Long Ball Stories

TUESDAY BEAT DOWN UNDER THE STORM CLOUDS:

In my last piece I made a bad joke about the weather forecast for the two-game series between the Blue Jays and the New York Mets Tuesday and Wednesday. I mentioned that the Mets’ ballyard is in Flushing, and that it was supposed to be wet.

Sorry about that. I should bite my tongue. Or my keyboarding fingers. Or something.

Tuesday evening’s game was delayed over an hour and a half, and during the delay there was great scepticism as to whether it would even be played.

Wednesday afternoon’s game started right on schedule because, well, because the league told the umpires to start it no matter what the weather. And they did. And all the while it “poured down rain” as my late mother-in-law used to say.

There’s an old story about the Hall of Fame pitcher Dizzy Dean, who went on to have a long and fruitful career as a radio broadcaster for the St. Louis Cardinals. During the Second World War security restrictions forbade the broadcasters from mentioning the weather during the game. But one time Dizzy couldn’t resist, and came out with this: “We ain’t supposed to say what the weather is, but that ain’t sweat what is runnin’ down the pitcher’s face.”

And I can confirm that Wednesday afternoon it wasn’t sweat running down the pitchers’ faces, and every other part of their physiognomies as well.

But luckily for the scheduling pooh-bahs of MLB the clouds stopped bleeding Tuesday night and the game finally started. Maybe the schedulers were happy, but not our heroes, no sir!

Despite the fact that the Mets’ heralded starter Noah Syndergaard, aka Thor, was more of a snore, at least on the mound, the Jays were, once again, unable to achieve much against frankly mediocre pitching.

At the same time, the supposedly light-hitting Mets didn’t seem to care who was serving them up for Toronto. Whoever it was, they liked his stuff, and the whole crowd, Thor right up in the front row, had a great time knocking it all over the park. For the whole game.

One in the second, five in the fourth, three in the fifth, and, for good measure, three more in the eighth, what fun they had, these lousy Mets’ hitters.

They had so much fun that it’s easy to forget that after three innings Toronto was actually ahead 2-1.

Syndergaard started by striking out the side in the top of the first. Looked as advertised so far. Jaime Garcia held the Mets off the board in the bottom of the first, but gave up a base hit, a stolen base, and a walk in the process.

In the second inning Syndergaard looked significantly less intimidating. Teoscar Hernandez leff off with a sharp single to left to break the strikeout string at three. But he was stranded on the bases, along with Russell Martin, who drew a two-out walk, when the big Viking fanned Richard Urena to end the inning.

The Mets capitalized on two, no, make that three, Toronto mistakes to take a one-run lead in the bottom of the second. The first mistake was that Jays’ starter Jaime Garcia walked the newly-arrived Mets’ catcher Devin Mesoraco, who came to New York from Cincinnati in return for the disgruntled Matt Harvey, whose days in the Big Apple were never very happy. Mesoraco looks like a pretty good fit for a team that was looking for any kind of a catcher at all. That he’s pretty good is a distinct bonus.

Anyway, walking the leadoff man is bad. Grooving a fast ball to a pitcher who can hit some is bad. Syndergaard hit a fast ball up and in down the left-field line, and Mesoraco, the catcher, lumbered all the way around to score because Teoscar Hernandez, who got to the ball quickly, made a terrible weak throw to the cutoff man for mistake three.

For some reason probably having to do with pointy-headed analytics, Mets’ manager Mickey Callaway bats his pitcher eighth, not ninth. I thought it was just because Thor isn’t such a bad hitter, but he did it with Zack Wheeler Wednesday night too.

Hitting ninth, the shortstop Amed Rosario, who can also hit some, hit a hard grounder to Urena at short for the second out, with Syndergaard holding second. So it’s not a given that Mesoraco would have scored subsequently even if the Hernandez throw had been accurate. Defensive positioning, pitch selection, approach at the plate all could have changed drastically if Rosario had been facing one out, runners at second and third. Conclusion: maybe Hernandez gave the Mets a run, and maybe they would have scored it anyway. In any case, the scorer didn’t give Hernandez an error for allowing Mesoraco to advance.

You might have expected the mighty Syndergaard to come out and dominate like in the first inning after knocking in the lead run, but it was just the opposite. He faltered, and the Jays put up two runs to take the lead back.

They even did it with a two-out base knock, a rare accomplishment that could have led to great things, but instead ended up being the only highlight for Toronto in a long and dreary night.

After plate umpire Bill Welke rather cruelly punched out Jaime Garcia on a pitch that was low and away, Curtis Granderson roused the crowd of sentimental New Yorkers who remember his happy years with the Mets by lining a single solidly into right. But when Josh Donaldson popped out with a massive swing for the second out, it looked like Grandy was going to die at first.

Then it got interesting. With Justin Smoak at the plate Granderson stole second. When Smoak grounded a single up the middle Granderson was stopped at third. Maybe rattled, Syndergaard nicked Teoscar Hernandez’ shirt to load the bases, prompting a coaching visit to the mound.

The time out didn’t help much because Syndergaard went 2-0 on Yangervis Solarte, and then threw ball three, a sinker low and away, but Solarte reached down and knocked a grounder into centre to score both Granderson and Smoak. Kevin Pillar ended the rally by flying out to right, but it was a nice little moment, if fleeting and forgotten.

We had a little while to savour the fact that we were in the lead in a close ball game. Garcia came out and fanned two and flew out the third to centre on just twelve pitches. Syndergaard also rallied to retire the side with two strikeouts in the top of the fourth, leading us to the bottom of the fourth.

Little did we know that this game was going to blow up in the face of Jaime Garcia and the Blue Jays.

Even after Jay Bruce hit a fluky opposite-field pop ground-rule double to lead off the inning there was no reason to suspect anything was up.

Mesoraco worked a walk on a 3-2 count for the second time against Garcia, and former Blue Jay Jose Reyes hit a soft single into centre to load the bases, bringing Thor back to the plate carrying his thunder-stick. This time he hit a sacrifice fly to centre; thus far he had driven in both Mets’ runs, in a tie ball game.

Then the floodgates broke. Rosario hit one off the top of the fence for a double that they had to review to see if it was a homer. It wasn’t; Mesoraco scored and Reyes stopped at third, giving the Mets the 3-2 lead.

Pete Walker visited Garcia, and it helped for the moment, as Brandon Nimmo went after the first pitch and popped up to third. But that was the last gasp for Garcia; he couldn’t get the third out.

Juan Lagares doubled to right to score Rosario and and Reyes, and Garcia was done at four and two thirds innings. Just to make it neat, Jake Petricka gave up a double to Asdrubal Cabrera to score Lagares and finish Garcia off at 6 runs allowed.

With one out in the top of the fifth, the Jays last gasp died on a hard shot by Hernandez that ended up in an easy double play to neutralize Donaldson’s double to the wall in left centre and Smoak’s subsequent walk. By the time Thor had finished off Hernandez he had reached 103 pitches and he was finished for the night, having dodged a few bullets but leaving with a 6-2 lead.

He needn’t have worried about getting the W. His mates bushwhacked Petricka, once again with two outs, for three more runs.

Deck McGuire, who’s been in the minors since the Jays drafted him in 2010, finally made his Toronto debut after coming back to the franchise from a brief stint with Cincinnati during which he made his first six appearances in the majors last year.

McGuire did a pretty good job mopping up for the Jays, pitching three and a third innings and holding the Mets off the board until he ran out of gas in the ninth and was tattooed for three more runs. He also distinguished himself by rapping a hard line single into left in the eighth inning when John Gibbons let him bat for himself in the eighth because he wanted him to finish the game on the mound, to save the exhausted bullpen stalwarts from having to put in more work.

WEDNESDAY RAKIN’ IN THE RAIN:

I have to take a moment to recognize two milestones that occurred on May sixteenth of this year. 118 years ago my mother, Loretta Marie Remski, was born in Detroit, Michigan. She died at the age of 78 in 1978. She was not a baseball fan, but she was a kind, generous, and nurturing mother to all of her ten children. Also on May sixteenth we celebrated the second birthday of our second grandson, O, a happy, intelligent, interesting little boy who has a lot of his great grand-mother in him, and whom she would have loved as much as we do.

I watched and annotated the first five innings of Wednesday’s game as usual, then listened to the rest of it, except for the ninth inning, as we slowly made our way across town for the after-school birthday celebration for O.

Wednesday was a day when no baseball game ever should have been played. If it had been started before the rain, and it rained like that, they would have stopped it. But you can blame this one on the greed of the officials of major league baseball. They have crammed the schedule so full of paying dates that it’s sometimes nearly impossible to make up a rained-out game. The fact that a game is an inter-league game makes it even more difficult, because there’s far less chance of the game being made up “in passing” so to speak.

All that being said, and I hope nobody coming out of that mess ended up getting hurt, I’m sure as hell glad they played that game, because it turns out that a little slick on the bat and a little slick on the ball makes the Toronto hitters much, much better.

After laying over and playing dead on Tuesday night under the threat of rain, the Blue Jays came back Wednesday afternoon in what counts in baseball as a torrential downpour, and turned the tables on New York, giving them a fearful beating and winding up winning 12 to 1, with unheralded Richard Urena administering the coup de gràcewith a three-run homer in the top of the ninth.

Meanwhile, Jay Happ pitched the performance of the month for Toronto. Hell, it seems like the performance of the century, when you think about it. All he did with a ball he couldn’t even grip properly was throw a two-hit shutout for seven innings with no walks and ten strikeouts, on 101 pitches.

I won’t say too much about Jay Happ and the Mets’ at-bats through the rest of this piece just because there’s little to say. Just keep in mind that while the Jays were piling up runs and putting in long innings at the bat, Happ was just toodling along, sitting the Mets hitters down equally effectively whether he had a long wait or a short wait between innings. Consider his performance to be like an anti-virus programme quietly running in the background, doing its thing, while other, flashier things, were going on in the foreground.

There was really no early hint about the way this game was going to turn out. Justin Smoak hit a two-out solo homer off Mets’ starter Zack Wheeler in the first inning, but that run stood up as the only score for the first three innings.

There wasn’t that much to choose from between Happ and Wheeler through those first three. Other than Smoak’s dinger, they basically went pitch for pitch. The only hard-hit ball off Happ came from the bat of Michael Conforto in the second, a drive to the base of the wall in centre that Kevin Pillar ran down and caught as he slid awkwardly into the wall.

In the third inning we saw the phenomenon of both pitchers striking out the side. After three Wheeler had thrown 41 pitches and Happ 43.

The Jays extended their lead in the top of the fourth when Teoscar Hernandez jacked one down the line and out to left to chase home Josh Donaldson’s leadoff walk. Kevin Pillar and Luke Maile picked up two-out base hits before Wheeler fanned Gio Urshela to end the inning.

In the bottom of the fourth Wilmer Flores hit a double to left centre that was the only hard-hit ball off Happ, and made him the only Mets’ batter to reach second base, but Happ induced a little grounder to second by Conforto, and fanned the rookie Phillip Evans to strand Flores.

In the fifth the Jays chased Wheeler, who must have reached the end of his usefuleness in the fourth, because he gave up three more runs in the fifth without getting an out.

Wheeler went to 3-1 and then walked Jay Happ leading off. Nothing makes a National League manager madder than his pitcher walking the other pitcher, especially leading off. Granderson doubled to the wall in right centre with Happ going to third. Donaldson ripped one up the middle to score Happ and move Grandy to third. Smoak hit one to dead centre over the head of Juan Lagares and Donaldson chased Grandy home with the fifth and sixth runs. Wheeler walked Hernandez, and manager Mickey Callaway called it a day for Wheeler with Toronto up 6-0.

Robert Gsellman came in and shut down Toronto to strand Smoak and Hernandez, but it was only a holding action.

A.J. Ramos came in to pitch the sixth inning for New York, and maybe Callaway shoulda stuck with Gsellman, because Ramos started by serving up a ground ball single to right by, you got it, Jay Happ, leading off, and the inning went downhill from there. Grandy doubled Happ to third for the second inning in a row; Donaldson scored him on a sacrifice fly that also moved Grandy to third. Smoak walked. Hernandez knocked in Grandy with a base hit, Smoak advancing to second. Solarte hit into a fielder’s choice after a video review requested by the Mets, with Smoak going to third. Pillar knocked Smoak in with a base hit to centre.

Finally, Jacob Rhame was brought in to pop up Luke Maile for the third out, but it was 9-0, and with Happ going two more innings it was all over.

Let’s just pause on one moment before moving ahead to the ninth. With one out in the seventh and Rhame still on the mound for New York, Jay Happ’s spot in the order came up again. Of course he hit, because he was going to pitch at least another inning, saving on a relief pitcher, and besides, why not, with a 9-0 lead? So with one out Happ came to the plate, swung at the first pitch, and lined a single to centre field, giving him two base hits and a walk in four plate appearances. Much searching of record books ensued, to try to find another two-hit game by a Toronto pitcher.

So in the ninth inning, with lefty Buddy Bauman on the mound for the Mets in his second inning of work, Maile led off with his second hit of the game. He looked destined to be stranded as Bauman retired Urshela on a deep drive to centre on which Lagares made a brave if foolhardy spectacular catch, crashing into the wall, and Morales on a fly ball to left. But Richard Urena, who is capable of such doings though we tend to forget that, ripped a line drive into the seats in left for a final insult to the Mets, giving the Jays the same number of runs as the Mets scored in Tuesday’s game.

For however it matters, Danny Barnes served up a solo homer to Brandon Nimmo in the bottom of the ninth to break the Jays’ shutout, after Aaron Loup had pitched a clean eighth.

So the Jays scored a split in the two-game series with the Mets, and even won the runs-scored battle by a slim 14-13 margin. All played under either threatening or weeping clouds, a not-quite-wasted short visit by the Blue Jays to the Big Apple.