher Sweet Jesus/Jesus Sucre (did I add him to the roster of my All-Time Best Baseball Names Team yet?) lofted a short fly to Zeke Carrera in left, Corey Dickinson applied a slice swing reminiscent of Wally Moon of Moon Shot fame (you could look it up), and hit—of course—a slice to left that sliced its way right over the ridiculously inviting short wall that angles from the left-field foul pole to the straight portion of the fence. That made it 2-1 Jays, and no big deal, because Estrada is okay with giving up a solo dinger from time to time, as long as his mates give him a few runs to play with.
But then Estrada’s luck really went south. Kevin Kiermaier bounced one sharply to first that caromed off the bag and went bouncing around in foul territory down the line. By the time Jose Bautista got the ball back into the infield, Kier the Deer was of course on third with a triple.
After Estrada got a called third strike on Evan Longoria, he made his first actual mistake of the inning, which was to walk Brad Miller. Then he made his second, and worst, mistake, going up and in on a 1-2 changeup that Steven Souza happily plunked over the real, but not very deep,left-field fence, giving the Rays a 4-1 lead.
A lead that was never challenged. For all intents and purposes, the game was over.
Hard to imagine after only three innings, but here’s what transpired:
In the top of the fourth, Morales was nicked on the shirt by a Jake Odorizzi pitch. He was immediately erased when Tulowitzki grounded into a double play.
In the top of the ninth, with two out, Bautista doubled to right on a flare that fell far from human hands. Kendrys Morales then lined out sharply to Robertson at short for the final out.
That’s it. Two baserunners. Both wasted.
Oh, and Josh Donaldson pulled up a little lame after grounding out to Evan Longoria for the second out of the sixth inning. It was “a different area”, they said after the game, of the same right calf that bothered him in spring training. Ryan Goins finished up for him at third.
Incidentally, with Travis already being given a one-game rest in the first week of the season, and now Donaldson day-to-day, how smart was it for Jays’ management to release Melvin Upton and keep both Darwin Barney and Ryan Goins? Especially since either is perfectly capable of filling in in left field.
Odorizzi went six innings, and after giving up the two runs, the two hits, and the one walk in the first inning, faced the minimum fifteen batters through the sixth, since the shirt-flicked Morales was erased on a double play. He also struck out four, and threw 101 pitches.
Jumbo Diaz gave the Rays two quick innings of six-up six-down on 32 pitches, and Tommy Hunter mopped up in the ninth, with the two-out bloop double by Bautista the only blemish on his record.
Meanwhile, in the fourth inning, Marco Estrada gave up another solo home run, to Sweet Jesus, before worming his way out of trouble in his last inning, the fifth. While not a quality start, his five innings, five runs on seven hits, two walks and five strikeouts on 99 pitches wouldn’t have looked nearly as bad if three of the seven hits hadn’t left the yard, one of them the lucky slice of Corey Dickerson.
Ryan Tepera gave the Jays a quick, clean sixth on twelve pitches, and then Aaron Loup came on in the seventh to try to get past Sucre, then focus on the two left-handed hitters, Dickerson and Kiermaier. He got Sucre but walked Dickerson before striking out Kiermaier, who so bitterly protested the called third strike that he was dispatched to an early shower by home plate umpire Mike Muchinski.
Manager Gibbons wouldn’t let Loup face the dangerous righty Evan Longoria, so he brought rookie Casey Lawrence in for his second appearance in the bigs, and
the move paid off as Lawrence froze Longoria with a wicked 1-2 slider to the low outside corner. Longoria chose to keep his thoughts to himself and stay in the game.
If the Jays had any hope of climbing back from the three-run deficit late in the game, they were erased when Lawrence walked Souza and Logan Morrison back-to-back to lead off the bottom of the eighth, especially since Robertson beat out a squibber to third to load the bases with nobody out. This brought the pesky Smith to the plate, and he hit a grounder to Devon Travis, who came to the plate for the force on Miller for one out, but there was no chance of doubling Smith at first. This gave Sucre the opportunity to thrust the knife a little deeper on the Jays. His single to left scored two, making it a 7-2 lead.
The inning nearly ended when Smith rounded second and wandered too far off as Ryan Goins was cutting the throw from the outfield, but bizarrely Smith got back to second safely. Goins correctly flipped the ball to Tulowitzki, in the baseline at third, and the latter started to herd Smith back to second. However, Devon Travis, covering second, somehow got too close to Smith, and ended up backpedalling awkwardly toward the bag, almost shoulder-to-shoulder with Smith, like a wierd pas de deux. Tulo had to eat the ball as there was never a moment when Travis was in position safely to make a catch-and-tag. Back to spring drills maybe?
The rundown gaffe didn’t hurt, however, as Dickerson grounded out to Tulo to end the inning.
Down by five, Bautista’s bloop double was a last gasp far too shallow to invigorate the moribund Jays, and the road trip came to a sad end with Toronto’s fifth loss in six games.
Home again, home again for the opener, and never was home cookin’ and home grounds more badly needed by a limping and demoralized would-be contender than these 2017 Toronto Blue Jays.
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