For the first time this season, having gotten all the way to game 98 of a 162-game schedule, I am going to write about a game that I did not watch, and that’s probably a good thing, because this 14-5 drubbing by the Mariners, in which Victor Cruz single-handedly out-produced the entire Blue Jays lineup, wasn’t much worth watching.
You see, I had a very important luncheon date downtown for Summerlicious yesterday with the two most important ladies in my life, the one I have lived with for 48 years, and the almost-nine-year-old grand-daughter who brightens my days. I wouldn’t have missed it for the world, or for the Blue Jays (well, maybe we’d have worked around a playoff game . . .)
So, like the Jays today, I’m mailing this one in.
You may not realize this, but there is a hallowed tradition in baseball reporting of creatively describing games that were not actually seen. The first baseball game broadcast over the radio was produced by pioneering station KDKA in Pittsburgh on August 5, 1921, a game that the Pirates won 8-5 over the Phillies. The game was broadcast by Harold Arlin (not the Harold Arlen who composed “Somewhere over the Rainbow” for the movie), the first salaried radio on-air broadcaster. Arlin had initiated the live broadcasting of events the previous November when he read out the results of the 1920 presidential election. I have no information on the time that Arlin projected a victory for Warren Harding, based on exit polls.
However, Arlin did not attend that first game. He broadcast a description of the game from the studio, by making up the details of each play as he received it via a typed transcript of a running account sent over a telegraph line. So, if Arlin, and other early broadcasters received a report, say, that a hitter grounded out to the shortstop, he might embellish this to “he hits a slow roller that gets past the pitcher, but the shortstop races in, grabs it, and fires it on the run to first, and ooh, that was a bang-bang play at the bag.“
The recreation of these early broadcast games became their own stylized art form. The studio technicians added sound effects, recordings of crowd noise, used a second mike to simulate the public address announcer from the ball park, and so on. The era of radio recreation of major league games didn’t last long, as KDKA actually sent legendary sports writer Grantland Rice on location to report the games of the World Series that year between the Giants and the Yankees.
Small-town radio stations continued the tradition of recreating the games on the radio even into the 1950s. There is a wonderful article you can find here http://www.modestoradiomuseum.org/recreations.html by Big Jim Williams, who covered the team in Ventura, California, in 1951 and 1952. He describes sitting at the mike console with a baseball bat dangling over his head that he whacked with a wooden ruler for the crack of the bat. He wore a glove and slapped a ball into it for the sound of a catch, and he had recordings of peanut vendors and the like that he could play in the background.
Of course these broadcasts were vulnerable to technical difficulties. There were an awful lot of “rain delays”, or pauses for “repairs by the groundskeeper” reported over the radio to paper over the delays caused by glitches. His best story is about the time that the transcript brought to him made absolutely no sense. It reported four outs in one inning by the Modesto team, and then the report had Modesto coming back up to the plate immediately after making the four outs, with no intervening half-inning for the Ventura team. While Big Jim filled the air with made-up nonsense, his producer frantically called the ball park, to have the phone answered by a Western Union telegraph operator who was very obviously drunk.
So in this wondrously modern age of technical wizardry, I don’t feel badly at all about reporting a game I didn’t watch. Between hearing Jerry do the first two innings and the last two on the radio, referencing the modern-day equivalent of the Western Union wire, the running play-by-play account on MLB.Com, and catching a round of Blue Jays in Thirty on Sportsnet, I’ve got the gist of it, and it wasn’t much of a gist anyway, was it?
The pitching matchup was very different from last night’s, when it was Paxton’s power against Estrada’s finesse. Today it was Hisashi Iwakuma against R. A. Dickey, so it was a case of Iawakuma finesse against Dickey craziness.
Theoretically, on a hot day with the dome open, Dickey’s knuckler should be very effective, but the two major problems Dickey has to deal with, wildness and a susceptibility to the home run, are inextricably linked. If his knuckle ball is lively and he’s throwing it for strikes, his 80-plus MPH “fast” ball is a very effective out pitch. But if he suddenly loses control of the funny one, forcing him to come in with the fast ball, hitters sit on it, and it’s mighty juicy. That’s what happened in the third inning today, and it led to Dickey’s quickest exit of the year.
There was no real sense of impending doom after two innings. Dickey had given up a two-out single to Robinson Cano but stranded him by fanning Nelson Cruz. Scorers should have put a big gold star next to that one, as the highlight of Dickey’s outing. In the second, he allowed a single by Kyle Seager and walked former Jay Adam Lind, but erased Lind on a double-play ball by Leonys Martin, and stranded Seager at third by fanning Chris Iannetta.
This was typical Dickey dipsy-doodling through the lineup, and in fact he was rewarded for his efforts with a nicely-executed Jays’ run for a 1-0 lead in the bottom of the second. After Iwakuma struck out Justin Smoak for the first out, he walked Kevin Pillar, and then Pillar and Devon Travis pulled off a perfect hit-and-run, Pillar going around to third on Travis’ single up the middle. This brought Josh Thole to the plate, in the lineup to catch Dickey, but also the only regular catcher available again, because of Russell Martin’s sore knee. Thole did a great job of squaring up one of Iwakuma’s soft little darts and hit a liner right on the nose to left. Unfortunately, it was right at Nori Aoki, who came in and took it on the run. By all rights, Pillar, who had tagged up, should have been DOA at the plate. But a combination of his speed and some good scouting on Aoki, that had pinpointed his mediocre arm, enabled him to swoop across the plate as the ball came in a bit up the first base line. This was the kind of nice work that we should see more of from the Jays.
So Dickey should have been feeling pretty good going out for the third, ready to settle down and start on a roll. But the damned ball just wouldn’t behave for him. After Shawn O’Malley topped one to third and beat it out for a hit, Aoki forced him at second, and then the demon really got loose. He hit Seth Smith. He hit Cano. Now he had to pitch to Nelson Cruz, and he really had to pitch to him, with nowhere to put him. A walk, another hit batter, a wild pitch or quasi-wild-pitch/passed ball had to be avoided at all costs. He threw a pitch too good for Cruz to miss, and it was 4-1, just like that, the dreaded grand salami turning the game upside down in an instant.
With no one left on base, Dickey got Kyle Seager on a fly ball to centre, and fanned Adam Lind to end the inning. Manager John Gibbons, faced with the usual Dickey conundrum, that once the damage is done he is as likely to settle down and go four quick innings in a row, sent him back out for the fourth inning. This time it was not a good idea. Single, walk, single, single, and it was 5-1 with no one out and the bases loaded, and Gibbie was coming out with the hook.
With the left-handed Seth Smith at the plate, it seemed like a good idea to give the lefty Franklin Morales, just reactivated from the DL where he had spent the entire season, a chance to show his stuff, and he looked pretty good. He got Smith to ground into a double play, allowing the sixth Seattle run to score, and then got Cano to pop out to the catcher for the third out. Morales then came back out for the fifth and quickly worked through the Mariners, getting two fly balls and a groundout, though he did yield a two-out single to Adam Lind. So in his 2016 Blue Jays’ debut, Morales went two innings, gave up one hit, and allowed one inherited runner to score, albeit on a double play ball. All of this on just 17 pitches; so far so good for the veteran lefty. He’ll come in handy if he can keep it up.
I haven’t said any more about the Jays’ offence, but maybe that’s because it’s not easy to swing a bat when you’re dragging your tail between your legs. It’s certainly not that Iwakuma blew them away. Even though he avoided very much hard contact, he was neither here nor there, taking 98 pitches to get through six innings, as he nibbled his way through four hits and three walks. Only in his last inning did Michael Saunders give the Jays a glimmer of hope by hitting one out to the opposite field on him in his last inning of work; Iwakuma departed with a 6-2 lead which, thanks to the horrors to come from the Jays’ bullpen, was to prove impregnable.
After the carnage of the Mariners’ sixth and eighth innings were behind them, Justin Smoak with a two-run blast and Saunders with a solo homer in the bottom of the eighth rounded out the Jays’ scoring at an embarrassing nine-run deficit, 14-5 Seattle, which is how it ended. The two Jays’ homers in the eighth came off former Jay supernumerary Wade LeBlanc, who was handed the ball for the seventh after Iwakuma finished up, and presumably told that he was it, and just let them hit it. He had two goals: keep the Jays from scoring twelve runs to tie it, and save using another Seattle reliever. He accomplished both goals.
Wait a minute, you say, how did we get from 6-2 to 14-2 in only three innings? Well, I was hoping you wouldn’t ask that, because it’s a pretty sad story.
Next up from the bullpen for the Jays after Morales’ work was done was Jesse Chavez, who has had a lot of good outings, both holds and mop-ups, but some really dreadful ones. This one was the worst, but strangely enough, looking at the sequence of at-bats in rapid succession on Blue Jays in 30, he got exactly the contact he wanted, and could have been out of the inning long before Kyle Seager administered the coup de grace by taking him over the wall. On the face of it, five runs on six hits with one double play in seven batters is pretty awful, and Chavez certainly didn’t earn any laurels for his work.
But watching it was really strange. Chris Iannetta led off with a double to left, one of only two drives hit off Chavez. Shawn O’Malley bunted him to third and beat out the throw to first. Then the nightmare loop started. Three straight batters, Aoki, Smith, and Cano, hit ground-ball singles to right field, driving in two runs in the process, for an 8-2 Seattle lead. Three times we saw Devon Travis chasing after grounders that he couldn’t quite catch up to in short right field, and three times we saw Zeke Carrera picking the ball up and throwing it in. Honestly, I thought there was something wrong with the spooling of the video, and it was all the same play. The only way you could really tell what was going on was that Carrera threw it in a different direction each time he picked it up. In another world, those are three ground ball outs, Iannetta scores on the first of them, and Chavez is out of the inning down a not-insurmountable 7-2. But in this world, they all got through, making it five straight hitters reaching base, and the two runs in. Just for a little variety, Nelson Cruz grounded into a double play and Chavez was almost out of it, though Aoki scored on the play to extend the lead to 9-2. I said almost, because Chavez had one more batter to face, Kyle Seager, who hit one out to centre to make it 11-2, and send Chavez from the mound in anguish. (I didn’t see the anguish, of course, but it doesn’t take much recreation to know that it was there!)
Bo Schultz came on to get the last out, and worked the seventh, giving up just a single to Iannetta, before turning it over to Drew Storen for the eighth. Gibbie called on Storen because he wanted him to get some work, but I don’t think what happened was what he had in mind. Like Chavez, Storen came in throwing flames. Not fast balls, but actual flames, igniting the Mariners gas once again.
Like Chavez, Storen failed to get an out until the damage was done. He walked Seth Smith leading off, gave up a ground-rule double to Roberston Cano, and then a three-run homer, his second of the day, to Nelson Cruz. This completed the Mariners’ scoring at 14 runs, and upped their hit total to 17. Storen was left in to sort things out. He struck out Seager, gave up the M’s eighteenth hit to Adam Lind, then saw him erased on a double-play ball by Leonys Martin.
After the Jays’ futile flurry of power in their half of the eighth, Joe Biagini mopped up for the Jays in the ninth, giving up a single, Seattle’s nineteenth hit, to Aoki, who died at first. LeBlanc got in a bit of trouble in the bottom of the ninth, yielding a ground-rule double to Travis leading off, but he died at third and the score remained 14-5 Seattle.
Last night’s was an understandable, even acceptable, loss to a fine pitching performance. Today’s was a disaster and an abomination. It pointed to the fact that the Blue Jays still have a hole in their bullpen to address before the trade deadline, and it made Sunday’s series finale considerably more crucial as a game to win than any single game should be at this point in the season.
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