Long Ball Stories

Friday:

Oh, that orange juice bowl. Every time the Blue Jays take a dip in the orange juice bowl they forget how to swim

Early Friday morning the weary and forlorn Toronto Blue Jays dragged themselves into Tampa Bay for a three-game weekend series with the resurgent Rays, who do not look very much like the team that was supposed to roll over and play dead this year while it rebuilt.

Playing at Tampa Bay has never been a good thing for the Blue Jays. Before this series, in the team’s history their record in Tampa Bay had been 72 wins versus 104 losses, a terrible record that suggests that something darker than mere chance might be at play.

A quick look at the record uncovers an interesting little fact: in 1998, the Rays’ first season of play, their team record was 63-99. Against Toronto, the Rays went 0-6 in Toronto, but beat the Blue Jays 5-1 in the six games played in Florida.

Since then it has ever been thus, so it is not at all surprising that given their condition on arrival the Jays slumbered through the three games on the weekend, and only managed to avoid a sweep on Sunday by virtue of the gritty personal effort of Marco Estrada and the sheer offensive chutzpah of Kevin Pillar.

The team suffered a complete offensive breakdown on the weekend, and were as putty in the hands of the Tampa pitching staff, scoring only six runs in the three games.

And this is a team that despite that dismal Florida showing remained fourth in all major league baseball in runs scored for the season, and first in home runs with 51. Yes, that’s first in homers, as in three more than the Yankees, Indians, and Angels, and five more than the Red Sox. Without Josh Donaldson for much of the season, I might add. Not to mention the slow starts of Justin Smoak and Kendrys Morales, with four and three respectively, far off the team leader, Yanvergis Solarte, who has nine.

So, you get the point: what kind of wool is it that Tampa Bay pitching pulls over the eyes of Toronto’s hitters when they play in Tampa?

Take Friday night, for example, what looked like an egregious mismatch: Jay Happ starting for Toronto and Andrew Kittredge starting for the Rays, as the first up in a self-proclaimed “bullpen day” for Tampa Bay, as if they needed a bullpen day more than the Blue Jays!

Maybe it was all a scam by Rays’ manager Kevin Cash, though.

Cash left the right-hander Kittredge in for two innings and 36 pitches. He’d started the first looking like he wouldn’t last long. Curtis Granderson led off the game running out a double to left centre. Josh Donaldson walked on a 3-2 pitch. Solarte hit one high and deep to right that stayed in the park, but allowed Granderson to advance to third.

Oscar Hernandez hit a fly ball solidly to centre that scored Granderson and for once the Jays had a first inning run. It’s lucky for the Jays that they didn’t know they wouldn’t score again until the eighth inning.

Cash ran Kittredge out there for the second inning, and he picked up his first strikeout of the game, and gave up his second hit, a Luke Maile opposite-field single that crossed up the shift, a harmless two-out single followed by a fielder’s choice for the third out.

After two innings, down only 1-0, Andrew Kittredge . . . did not come out for the third inning. Out of the bullpen came the left-handed Ryan Yarbrough. This is where I question the intent of the Tampa manager: was starting Kittredge a bait-and-switch tactic, and did he really intend to get the most innings out of the lefty?

Or did he just take a wild guess and hit the jackpot, when Yarbrough gave up a leadoff base hit in the third, and then proceeded to mow down fifteen Toronto batters in a row, to take Tampa Bay through to the eighth inning, by which time the Rays had a 4-1 lead?

Yarbrough’s pitching line is about all you need to say: 5 innings, 1 hit, 4 strikeouts, 58 pitches. Total command.

Jay Happ meanwhile started without any of the fuss and drama of his recent starts. A first-inning walk to C.J. Cron on 4 pitches made you worry a little, but then Matt Duffy grounded one up the middle that Aledmys Diaz cut off, flipped the ball to Lourdes Gurriel Jr. at second with his glove, and the latter lasered to first for a lovely double play.

In the second he picked up his first strikeout, and benefitted from a nice play up the middle on his backhand by Gurriel to get the third out on Denard Span.

28 pitches and Happ was through two with no damage, having faced the minimum.

He continued his streak of facing the minimum number of batters through the first two outs of the third inning before centre fielder Johnny Field [but can he hit?] hit one out to left to tie the game at ones. After three Happ still had thrown only 40 pitches.

But in the fourth inning, with Yarbrough having already started to impose his dominance on the Toronto hitters, Happ walked the leadoff batter, which as always was a bad thing. It wasn’t like the Rays were all over Happ, but by the end of the inning they were up 3-1, and that’s all they’d need in this game.

Cron walked again on a 3-2 pitch. Matt Duffy grounded one up the middle but avoided the double play this time as the ball snaked through. The hot-hitting catcher Wilson Ramos lined one into right centre for a base hit that scored Cron and sent Duffy to third. Happ fanned Daniel Robertson for the first out, but Denard Span hit into a fielder’s choice that scored Duffy with the Rays’ third run.

This was one of those games that, though close, never really seemed to be in reach. Barring a sudden wave of fatigue or hitting the wall, it was clear the Jays weren’t going to get to Yarbrough.

The question was, what might they be able to do once he was done? That question didn’t get answered until the top of the eighth, when Sergio Romo trotted out to the mound to take over the pitching chores.

By that time the gap had grown to 4-1, as Jake Petricka, recently recalled from Buffalo, and had come on to finish up the sixth inning for Happ, was touched for a run in the Tampa seventh on a double to right by Johnny Field and a base hit to left by the Rays’ shortstop Adeiny Hechavarria, who had originally been signed by Toronto.

So when Aledmys Diaz homered off Romo with one out in the eighth inning for Toronto it only returned the Tampa lead to two runs, and when Toronto did no further damage to Romo they would be looking at Tampa’s closer Alex Colome in the ninth.

The Rays notched two more off the lefty Tim Mayza in the bottom of the eighth, via a bloop single by Span and a home run to centre by Brad Miller, the lefty Mayza was supposed to retire.

At this point with a 4-run lead the Rays didn’t have to use Colome, but they decided he needed the work anyway, which quelled any hopes that Toronto may have had for a late rally.

Teoscar Hernandez reached third after getting on by means of an error, but that was it and Toronto was done, for their second straight desultory loss.

They’ll have to shake out of it tomorrow evening against Jake Faria, who’s historically pitched well against Toronto.

Saturday:

If you thought it was bad that Toronto lost 6-2 on Friday night to a bullpen committee of the Tampa Bay Rays, how much worse would it be if the Blue Jays lost the second game by a 5-3 score while allowing 3 unearned runs, and fighting the most skewed strike zone you could ever imagine?

That’s what happened Saturday evening in Tampa Bay, and it was not a pretty sight, believe me.

Aaron Sanchez has been slowly rounding into form this spring, and with the addition of a very effective changeup to his repertoire he offers the possibility at the end of his journey of being a more complete pitcher than he was in 2016, when he just happened to be the ERA champion.

But as he works to regain his confidence and command, one new problem has emerged.

Sanchez is a pitcher who has such live movement on his pitches that it appears to be very hard for umpires to be able to see exactly what the ball is doing as it approaches the plate. I say “appears to be” to be charitable to the poor guys who have to stand back there and try to see what almost can’t be seen.

Sanchez has had problems with the plate umpire over his strike zone in several of his starts so far this season, but none were worse than what he faced on Saturday. From the moment C.B. Bucknor called his first trademark fast ball at the knees a ball, Sanchez started fretting about Bucknor. Which made Bucknor fret about Sanchez, and his team-mates. Which didn’t help anybody.

And the more Sanchez frets over the strike zone, the more he struggles.

The big right-hander didn’t help himself with three walks in the first inning, but the run the Rays scored not only wasn’t earned, it absolutely wasn’t his fault.

He went 3-1 on Denard Span and walked him. Then he got C.J. Cron to hit into an easy double play. Then he walked Matt Duffy, and it was in this at-bat that Sanchez learned that a low strike wasn’t a strike. Then he walked Brad Miller, still obviously troubled by the low strike call on Duffy. Then Wilson Ramos hit the ground ball to Gurriel that should have ended the inning.

But Gurriel picked the wrong time to make his first error as a Blue Jay. The ball clanked off his glove, Ramos was safe, and Span scored for a 1-0 Rays lead.

Sanchez had a better second inning, but he was still chewing through pitches like they were a bag of Doritos and he was Donald Trump. Just one walk in the inning, to Mallex Smith who stole second but died there, but his pitch count still had risen to 47 by the end of the inning.

The Rays picked up a second run in the third inning in a good example of the kind of inning that’s a minor nightmare for a ground-ball pitcher: 2 ground balls that snaked through for base hits, then a weak flare single by the catcher Ramos to knock in the run. It was only 2-0 at the end of three, but Sanchez was quickly coming to the end of the line, now at 63 pitches for three innings.

In the meantime Jake Faria had faced the minimum number of batters for the Rays, erasing a one-out walk in the first to Josh Donaldson with a double-play ball, and striking out two.

But despite Sanchez’ troubles the Jays were only down 2-1 after Teoscar Hernandez homered to left to lead off the fourth, the first hit and first run off Faria.

This was a point at which the game could have gone either way, but it depended on Sanchez settling down and throwing a couple of good innings.

Didn’t happen, and by the end of the Rays’ fourth their lead had increased to 4-1, and Sanchez was gone.

The first Tampa run in the fourth was manufactured by the speed of Mallex Smith. The second resulted from the speed of Denard Span. But the inning was lengthened and the Tampa runs abetted by a second Gurriel error, which was compounded by a failure to scoop his low throw by Kendrys Morales, who was playing first because Justin Smoak’s wife had a baby daughter and he was on paternity leave.

Got all that?

Smith beat out an infield single to short despite the heroic effort of Aledmys Diaz to dig the ball out on the backhand and fire it to first. He took second on a grounder to third and scored on Span’s single into the corner. Span stole second and moved to third when Cron was safe on Gurriel’s throwing error. From third he scored Tampa’s fourth run on Duffy, and that it was it for the frustrated Sanchez.

In a moment of supreme irony, Aaron Loup came in to get the final out by striking out Brad Miller looking on about the same pitch that Bucknor wouldn’t give to Sanchez. Must be the cut of Sanchez’ jib.

After Faria’s four effective innings, you’d think that if Toronto was going to brace up and fight back it would have to start right away, but the top of the fifth was the measure of where this game was going. The slumping Russell Martin rolled over on the first pitch and grounded out. Morales hit a lazy fly the wrong way to left. Gurriel put a charge in one, but it stayed in the park in left centre.

The Jays did pick up a couple of runs in the eighth to bring it to 4-3, only to have Tampa add on a third unearned run in the bottom of the inning to make the final margin two.

Toronto’s eighth inning flurry could have tied the score, except that Mr. Bucknor behind the plate intruded on the proceedings again to eliminate a hitter who would have gone on to score. Gurriel finally got all of one leading off to cut the lead to 4-2.

But then Bucknor punched out Dalton Pompey on a 3-2 curve ball from Sergio Romo that you could watch, over and over again, in agonizing slow motion, as it bent around the strike zone, never coming closer than six inches to the black. So Pompey wasn’t on base when, long story short, Diaz doubled to left centre which might have scored Pompey, and Hernandez followed with a single to left the scored Diaz, so Pompey would have been ahead of him. Outrageous, and we’ll never hear a word of it from MLB headquarters.

So it was left as the final frustration for Russell Martin in the bottom of the eighth to bat away a bunt for an error leading to Tampa’s final run, the one that made it look easier for Colome to wrap things up in the ninth as he finished an extended five-out save.

With Tyler Clippard on the mound, Mallex Smith hit a ground-rule double to right. Playing for the extra run, manager Kevin Cash had Johnny Field lay down a bunt. It wasn’t very good, driven hard enough into the turf that it hopped right up in front of Martin charging from behind the plate.

Martin was never going to get Smith at third, but he certainly had a shot at Field at first. But he batted the ball with his mitt rather than securing it, and Field was safe at first. Smith eventually scored on a sacrifice fly by Cron that would have been the third out.

So the score of Saturday’s game was a little complicated: the Rays earned 2 runs for themselves. The Jays handed them three. C. B. Bucknor stole one from Toronto. In your mind, then, this was a 4-2 Toronto win with the Umpire bringing up the rear. On the scoreboard it was something else.

Sunday:

You’d think after two such abysmal showings at the plate that the Blue Jays would break out with some big numbers to avoid the sweep. Or even that Tampa Bay might score more than a couple of runs without the help of the Toronto pitchers and defence.

This despite the fact that the Rays had Chris Archer going for them, and Toronto had Marco Estrada. To be honest, neither has much resembled the pitcher that he was in previous years, although in Estrada’s case he has shown flashes of his old mastery, stringing together several effective innings either before or after giving away the farm.

Yet both looked more like the pitcher of yore on Sunday, and we quickly settled into a for-real pitchers’ duel.

After only giving up one base hit in the first two innings, Estrada survived more of a scare in the third, and had to navigate dangerous waters in the fourth and fifth before finishing up with an easier sixth inning, aided by a fortuitous double-play ball.

The Rays pushed their aggressive button a little too hard in the third, and for once they were stopped cold by the Blue Jays. It started with a walk to Mallex Smith and then of course a stolen base. Carlos Gomez hit a sharp single into centre, Smith had to hold up on it, and when Kevin Pillar came up throwing he was held at third.

After Estrada fanned Denard Span, Gomez tried to steal second and Luke Maile threw him out, with Smith holding at third. The next thing you knew, Smith was trying to steal home, the second such attempt we’ve seen in a Jays’ game this year. But Estrada stayed calm, didn’t rush his motion, and threw a pitch that Maile could handle which took him straight into Smith’s path, legally. Smith bounced off Maile and was dead as a doornail. Well, out at the plate, I mean.

In the fourth after C.J. Cron drove Pillar to the wall in centre for a nice catch, Estrada gave up a grounder to Duffy that went off Solarte’s glove at second for a hit, and walked Brad Miller before getting the dangerous Wilson Ramos to hit into a double play started by Josh Donaldson.

In the meantime Archer had stranded a double by Pillar in the second, and had Gomez bail him out in the fourth with a nice catch of another drive by Pillar after the Jays had put two runners on with base hits, Solarte and Smoak, both of whom defied the shift to hit cleanly into a crowded right field.

If you want a turning point in this game it was the fifth inning, when Toronto finally scratched out a run, and Tampa Bay missed its third opportunity in five innings to break into the scoring column.

For Toronto it started with Anthony Alford, who led off the inning with his first base hit since being recalled from Buffalo. Alford immediately stole second, a welcome addition to the team’s repertoire. Luke Maile hit one deep to right field, and Alford moved up to third on the catch.

Then came the key play of the game, at least before the top of the ninth. Aledmys Diaz hit a grounder into no-man’s land between first and second. Archer was a bit late covering the bag, and he and Diaz converged at first as Archer took the throw from Brad Miller. Diaz was safe, Alford scored, and Diaz was down.

The replays show that he had caught the side of the bag with his left foot, turning his ankle. Diaz would be carried off, to be replaced as a baserunner by Lourdes Gurriel Jr , who would take over at shortstop as well.

Archer stranded Gurriel, but the run stood, and it stood until the bottom of the eighth inning.

Marco Estrada was pulled after six innings, despite that he was throwing a four-hit shutout, because his pitch count was already 96. His last inning was his shortest at nine pitches, but he needed some help from his friends. After walking Cron, Duffy smacked a liner over Solarte’s head at second, but Solarte leaped and made a circus snag, came down, and doubled Duffy off first. Miller lined out to Hernandez in right for Estrada’s last out.

Tyler Clippard gave up a hit but struck out two in the seventh.

Meanwhile, Archer retired the side in the sixth and seventh innings to finish strong, having given up the one run on five hits with no walks and six strikeouts, on 97 pitches. Matt Andriese pitched around a couple of baserunners in the eighth, and the game remained 1-0 for the visitors going to the bottom of the eighth.

As usual, Ryan Tepera appeared for the eighth inning, well established as John Gibbons’ setup man.

However, this time what Tepera set up was a 2-2 hanging slider that Carlos Gomez pounded over the wall in left to tie the game. Tepera got out of the inning without further damage but not without some adventure, finally getting a strikeout and a groundout to keep the Rays from taking the lead after they’d put runners on first and third with only one out.

With the game tied at one, Marco Estrada had done his job, and now it was time for the Toronto hitters to step up and make a difference. And who better to be leading off against the Rays’ closer Alex Colome but the Jays’ most consistent hitter this season, Kevin Pillar?

Pillar had already had his impact on this game. He’d recorded the first base hit against Chris Archer in the second inning when he’d lined a double into the corner in left. Then in the fourth he saved a run by taking a leadoff extra-base hit away from C.J. Cron with a leap against the wall in centre. The catch increased in significance when Matt Duffy followed with a base hit off Solarte’s glove that would have plated Cron in scoring position.

In the home half of the fourth, it had taken a good running catch in right by Carlos Gomez of a Pillar drive into the alley to keep the Jays from cashing one or two base runners.

Facing Colome in the ninth after he’d completed a five-out save on Saturday, Pillar swung at a 2-1 fast ball that the Rays’ closer left out over the plate and lashed it into left centre field. He later said that with the game tied in the ninth he was thinking double all the way as he raced into scoring position.

For once scoring the leadoff double from second looked simple. Kendrys Morales, hitting left, hit a high chopper to shortstop Drew Robertson stationed up the middle, and Pillar moved up to third. At this point, Colome contributed to his own downfall by bouncing one to the backstop, which allowed Pillar to score, illustrating the importance of moving up from second to third on a groundout.

The wild pitch was somewhat academic, because Anthony Alford skied out to Gomez in right for the second out that would have scored Pillar anyway.

Roberto Osuna came in for the save, and struck out Joey Wendle leading off. Then he got three ground balls. The first ran up the middle for a single by Drew Robertson. The second and third were converted for the outs that closed out Osuna’s ninth save in ten opportunities.

It took a couple of first-rate efforts, from Marco Estrada and Kevin Pillar, to extract one hard-fought win out of the three games played in that hell-hole that the Tampa Bay Rays call home.

The Jays came home sporting a record of 19 and 16, ready to face the very tough Seattle Mariners in the friendly confines of the TV Dome.