Talk about your topsy-turvy outcome!
In a near mirror-image of last year’s American League Wild Card Game, the Baltimore Orioles captured today’s opener of the 2017 season with an eleventh-inning walk-off home run by Mark Trumbo, served up by the grizzled Jays’ veteran reliever Jason Grilli
Dial it back to October 4, 2016. Change the venue from Orioles Park at Camden Yards to the TV Dome. Put Ubaldo Jimenez on the mound for the Orioles, and Edwin Encarnacion at the plate for the Blue Jays. Will we ever forget the image of Edwin’s majestic three-run shot, followed by a majestic bat drop that ended the season for the O’s and sent the Jays on to the ALDS? Of course not.
I’m sure if the Orioles had their druthers they druther trade today’s exciting victory for a reversal of that game in October last year. But that’s not possible, so it’s some consolation for them to have turned the tables on Toronto and hung a tough loss on them in the first game of the 2017 season, a game in which the pitchers dominated the hitters, and both teams missed opportunities to put things on ice in regulation.
Of course there can be no comparison between the electricity generated by the wild card game last fall and the atmosphere of today’s opener. But this game indeed had its own moments, its own important actors, its own interesting plays, both sizzling and otherwise. It introduced some new aspects to the Jays’ narrative, and revisited some of the old through lines.
There are, no doubt, those commentators and fans alike already groaning about the same-old same-old of Toronto’s bullpen giving up a loss after a fine performance by starter Marco Estrada.
But let’s be clear: we cannot hang this loss on bullpen failure, nor can we hang it on defensive lapses. While it is true that there was a single odd moment of failure to execute, when Zeke Carrera and Kevin Pillar played excuse-me as Wellington Castillo’s easy fly ball fell for a double, that embarrassing moment passed without inflicting any harm on the Blue Jays. And it was more than compensated by not one, but two marvellous defensive plays by, who’da thunk it, Jose Bautista.
The fact is that, contrary to most expectations for an early season match, this was a finely-pitched game on both sides, the totality of the pitching far outshining the ability of either team to deliver in the clutch.
And, Breaking News here: Baltimore manager Buck Showalter did not leave premier closer Zach Britton moldering on the bench like he did in the Wild Card game. Wonder if Showalter has really changed his approach, or if he’s just gotten tired of listening to all the criticism? In the event, Britton pitched six outs, the ninth and tenth innings, in a tie, and kept the Jays at bay, though he didn’t exactly blow them away, giving up three hits, to Devon Travis, Josh Donaldson, and newcomer Steve Pearce, while walking Russell Martin and fanning only Darwin Barney.
Pearce, by the way, acquitted himself very well in his first game with Toronto. He went three for five, hitting three ropes for base hits, scored the tying run all the way from first, going with the pitch on a 3-2, 2-out count that Zeke Carrera scalded into the right-field corner for a double. Pearce handled first base without any difficulty, and then moved to left for the homer-shortened eleventh, giving way to Justin Smoak at first after Smoak had hit in the top of the inning for Barney, who had hit for Carrera in the ninth against the lefty Britton and taken over in left. Have you got all that?
It was a measure of the hitting futility of the Jays that both Barney and Smoak struck out as pinch hitters. To reiterate, it was not a day for the hitters.
It’s not really surprising that after a winter of fine-tuning their rosters, both the Orioles and the Jays, who finished in a dead heat for second in the American League East last year, still line up pretty equally against each other. Potent offensive potential up and down the batting order, each oriented toward the big blast rather than small ball. Solid, in some cases outstanding, defensive capability. Very good pitching, with an edge to the Jays in starters, especially with Chris Tillman on the shelf, and an edge to the Orioles in the bullpen, especially with Jays’ closer Roberto Osuna not available to come off the disabled list until April 11th.
The starters were Marco Estrada and Kevin Gausman, tabbed as Showalter’s number two, but temporarily elevated by the absence of Tillman. Estrada had an interesting first start, in that he struggled for his first three innings before turning out the lights in his last three. In the first Adam Jones nicked him for a double down the line, and he walked Mannie Machado, before geting Trumbo to fly out to right with runners at second and third. He was better in the second, but had to induce three ground balls after Castillo led off with the aforementioned bloop double to left.
Then, in the third, Baltimore teed off on him and put up two runs, though a great play by Bautista kept it from being worse. Leading off, newcomer Seth Smith pounded a double over Kevin Pillar’s head. Jones walked. Machado hit a lazy fly to left for the first out, but Chris Davis rifled one down the line in right that bounced off the top of the fence and back to Bautista, who turned and fired a one-hop strike to second to nail Davis trying for the double. The ball had been hit so hard that while Smith scored Jones was held at third. Trumbo then cashed Jones with another double to right for a 2-0 Baltimore lead and Castillo made the third out on a deep fly to Carrera in left..
So after three innings, Estrada had given up two runs on five hits, with two walks and no strikeouts, and had thrown 55 pitches. Then he settled into the kind of groove that we often see with him. Starting with Wellington’s deep fly, he set down ten straight batters, striking out four, and departed after six innings having thrown 89 pitches, only 34 in the last three.
He also departed with a tie, which would have seemed unlikely through the first four innings as Gausman frustrated the Jays while playing with fire against Toronto for the first three innings before setting them down in order in the fourth. The Jays finally plated their first run of the season in the fifth, through no merit of their own. Gausman grouped three walks around a single by Carrera, Kendrys Morales picking up his first Toronto RBI with the bases-loaded pass. Troy Tulowitzki followed by battling Gausman through nine pitches before the struggling righty got him to roll over and ground weakly to Machado at third to end the inning.
But in the fifth the Oriole starter’s pitch count ballooned from 62 to 97, and Gausman was definitely gassed. Surprisingly, Manager Showalter sent him out for the sixth and he got Russell Martin to ground out to short before giving up Pearce’s second base hit, which ended his day but left Pearce on first as his responsibility. Showalter turned to his hard-throwing first-man-up Mychal Givens, against whom the Jays have had mixed results in the past. This wasn’t one of his better outings as the first two batters hit the ball hard on him, Kevin Pillar flying out deep to Jones in centre for the second out before Carrera drove Pearce home to tie the game, finishing Gausman’s record for the day.
A word is in order here about Mr. Ezequiel Carrera. In the run-up to the final roster decisions before opening day, much was made of John Gibbons’ apparent affection for Carrera, which might have led to his making the team rather than Melvin Upton Jr., who has arguably better tools all the way around. And here he was today, starting in left, when the expectation had been that Pearce would be in left and Smoak at first. And there he was in the second inning, trading puzzled looks with Kevin Pillar as the two of them failed to camp under Castillo’s easy fly. Yet, there he also was, with the only base hit, sharply grounded up the middle, to combine with the three walks for the Jays’ first run in the fifth, and again driving in the tying run in the sixth with a double.
There’s something about that guy, Carrera. Maybe manager Gibbons isn’t so sleepy after all.
Mention needs to be made here about Carrera’s partners at the bottom of the order. Pearce, Pillar, and Carrera combined for six of the team’s eleven hits, set the table for their first run, and produced the second one. Meanwhile, despite two hits from Travis and three from Donaldson, none of which figured in the scoring, Bautista, Morales, Tulowitzki and Martin went a combined zero for 17, and left 15 runners on base. If you’re looking for the key to defeat on this day, there it is.
Except for Martin, the other three meat-of-the-order guys all had good springs, so one would hope this is only a one-day glitch.
With the score tied and the starters out, the game settled into nearly six scoreless innings of effective work by the two bullpens. There was little to choose between them. Gyvens, Brad Brach, Britton, and Tyler Wilson gave up six hits, walked two, and struck out four in five and two thirds innings.
For Toronto, Joe Biagini, J.P. Howell, Joe Smith, Aaron Loup, and Jason Grilli gave up one run, Trumbo’s walk-off against Grilli, four hits, walked one, and struck out none, also over five and two thirds. Biagini and the newcomer Smith both worked one and two thirds giving up just one hit each, Howell got the left-hander he was assigned, Loup gave up a hit to the only batter he faced (to be fair, he came in for a lefty matchup, and then had to face the right-handed pinch-hitter Trey Mancini, who singled to centre, then was stranded by Grilli).
Besides the good work of the relief pitchers, both Jose Bautista and Manny Machado contributed brilliant plays to keep the game tied. With one out in the bottom of the ninth, Wellington Castillo picked up his second hit of the evening, bringing up Joey Rickard, a regular pain to Toronto last season. The right-handed Rickard took an outside pitch to right. Bautista, having already picked up an assist on Davis in the third, and shaded toward centre, raced to his left and launched a desperate dive, just snaring the ball above the turf in the webbing of his glove. Jumping to his feet, he launched a wrong-footed shot-put back to first to double off the lumbering Castillo, who, smelling a chance to score from first as the ball went all the way to the wall, was dead to rights. There is no doubt that Bautista’s heroics kept the game-winning run off the board.
In the top of the eleventh it was Machado’s turn to shine. After Smoak led off by striking out hitting for Barney, Devon Travis, who already had two base hits, came to the plate and hit a hard grounder that was destined for the left-field corner until Machado went down to his right in approved Brooks-Robinson Baltimore style, snagged it, turned his upper body around to the left toward first, and fired a bullet from his knees to nab Travis at first. Wondrous on its own merits, the play took on new meaning when Josh Donaldson followed with a single to left that would have scored Travis with the lead run.
After five-plus innings of gritty relief pitching, and two game-saving plays, it was inevitable, given that these two lineups feature numerous hitters who can end it with one swing, that sooner or later one of them would. And as always in these cases, it was advantage home team, looking for the walkoff.
And so it fell to Trumbo to attack a Grilli mistake with two gone and nobody on in the eleventh, and that was the ball game.
A fitting, if disappointing, end to an Opening Day thriller between two tough teams who will be going after each with everything they have for the rest of the season.
And we get to watch.
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