Say what you will about Jose Bautista, there is no denying that he has a finely-tuned flair for the dramatic.
Wednesday afternoon in Seattle, in the top of the ninth inning, with the Mariners clinging to a 1-0 lead after a scorching pitchers’ duel between Felix Hernandez and Aaron Sanchez, the distance around the bases for the Toronto Blue Jays might as well have been 720 feet instead of 360, for all the hope the team had of scoring the tying run.
The skinny young flame-thrower Edwin Diaz, who had assumed the closer’s role in Seattle in mid-season, and had already racked up 16 saves in 17 opportunities, stood on the mound bathed in bright, early-fall sunlight. Unfortunately, the circle of sunlight was not big enough to reach home plate. A line of deep shadow crossed the infield half-way between the mound and the plate. The batter would see the ball clearly out of the pitcher’s hand, but about half-way to the plate it would disappear. If the batter were very lucky, and had very acute eyesight, he might have picked up the flight of the ball a split-second after it had disappeared, and an instant before it was on him at the plate.
If the batter were neither blessed with hyper-vision nor Irish luck he’d never see the ball again. Edwin Encarnacion led off the inning for Toronto, and struck out swinging on a 3-2 count. On a 1-0 pitch Diaz had thrown a mid-80s slider and Edwin had swung over it and missed. He stepped out of the box, took his right hand off the bat, and raised it, palm up, to his shoulder level in a one-handed shrug. Everyone in the park knew that he was saying that he hadn’t seen the ball at all. He did manage to foul one off before striking out.
Next up, Bautista quickly fell behind one and two, but then, somehow, fouled off the next two pitches, the first one a 99 mph fast ball. Diaz threw ball two, and then threw a 98 mph two-seam fast ball, and Jose Bautista hit it out of the park down the left field line. Watching the flight of the ball to see that it stayed fair, he side-skipped down the base line until he was sure that it was out, and then broke into his home run trot. Another piece had been added to the puzzle of Jose Bautista, embellishing the image of the mythical bat-flipper of the Toronto Blue Jays. The stakes weren’t as high, not quite, but they were high enough, as anybody who has been following the Jays this year knows full well.
Last night in the seventh inning he was just an ordinary hero. With his team clinging to a slim 2-0 lead, and the pressure to win growing by the game, if not the inning, Francisco Liriano’s brilliant starting effort had come to an end and, as always, you never knew with the bullpen.
With Blue Jays on second and third and one out Manager Joe Girardi decided to walk Edwin Encarnation to load the bases and create a double-play situation. And, not incidentally, to pitch to Jose Bautista instead. Bautista hits into a lot of double plays, primarily because he always hits the ball hard, and if it’s right at an infielder, well, there’s not much you can do about it. Jose’s a smart ballplayer. He wouldn’t take it as an insult that the Yankees walked Edwin to pitch to him. But he would feel a little better about it after he ripped a ball past the third baseman and down into the left-field corner, driving in two runs, increasing the Jays’ lead to 4-0, and allowing a whole gang of Blue Jays’ fans across the country to relax and breathe. Just a little.
And today? Well, in case you didn’t see the game, we’ll just keep that our little secret for the time being, okay?
Looking over his last few starts, I think it’s safe to say that we can put the “where’s the Marcus Stroman we expected to see?” question away for good, at least for this year, because the answer now is “right here, doing his thing”. In the month of September, he has had four starts before today. On the face of it, since he went 0-4 in those four starts, you might wonder how he’s back to the Stroman we expected. But remember, wins and losses don’t mean anything, until they do, as in Jay Happ, Rick Porcello . . .
But in those four losses he pitched 23 innings, gave up 23 hits, 8 walks, and 8 earned runs, for a WHIP of 1.30. In other words, he’s pitched like a perfectly decent starting pitcher in the American League, and if you want an explanation for his won-loss record, it’s not hard to find, is it? You could win a World Series with a shortened Blue Jays’ rotation of starters who’ve lost more games than they’ve won in September. But you would need a few hits along the way.
C.C. Sabathia, like Felix Hernandez, is a very different pitcher from the one who spent the bulk of his career as a dominant number one starter. However, unlike Hernandez, who has continued to pitch effectively and coninued to be respected as the ace on his staff, Sabathia has fallen on leaner times. His career arc hit its low point last season when, on the day after the end of the regular season, he announced that he was going into rehab for alcohol abuse. The severity and urgency of the problem was highlighted by the fact that the Yankees were about to play the Houston Astros in the Wild Card game the very next day, and by his action Sabathia was withdrawing from the team’s playoff roster.
Through the winter and early spring Sabathia did a number of media interviews in which he discussed the success of his rehab, how it had been the only option left for him, and how he was returning to the Yankees with a new lease on life. In the best of all baseball worlds, this good news story would have ended with him having a great season and restoring his baseball reputation before the world.
Sadly, this hasn’t happened, as his year has been mediocre at best. He entered tonight’s game with a season record of 8-12, with an okay ERA of 4.19, and a run of September starts marked by fairly low innings pitched and very high pitch counts. Always a work horse, entering tonight’s likely second-last start of the season, he has only pitched a total of 165.1 innings, this from a pitcher who had reeled off six consecutive 200-plus seasons, including a high of 253 in 2008, before struggling with injuries in 2014 and the other problems last year.
All that having been said, Stroman pitched one of his best games of the year, throwing seven innings of shutout ball on just one hit and three walks, striking out five and ending at 97 pitches. Removed from a scoreless tie with a one-hitter going, it took all of Uncle Gibbie’s arm-around-his-shoulder consoling to explain to Stroman why he wasn’t going back out for the eighth inning.
Sabathia, meanwhile, went nearly pitch for pitch with Stroman, also finishing seven innings, no runs, four hits, three walks, two strikeouts, and 93 pitches. After quick three-up, three-down first innings—Stroman retiring Gardner and Ellsbury on six pitches, and Sabathia erasing a Donaldson single with a double-play ball from Edwin Encarnacion, it was game on.
Both pitchers benefited from double plays in the second inning. The Jays pulled off their second 3-5-3 double play in two nights, with Donaldson making the pivot very efficiently again. Sabathia survived a lead-off double by Jose Bautista, as he continued his solid hitting, and two walks, lucky that Tulo hit into the dp in between all this. CC also committed a cardinal error which could have come back to bite him big time. Frustrated with the strike zone while pitching to Russell Martin, he made an obvious gesture of frustration aimed at home plate umpire Dan Bellino.
Baseball tradition is very strict on this point. Players are allowed to say almost anything to a plate umpire about his strike zone, but they can’t use expressive body language, so that everyone in the park can see what’s going on. This is called “showing up” the umpire, and must not be done. For example, catchers are talking to the plate umpire all the time—where was that pitch—is that the limit of your zone on the outside—can you please appeal the checked swing—and so on. But woe betide the catcher who stands up and faces the umpire, or turns his head to look at him while he’s speaking. And the woe will come in the guise of a suddenly tighter strike zone for the catcher’s pitcher. It goes without saying that the pitcher can’t be gesturing to the ump from sixty feet away.
(Sixty feet, six inches, to be precise, and extensive preliminary research—at least ten minutes’ worth—has not been able to uncover a reason for a change to that specific distance, made in 1893, and measured from the front of the pitcher’s “plate”, which we now call the pitcher’s rubber, to the exact intersection of the first and third base foul lines. Since the pitching distance was lengthened considerably by this change, it’s likely that the rules committee of the day was stacked with .220 hitters.)
Stroman walked Brett Gardner to lead off the fourth, and he advanced to second on a passed ball, but died there, as the Toronto starter fanned Jacoby Ellsbury and then Gary Sanchez, Sanchez on a high hard one, as the smoking hot catcher seems to be cooling off with the fall air in Toronto, and retired Didi Gregorius on an easy fly to left. Gregorius, by the way, who has had a great season and is finally starting to fill Derek Jeter’s shoes, may be running out of gas, as he seems to be making a weak, late contact so far in this series.
Sabathia pitched over two hits again in the Jays’ fourth, one of them a landmark for Edwin Encarnacion. His single to centre was his 153rd base hit of the year, a career mark for him; his record should be extended a fair ways further, since he has ten games to go in the season. As season hit totals go, this isn’t all that great shakes, but Edwin’s never been a .300 hitter, or even very close to it. The fact that this is his highest hit total for a season, though, is just another piece of the very solid portfolio Edwin is putting together for the market in the fall.
The fifth, sixth, and seventh innings passed quickly and quietly as the two starters showed what it means to be in command, both of their stuff and of the game situation. The bullpens, then, would tell the story.
Jason Grilli started the eighth for Toronto and quickly retired the first two batters, Aaron Hicks grounding out to Donaldson at third, and Brian McCann looking at a called third strike. Then the game got really tense, really quickly. No Yankee hitter had touched third base for seven and two thirds innings, but Ronald Torreyes changed that with a triple to the wall in right centre. Manager Joe Girardi inserted Billie Butler to hit for Tyler Austin, and Grilli earned another hold, and another chance to do his frenzied walk-off, by fanning Butler on a four-seamer at the end of a tough seven-pitch at bat.
Tyler Clippard came in to pitch the bottom of the eighth for the Yankees and it looked like we might be settling in for a long night. Both Kevin Pillar and Devon Travis grounded out to Torreyes at third. But then Josh Donaldson stepped up to the plate, and stepped up, period, prolonging the inning with a single to left. A Clippard wild pitch moved Josh to second, opening up first for Edwin to receive a five-pitch walk, as Clippard stayed away from him. This brought Jose Bautista to the plate.
You could just imagine Jose coming to the plate thinking “This shit is really getting old.” With the season he’s had, you can understand why opposing teams would prefer pitching to Jose rather than Edwin, but still, is is crunch time, and it is Jose. Result? Clippard’s 2-0 pitch landed in the left-field seats and the Jays had a sudden 3-zip lead. This time Bautista didn’t feed the haters, taking a normal trot around the bases.
Roberto Osuna came in for the save, and retired Donovan Solano, the Yankees’ second baseman, on a grounder to short, gave up a lame opposite-field single to Gardner, and then finished off the night with easy fly balls by Ellsbury and Sanchez. Osuna, who shows no signs of slowing down, recorded his 35th save in 38 opportunities.
The Yankees had been shut out 2-0 by Tampa’s Blake Snell, Chase Whitley, and Alex Colome on Thursday night, so they have now been shut out in three straight games, as things have come to a pretty pass indeed for the fabled Bronx Bombers. In ten days, the Yankees have faded from lurking in the rear-view mirror to pulled off on the shoulder with their hood up and steam rising from the rad.
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