Let’s get this out of the way right from the beginning. I don’t want to make this story about Marcus Stroman again. I really don’t. I’d rather write a thousand-plus words about the Oakland A’s bizarre mascot Stomper, an ugly elephant with a pot belly, than start another column with the trials and tribulations of the pitching career of everybody’s favourite Energizer Blue Jay. (I’ll fill you in on Stomper a bit later.)
As we headed into the break, I felt really good about the Jays’ rotation. Happ was Happ-ing, Dickey was Dickey-ing (sorry, R.A., that sounds faintly naughty, doesn’t it?), Stroman was back in form, the silly talk of sending Aaron Sanchez to the bullpen seemed to be dying down, and the only glitch on the horizon was the back issue Marco Estrada was dealing with. And surely, for someone who is not trying to throw his whole arm at the batter all the time, a little R and R would do his back just fine.
So with the break over we reconvened in Oakland to play three games against the 38-51 A’s, fully intending to run down and right over Baltimore and Boston to take the division lead by Sunday night, and what could be better than starting with the newly-restored Marcus Stroman, whose last two starts had almost made us forget about how badly he was getting beaten up as recently as a couple of weeks ago?
And then the fickle baseball gods intervened. Playing on the West Coast, we knew that the Red Sox had won and the Orioles were almost home free, which gave a little added piquancy to the game in Oakland. Whatever strings the gods had plucked to make Stroman lose his location, and unplucked to give it back, were just waiting to be plucked again tonight, and the gods obliged. With his location, Stroman is dominant. Without his location, he is eminently hittable.
But in the top of the first, the Jays’ hitters didn’t know that the Stro-mojo hadn’t made the trip to the coast. All they knew was that they were facing a young right-hander with some pretty good stuff, a really pokey old-timey windup, and a pretty bad record for 2016, at one and four with an ERA of 4.54. This could be good for our guys, and it eventually was, but they went pretty meekly in the first, as Daniel Mengden struck out Zeke Carrera and Edwin Encarnacion, and induced a soft fly to left from Josh Donaldson to sit back down after 13 pitches.
But no matter, right? After Marcus sets them down in order—three ground-ball-outs will do nicely, thank you very much—we’ll take another crack at this Mengden guy, and see what he’s made of. And then Stroman came out and proceeded to throw . . . balls, lots of balls. Leading off for the A’s was Coco Crisp, co-captain of the American League Best Ball-Player Names All-Star team. He hit a 2-0 pitch hard on a line right at Carrera for the first out. Jed Lowrie singled to right on a 1-1 pitch. Josh Reddick walked on four straight balls. Khris Davis singled to centre on a 1-0 pitch to score Lowrie, with Reddick going to third. Stephen Vogt grounded out second to first, scoring Reddick, on a full count. Marcus Semien flied out to centre on a 2-2 pitch to end the inning. The thing is, the first pitch to every hitter was a ball. Every strike he threw was followed by a ball if it wasn’t put into play. And both base hits and the line-out by Crisp were hit hard. It wasn’t really the two runs that worried you–after all, Mengden, who’s he?–it was the way they were scored that rang a pretty ominous bell, not to mention the 24 pitches he threw.
The A’s gave one back to us right away in the second, an unearned run courtesy of catcher Stephen Vogt, who picked up Michael Saunders’ leadoff nubber and threw it in the dirt to first, where Yonder Alonso couldn’t distinguish the skipping ball from Saunders’ racing feet, and failed to scoop it, the error going to Vogt. Saunders ended up at second on the error, moved to third on a ground-out, and scored on a ground-out. Justin Smoak hit a single with two outs, but died at first. Mengden threw 24 pitches in the second, and it looked like just a matter of time for the Jays, if only Stroman settled down.
And he did, in the second inning, anyway. An Alsono single to right was immediately erased by a quick 4-3 double play ball struck by Jake Smolinski, and then Stroman fanned third baseman Ryan Healy in his first major-league at bat. I didn’t notice if Healy asked for the ball. Probably not. Thirteen pitches, and back to the plate against this Mengden guy for the top of the third.
By the time Russell Martin flied out to right to end the third for the Jays, the young Oakland pitcher had thrown 30 pitches, taking his total to 66 pitches for three innings, and the Blue Jays had taken the lead. Mengden helped them out, a lot. After Devon Travis led off with a single and was forced by Carrera, Mengden walked Donaldson and Encarnacion to load the bases. He then unloaded a wild pitch that scored Carrera and moved the other two runners to second and third. Michael Saunders then hit a foul fly to left on which Donaldson smartly tagged up and scored for the lead run.
Happy to have been gifted with the lead, Stroman got the first two A’s hitters in the third, but then grooved one to Josh Reddick who hit it over the centre-field fence to tie the game. This was disconcerting, especially the loss of concentration, but the Jays came out in the top of the fourth, put up a four-spot with a string of well-placed hits, and drove Mengden from the mound, only one out into his fourth inning of work. It was quick and efficient work by the Jays’ hitters. A leadoff single by Troy Tulowitzki, a walk to Justin Smoak, a wild pitch that moved them up, run-scoring singles by Pillar and Travis, an RBI ground-out by Carrera for the first out, and an RBI single by Donaldson marked the end of Mengden’s toils. The familiar figure of Liam Hendricks came in from the A’s bullpen to get Encarnacion to ground into a double play to end the inning.
We might have hoped that with a seven-three lead going into the bottom of the fourth Stroman would relax, throw strikes, and start to cruise. But our hopes were not to be. The A’s shortened the lead by one after two were out in the fourth on a two-out single by Smolinski that scored Vogt, who had led off the inning with a base hit. The Oakland run was kind of under the radar, as simmering Oakland anger over the strike zone of home plate umpire Mark Wegner finally came to a boil, leading to the ejection of Yonder Alonso over a called third strike, and A’s manager Bob Melvin, who did his duty and joined Alonso in the clubhouse. They might not have been so angry had Wegner not rung up the previous hitter, Marcus Semien, on a checked-swing third strike, inviting rather public criticism from Semien on his way back to the dugout.
Hendricks carried on for the A’s in the fifth, and allowed the first two hitters to reach on a walk and a single, before retiring the side. The Jays would later come to regret those wasted runners that began to add up through the middle of the game.
It wasn’t long for the regret to rise, either. Stroman, who despite the Reddick home run and the singleton by the A’s in the fourth, had seemed to be settling, at least to the extent of looking like he might be able to hold the lead through the fifth and sixth, anyway, before maxing out on his pitch count. But after getting the first two outs, disaster struck, swift and sure. Reddick singled to right. Khris Davis hit one over the centre-field wall. Vogt back-to-backed with Davis, also to centre. If only that fence were twenty feet deeper, we would still have held the lead! The score was tied, Stroman was done after four and two thirds innings, his ERA back over 5 to 5.15, and Jesse Chavez had to come on to catch Semien looking to end the troubles.
I guess it’s only natural that sometimes your guys are up for scrapping back and retaking the lead, and sometimes they’re not. For the Jays, tonight was definitely a “not up for it” night. Despite being issued four walks by Oakland relievers, including leadoff walks in the sixth, seventh, and eighth, the Jays never got another hit off the Oakland bullpen after Russell Martin’s single off Hendricks in the fifth, the only hit the bullpen yielded.
The Jays’ relievers were equally effective, except for Brett Cecil in the seventh, who gave up the winning run. Now, it would be easy to go into a gloomy funk over the fact that the winning Oakland run scored in the eighth when the home team’s appeal of a tag play at the plate was supported by the replay team in New York. It’s not the first time that a game has clearly hinged on a review decision made in New York, and it won’t be the last.
If we wanted to lay blame, more would be apportioned to Cecil than to the umpire crew in New York, but before we go any further with that line, let’s just remember that this was Marcus Stroman’s game to win, and he didn’t seal the deal. But Cecil, who got the first two outs (again, with the two-out rallies!), committed the cardinal sin of walking the one guy he had to get, the left-handed-hitting Reddick. Reddick moved up on a single to left by Davis, and raced for the plate on a single to centre by Vogt. Kevin Pillar, throwing caution to the wind, went for broke on his throw to the plate, which was dead on, Marting swipe-tagging Reddick and the ump calling him out. Game still tied! Not.
After the appeal the run stood up, Ryan Madson got three ground balls in the ninth on eight pitches for his eighteenth save, the Jays lost a game they should have won, and failed to keep pace with the victorious Orioles and Red Sox. Tomorrow afternoon it’s R.A. Dickey against Sonny Gray, the subject of major speculation as the trade deadline approaches. The Jays sent out a scout before the break to check him out, but I don’t think they can afford him. I also don’t think they need him.
In closing, I promised to shed some light on Stomper, the A’s mascot. It seems like way back in 1902, when legendary curmudgeon John J. McGraw was managing the New York Giants, he dissed Connie Mack’s Philadelphia A’s as being the “White Elephants”, because Mack had spent a lot of money to field the team and wasn’t going to get much return for it, or so McGraw predicted. The elegant and gentlemanly “Mr. Mack”, who not only owned the A’s but managed them in his street clothes, a business suit with a four-in-hand tie and a high collar shirt, defiantly took on the term and declared the White Elephant to be the mascot of the A’s. Ever since, there has been a circus elephant on a ball incorporated into the logo of the Athletics’ uniform, a logo which has followed them from Philadelphia to Kansas City to Oakland. So that is why the A’s have a guy in an elephant suit for a mascot. Why he is grey and pot-bellied in a most un-elephant-like way, I do not know.
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