Okay, so the Royals have left town, their purple robes trailing sadly in the mud behind them, yet they still seem to offer a starting point for our deliberations on tonight’s exciting, old-timey-baseball type Blue Jays’ five-four comeback win over the visiting Detroit Tigers. This was a game which turned on the Jays’ ability to perform in the clutch more like the 2015 Royals than the 2016 first-half Blue Jays.
It’s the last series before the All-Star break, and what a great way to end the first “half” of the season (actually, we passed that marker seven games ago) it would be to take three out of four, or even sweep, the Tigers. We would go into the break in possession of a wild-card spot in the standings, we would finish with the wind in our sails and the momentum all on our side, and we could look to the rest of a July that should see three important pieces of our pennant-winning puzzle fall back into place, with the return of Jose Bautista, Marco Estrada, and Ryan Goins from the disabled list.
But tonights’s matchup with the Tigers offered us its own challenges going in. It was the first time that Estrada’s spot in the rotation would come up since he was put on the DL. Pitching for the Tigers would be their veteran (how time marches on, as my father used to say, way too often) ace Justin Verlander, who has always pitched well in Toronto, and in fact threw the last no-hitter recorded at the TV Dome. Finally, they were facing a team looking for a fight, a team that had just lost two out of three to the Indians, and in the process extended a season-long winless streak for themselves against the Indians to eleven games, before finally breaking out and belting them twelve to two last night before leaving for Toronto.
Filling in for Estrada tonight was Drew Hutchison, called up to the big team on the second of July, first to shore up the bullpen, and second to prepare for the possibility of having to make a start like this. Hutchison finds himself in an odd position this year, one that he can’t be particularly happy about, but which gives the Blue Jays the luxury of having a proven major-league starter just waiting in the wings ninety minutes away in Buffalo, keeping his arm loose and ready to answer the call when needed, fresh, unstressed, and ready to go. With him available, they can afford to be careful with a starter who might need to skip a turn, and he also gives them the luxury of thinking about the much-discussed move of Aaron Sanchez to the bullpen for the latter part of the season.
Hutchison’s history, for those of you who don’t know it, is that he joined the rotation early in the 2012 season, before his 22nd birthday, and pitched effectively for eleven starts before coming down with arm trouble. His stay on the DL was extended until it was decided in August of that year that he needed Tommy John surgery, which would not only end his rookie season, but take him out of consideration for all of 2013 while he rehabbed. The operation and recovery were a success, and he spent 2014 in the Jays’ rotation. His numbers were a mixed bag, 11-14 with an ERA of 4.48, but he threw 184.2 innings, struck out a batter an inning, and averaged almost six innings a start. Between his 2014 record and his performance in spring training in 2015 he showed enough promise that the Jays named him as their starting pitcher for 2015, their youngest in franchise history to that point.
Then last year was just a really weird one for Hutchison. Even his basic numbers baffle: 13 wins, 5 losses, but an ERA of 5.57. Even more weirdly, he was Cy Young at home, going 11-2 with an ERA of 2.91, and Sigh, Hutch, on the road, 2-3 and 9.83. Kind of hard to plan your rotation so that one of your regular starters only pitches at home! The upshot of this strange record is that he was optioned to Buffalo in August, remained there for the rest of the year, and languished as the forgotten man at the end of the season, never really even being considered for the playoff roster, his place effectively taken by the surprise early return to active duty of Marcus Stroman.
This year, after participating in the rigged spring training “competition” for a spot in the rotation, which eventually went to Aaron Sanchez, as we all knew it would, he was again optioned to Buffalo and told to keep his powder dry. He’s pitched very well there, clearly out of his league, and stands at the ready. Tonight would be his second spot start of the season, and give him another chance to force Jays’ management to think hard about his place in the organization.
On the surface, then, to the uninitiated, tonight’s pitching matchup would look like a monumental mismatch, pitting the spot starter against the great Verlander. But as we know, Hutchison is not a stereotypical spot starter—throw him out there and hope he gives us five—and this year’s Justin Verlander is not the imposing Justin Verlander of yore. Going into tonight’s game, his record was 8-6, and his ERA 4.11. On the other hand, his innings total ranked among the best in the league, and he was still striking out slightly better than one batter per inning.
All of the foregoing discussion is to lead up to the fact that it was basically a saw-off tonight between the two starters, with Hutchison’s line even looking slightly better than Verlander’s. Hutch went six innings, gave up six hits and three runs, walked one and struck out seven while throwing 90 pitches. Verlander gave up one run less, but laboured more, going five and two thirds, also giving up six hits, the two runs, while walking four and striking out five over 103 pitches. After Hutchison finished his night’s work with a clean sixth inning, Verlander got into trouble in the bottom of the sixth, and was only able to leave with his lead intact, to be preserved by Shane Greene who got the last out, due to some significant luck bestowed on him by the baseball gods, and a magnificently-executed fielding play he made himself to snuff out the tying run at the plate. The drama of this inning deserves its own narrative.
With one out, Kevin Pillar singled to centre. His partner in stirring up trouble at the bottom of the order, Darwin Barney, hit a shot to right centre that split the outfielders, and looked good to one-hop the wall. The always-sharp Pillar, reading the ball perfectly off the bat, got a great jump from first, and scored easily. But the one-hop was a little too hoppy, and hopped right over the hoppin’ wall for a ground rule double. Pillar, who was already jogging back to the dugout with the tying run in his hip pocket, had to go back to third. Significant luck? You better believe it!
Still only one out, Zeke Carrera dragged a bunt with him up the first-base line that 99 times out of a hundred scores Pillar from third on the safety squeeze. Who are these guys wearing Blue Jays’ blue? But this was the hundredth time, and it was Verlander’s time, to get on the ball, which was actually a good bunt, so quickly that he thought he saw a chance at the plate. He threw it to the perfect spot, McCann maybe applied the tag in time on Pillar despite a brilliant slide, the ump called “out”, the Jays challenged, the New York poobahs mulled the angles and examined the entrails, called “out”, and Pillar was finally, definitively, out at the plate, preserving the Tigers’ lead. The bang-bang plate at the plate, the archetype of bang-bang plays at the plate, ended Verlander’s day, and he was ushered to a seat of honour on the Tigers’ bench, as Shane Greene came in to finish the inning, two outs now, Barney at third, and Carrera at first. Verlander might have been through pitching, but he wasn’t through sweating, as Greene added his own little dramatic twist to the proceedings by hitting Josh Donaldson with his one-two pitch to load the bases before fanning Edwin Encarnacion to deflate our hopes, but just for the time being.
Just for the record, we should mention that the Jays had jumped out in front of Verlander with two outs in the first. He had walked Donaldson after retiring Carrera, who led off, on a grounder to second. Donaldson had advanced to second on Encarnacion’s soft grounder to third that Nick Castellanos realized was too slow to get the force, and threw on to first. With two outs, Michael Saunders scored Donaldson with a single to centre, and then Russell Martin doubled to left to score Saunders, off with the crack of the bat with two outs. Two runs on two hits with a runner in scoring position with two outs. Two sweet!
Detroit got one run back immediately in the top of the second, when Hutchison made one of those ouchie mistakes that drive managers wild (or, in Gibbie’s case, wilder). After breezing through the first on nine pitches, and dispatching Victor Martinez and Nick Castellanos on eight more in the second, and after being gifted with the lead, he grooved a two-strike pitch to Justin Upton, and Upton promptly halved the Toronto lead. The Tigers then took the lead in the fourth, one run coming in on a second gopher ball thrown by the Jays’ sixth man, this time to Castellanos. Upton followed with a double, and scored the lead run on catcher James McCann’s two-out single. The damage was already done, the Tigers in the lead, so it mattered little that McCann challenged Zeke Carrera’s arm on the single and got himself thrown out at second to end the inning. Or maybe it mattered a lot, since the Jays eventually won by just one run.
So, jumping around a bit here, that’s how we arrive at the seventh, the game in the hands of the bullpens, and the Tigers up three-two. Brett Cecil was first out of the gate for Manager Gibbons, and got into trouble right quick. He gave up a leadoff double to that guy McCann again, and Jose Iglesias followed with a single, but McCann was held at third. Cecil got the next three outs, but the first two came on a double-play ball off the bat of Ian Kinsler, on which McCann scored the dreaded “plus-one” run. So it’s four to two Detroit heading for the top of the seventh.
Now, if this were the Torontos of April and May 2016, they would have thrown in the towel at the immensity of the task ahead of them, and conceded the nine outs to lose the game. But if it were the Kansas City Royals of last year, they’d head for the dugout licking their chops, thinking, “we’ve got ’em right where we want ’em!” Now, in early July of 2016, what model would our heroes emulate?
The first three hitters to face Greene, who stayed in the game, answered that question, and the lead was cut to one. Saunders hit a ground-rule double to right leading off, and Troy Tulowitzki singled him home after a Russell Martin ground-out. That brought Greene’s short night to an end, and Tiger Manager Brad Ausmus brought in the left-handed Justin Wilson to turn around the switch-hitter Justin Smoak. Just in time, you might say, because Wilson fanned Smoak for the second out, with the generous help of an egregiously bad checked-swing strike-three call from first base umpire Joe West. He gave up a two-out single to Kevin Pillar, but then got Darwin Barney to ground out to second to preserve the slim Tiger lead.
The grizzled veteran Jay reliever Jason Grilli came on to pitch the eighth, and stranded a two-out walk to Nick Castellanos by fanning Justin Upton to end the inning. The excitable Grilli bounced off the mound with his now familiar excited fist-pump, which might have been a harbinger of good things to come for his team-mates.
Showing an interesting difference in approach to managing his relievers from that of John Gibbons, Brad Ausmus once again sent back out the pitcher who had finished off the previous inning. And once again, it didn’t work very well. Carrera singled to centre to lead off against Wilson, and Donaldson followed with an opposite-field single that brought Carrera around to third. After he fanned Edwin Encarnacion, it looked like he might survive the inning when he got Michael Saunders to bounce to first, and Carrera, not really executing the contact play very well, was out on a close play at the plate. Wilson walking Russell Martin to load the bases was what finally convinced Ausmus to replace his lefty Wilson with his righty Wilson, Alex, to pitch to Troy Tulowitzki.
Sorry, Brad, that didn’t work out too well, either. Tulo, channeling his secret inner Kansas City-ness (oh how it pains me to say this!), shot a grounder through the right side, with two outs, mind you, to score Donaldson and Saunders with the tying and lead runs, and the Jays had scored one in the seventh and two in the eighth to overtake a two-run lead, without hitting a home run. This is a refreshingly new and happy outcome for our boys, I must say.
Wilson (Alex) got Justin (Smoak) to fly out to left to end the inning, but the horse was already out of the barn, and the Tigers’ lead was gone. Roberto Osuna came in for the save and shut them down in order in the ninth, characteristically saving his one strikeout of the inning for the third out, to earn his eighteenth save in twenty opportunities.
A game that offered the promise of an interesting starting pitching matchup ended up being a game of bullpen effectiveness versus situational hitting effectiveness. On both sides of the baseball, the Blue Jays came out on top, so naturally they rung up the win.
Tomorrow night Toronto goes for its seventh win in a row, and Jay Happ will get the start against journeyman Mike Pelfrey for the Tigers.
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