In some ways it’s easier to be a fan of a mediocre team, one that is playing below the.500 level. Because losses come more frequently than wins, each one doesn’t take on quite the same emotional weight as a loss like this afternoon’s to the Padres does for Blue Jays’ fans. They’re spared the existential angst of having to decide how to react to a loss.
If we’re going to take an optimistic view, here are some of the things we can say: We’ve won three of the last four. We’re allowed two losses a week, and that’s only one since Sunday. You can’t win ’em all. Hey, we didn’t lose any ground. (True, because the Orioles and the Red Sox both lost too.) A struggling team like the Padres has still won 44 games out of 102; not all of their wins can come at the expense of the real bottom-feeders. Better to lose an inter-division game than an intra-division one, because the games against AL East rivals count double. Hey, the relievers did okay, except one. And wasn’t that a great double by Pillar?
If we’re going to be pessimists, we can choose among: How can we lose to those stiffs? Dickey sucks. We want Syndergaard back. Yeah, well we were lucky Tuesday night. Shoulda lost two out of three. Look—we missed a chance to pick up a game on Baltimore and Boston. Dickey sucks. Who traded Syndergaard? Just what we needed, a downer before the Baltimore series. Bautista sucks. Lookit the attendance, another sellout. Why didn’t they bring back Price with all the money they make? We’re doomed, doomed, I say, can’t even hit a rookie. Oh, and Dickey sucks. And Syndergaard. And Syndergaard.
How to choose? What to say? How about just: What happened today? How did we lose? How did they win? What should we remember about this game, number 102 out of the 162 games of the 2016 season?
On the surface, it’s simple enough. They hit R. A. Dickey. We didn’t hit Luis Perdomo, and for once their bullpen held.
Take it a little deeper, and it might be a question of day game after night game, or more tellingly, day game after twelve-inning gut-twister of a night game. The Blue Jays could have come out flying, still high on the exhilaration of the dramatic win the night before. Or they could have come out flat and drained. The Padres could have been listless and morose, knowing that they had blown a game they should have won. Or they could have come out mad as hornets, determined to salvage something from what was looking like a lost mid-week north of the border.
In some ways, these two levels of analysis complement each other. Is baseball a physical and highly technical exercise in which fine-tuned execution is paramount? Absolutely. Is it a highly emotional game, perhaps the most emotional of all, given the tension that builds in the moments of stillness before the action happens? Sure is.
Manager John Gibbons juggled the rotation to start R.A. Dickey today. There were two purposes, he claimed, for doing this. We hope that there wasn’t a third one lurking below the surface that he didn’t want to admit. The first was to align the top end of his rotation to face the Orioles this weekend, by moving Marco Estrada from today to Friday night, and, not coincidentally, keeping those big Oriole bats away from any Dickey flutterers that might not flutter just right in the cozy confines of the TV Dome. The second was to give Russell Martin two more days of rest for his sore knee, after having returned to the lineup Tuesday evening and catching twelve innings, and running the bases, and sliding, as well. We sincerely hope that the change was not also made because Estrada’s back issues really aren’t quite resolved yet.
On a hot and breezy day that should have favoured the knuckler, Dickey started out well enough in the first, albeit losing Wil Myers on a 3-2 pitch. He promptly made up for that by picking Myers off first. He had fanned Travis Jankowski prior to the walk, and fanned Matt Kemp afterward, so all good.
All good through the second and into the third, as he retired five in a row after the pickoff. Then the capricious fates intervened, or the wind changed direction, or something, as he approached the bottom of the order. He nicked number eight hitter and former Blue Jay prospect Brett Wallace. This brought the number nine hitter, third baseman Adam Rosales, to the plate. When the lineups came out, it was announced, that Rosales was subbing for Yangervis Solarte, who’d been called away on personal leave. A number nine hitter at third instead of Solarte hitting cleanup and threatening mayhem at every turn at bat looked like a good thing.
Rosales had never faced Dickey before, and the camera caught a good image of the smile of disbelief on his face after Dickey’s first knuckler floated in for a strike. Didn’t last long, though, as he timed up the next one and jacked it over the wall in left centre for a two-run Padres lead. Come back, Yangervis, we’ll take our chances with you! After the homer he walked Jankowski, but got Myers to ground into an around-the-horn double play.
In the top of the fourth he continued to dominate the meat of the San Diego order, popping up Matt Kemp and fanning the doughty young Dickerson. (I’m curious: does anyone say “doughty” any more?) But then a blip, a bop, and a double bumble helped the Padres to double their lead. The blip on Dickey’s part was a walk to Ryan Schimpf, with two outs, remember. The bop was a big double off the bat of catcher Christian Bethancourt to the wall in centre. The first bumble was Kevin Pillar fumbling the carom off the wall, which had to be retrieved by Zeke Carrera. The second bumble was Devon Travis short-hopping Josh Donaldson at third with his relay from Carrera, which skipped away. Instead of being on second with a double, Bethancourt had joined Schimpf in the dugout, cooling out, and it was 4-0 Padres.
Normally, 4-0, or even the 5-0 that it became when Brett Wallace homered off Dickey to lead off the fifth wouldn’t exactly seem insurmountable, except that the Jays were going exactly nowhere against the slants of Luis Perdomo. Perdomo, a 23-year-old rule 5 player who started the year in the Padres’ bullpen, has now made ten starts since being put into the rotation. Things started to crystalize seriously for Perdomo in his last start against the NL East division leaders the Washington Nationals on July 22nd, when he gave up two runs on four hits with only one walk in seven innings for the win. Today he was if anything better, at least through five, but he couldn’t escape the Jays’ hitters in the sixth, when they finally decided that familiarity breeds.
In his first five innings, though, this is how it went: he gave up a seriously tainted ground-rule double to Josh Donaldson in the first, on a catchable fly ball into the right-field corner that Wil Myers, patrolling right field for the first time after two games at first base, seemed to give up on, and then react with surprise when it bounced in front of him and then into the stands. It mattered little, however, because around the double Perdomo fanned all three of Bautista, Encarnacion, and Melvin Upton, hitting fourth in his first start for his new team.
In the second, he gave up a leadoff single to Kevin Pillar, but stranded him on third as the Jays couldn’t coax another base hit off him. That was it. Even when we finally scored a run in the fifth, it was without benefit of a base hit. He walked Devon Travis, who advanced to second on a wild pitch, to third on a right-side ground-out, and scored on a hard liner to left by Darwin Barney that went for a sacrifice fly. So, after five, he had given up one run on two hits, one tainted, and one walk. He had thrown only 63 pitches, and his five-one lead looked pretty good going to the sixth.
It looked even better at 7-1 and Dickey out of the game by the time he took the mound for the bottom of the sixth. Dickey’s last inning was a familiar story for him this season. After walking the leadoff batter, he quickly dispatched the tough guys, Dickerson and Schimpf, before another Bethancourt double rocked him, bringing Matt Kemp around to score from second. That was it for the knucksie, 5.2 innings, five earned runs on four hits, four walks, five strikeouts, and 102 pitches. There was also the matter of Bethancourt at second, also his responsibility. Joe Biagini came in to finish the inning, but not before yielding an RBI single to Brett Wallace which scored Bethancourt and closed Dickey out at six earned runs.
The sixth proved to be Perdomo’s Waterloo too. When you think about it, it’s going to be the rare case when a rookie starter is able to sail through the Jays’ order for the third time without being burned. And while Perdomo was good today, he wasn’t rare. The only saving grace for him was that he had a big lead starting the inning, and a big enough lead left when he exited at the same five and two thirds point as Dickey.
Emulating Dickey to the letter, Perdomo got two quick outs on the big guys, popping up Bautista in foul territory to the third baseman Rosales, and fanning Donaldson. But then he walked Encarnacion, and gave up his first hit as a Blue Jay to Melvin Upton. This brought Kevin Pillar to the plate, hitting fifth today with Troy Tulowitzki, Russell Martin, and Justin Smoak not in the lineup. Pillar hit the only serious shot of the whole day for the Jays, a blast to left centre that went for a double and scored both Encarnacion and Upton, who showed his speed running from first. Devon Travis followed with an infield hit toward third on which Pillar took third, and Zeke Carrera singled to right to score Pillar and send Travis around to third. That was it for Perdomo, and he left having given up four runs on six hits with two walks and four strikeouts, and a pitch count pushed up to 91 with his sixth-inning troubles. Brad Hand, one of the Wild Men of Tuesday night’s game, came on to face the gritty Darwin Barney, and high hopes were entertained for diminishing the gap even further, but this time Hand got the upper hand (sorry) and Barney flied out to right. But the lead was now only 7-4, and after such a barren start to the game, the rally suggested that, like last night, anything might be possible.
But this time it was not to be. Hand walked Josh Thole to start the seventh, and the sound you still hear is the echo of Padres’ Manager Andy Green’s teeth grinding, reverberating yet around the world hours later, that his reliever should issue a leadoff walk to the light-hitting number nine batter Thole. But Jose Bautista grounded into a quick double play, and all was peace and light in the San Diego dugout. As for the Jays, Thole was their last baserunner of the day. Jose Dominguez struck out two in the eighth, Brandon Maurer struck out two in the ninth, and the other two batters were retired on a checked-swing dribbler to the catcher Bethancourt in the eighth, and a comebacker to Maurer in the ninth.
Biagini threw a clean seventh for the Jays, and Franklin Morales made his second appearance in the eighth and looked good except for the leadoff dinger hit by Dickerson he (please, somebody, kneecap that guy before he wrecks the whole league), which extended the lead to four runs and sunk spirits in the third-base dugout even lower. Ancient newcomer—hey! He’s the Ancient Mariner!–Joaquin Benoit pitched a wobbly but runless ninth, walking two and giving up a stolen base on the way. The activity on the bases all came after two were out, of course.
So, were the Jays flat and the Padres cranked? Their hitters hit ropes and their pitchers threw strikes, and ours hit grounders and walked/hit batters. Was it emotion or execution, or a little of both? Or just another day on a long and wandering journey to October? One thing that’s for sure, though: I’d rather be following the Jays who lost today, than the Padres who won.
Speaking of Ancient Mariners as we were, I’m going to close with one of my favourite baseball cartoons. “Brother Juniper” was a sweet and corny one-panel strip featuring the naive and rotund Brother Juniper, whose innocence and fecklessness lead him into various comic scenarios. Occasionally the strip featured the monks’ baseball team (does this fit in here, or what—we just finished playing the Padres), and in one of them, the elderly brother who coaches the team is commenting to his assistant, while watching Brother Juniper, decked out in catcher’s gear, chase a wild pitch. “Brother Juniper is like the Ancient Mariner”, says the coach, “he stoppeth one of three.”
I appreciate it and good night, as Jim Nabors used to say.
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