The Blue Jays must have been feeling fortunate that they had an off day on Thursday to make their way from Baltimore to Tampa Bay for this weekend series against the Rays, since they had already safely arrived when the fringes of Hurricane Hermine, with its epicentre over the Florida Panhandle north and west of Tampa, hit early Friday morning. They would have felt even more fortunate that they would be playing indoors tonight, in the Orange Dome, out of harm’s way of the tail of the storm that was lashing the area.
So fortunate must they have felt that they forgot that they had to play a ball game tonight, didn’t show up, and some crowd of incompetent semi-pros had to be suited up in their stead. What’s that you’re saying? Those were the real Blue Jays, that flailed at the plate against a guy who hadn’t pitched in two years, kicked the ball around in the field when they really needed to be sharp, and generally suffered brain cramps every time they had to make a decision?
Well smoke my ham-hocks, chile, y’all coulda fooled me!
If Toronto rolled into Tampa brimming with over-confidence, and that’s why they played so badly, then maybe instead of calling up seven Buffalo Bisons they should have called up the whole Triple-A team, and just had them trade places with the purported major leaguers. If there’s any team and any city where the Jays have absolutely no right to succumb to over-confidence, it’s when they play the Rays in Tampa. After all, it was only in mid-season last year, in the midst of the best Jays’ performance in 22 years, that they finally broke a string of consecutive lost series to the Rays in Tampa that stretched back about as far as Bismack Biyombo’s pointer-finger reaches up.
In preaching calm and equanimity as the operative mood for Toronto fans, I’ve been saying all along that no single loss is significant, as long as we build up the record of winning series, because two out of three not only ain’t bad, it’s more than we need to clinch the division. There haven’t been that many three-game series in the last two months where the Jays have clinched a win in the first two games, so each series has had its own tense little story line. But what could be worse than condemning yourself to having to win two out of two in Tampa, when Tampa is such a rat-hole full of lurking dangers for the boys?
Where to start, not that I want to . . .
Okay, let’s start with the hitters. The Jays were facing Alex Cobb, who was making his first start since 2014, after undergoing Tommy John surgery in early 2015. Now, I’m not suggesting that a pitcher in such a situation couldn’t possibly pitch well, but Cobb’s rehab starts in the minors prior to rejoining the Rays for this start had been little short of terrible. And it was clear from Toronto’s first inning that he was rusty and therefore vulnerable. By the end of two he had already thrown 53 pitches, and should have been gone after three because of a pitch limitation for his first start back in the bigs, but the Jays let him off the hook, and he turned in a very creditable five innings of work.
But back to the first. Jose Bautista struck out looking on a three-two pitch that looked like a terrible call. Bautista certainly thought so, his dark visage glowering even more than usual. Then Josh Donaldson lofted an ordinary if rather deep fly ball to centre, that was an easy reach for the brilliant Kevin Kiermaier until the later pulled back and raised his arms in bewilderment. A second later the ball dropped harmlessly to the warning track and hopped over the fence, for maybe a ground-rule double, maybe a home run. Some tall foreheads somewhere would have to figure it out.
Playing in the Tampa Dome, you see, is like playing in a pinball machine, where there’s no rhyme or reason to the way the light comes through the ceiling panels. Lost balls in the roof are as common as peanut vendors. In addition, the ground rules for Tampa read like the libretto for Wagner’s Ring Cycle. There are rings around the ceiling of the dome, four rings, labelled A, B, C, and D Rings. Each ring is marked for fair and foul territory. Any ball hitting any ring outside of fair territory is a dead foul ball. Any ball hitting either lower ring, C or D, is automatically a home run. This has to do, presumably, with projected trajectory. A ball hitting one of the higher rings, A or B, is in play. If it’s caught, it’s an out, if not, it’s a fair ball in play. If it stays up there, though, it’s a ground-rule double. Got all that?
It turns out that two things happened on Donaldson’s hit. First, it got lost in the ceiling, and Kiermaier, obviously, didn’t know where it was. Second, it hit either the A or B ring. (They never said which.) Therefore, it was in play. Therefore, when it hit the turf and bounced over the fence, it was a traditional ground-rule double.
Edwin Encarnacion didn’t mess with the Ring Rules. He hit the first pitch he saw from Cobb about as hard as you can hit a ball. It banged off the wall in left in a hurry, scoring Donaldson. Edwin ended up going into second standing up, winning a bizarre foot race with first baseman Brad Miller, a sight you’d never have seen before the era of the shift. Early in the count, like on this pitch, the Rays play three infielders on the left side of the infield for Encarnacion. If Edwin pulls a ball that has the potential to be an extra-base hit, both the second baseman and the shortstop have cutoff duties—second baseman to second and home, shortstop to third. So they both head out into the short outfield. Who covers second, then, for the hitter? Why, the first baseman, who has to read the play and get to second before the hitter for a possible tag play.
In this case, the sharply-hit ball came back quickly to Kiermaier, who has a strong arm among other talents, and he cut loose with a direct throw to second. Problem was, Miller, who’s just learning first base, was late reacting to the play, and lost the race to the bag to Edwin, so we had Edwin going in to second standing up, with Miller frantically trying to catch up to him. If anyone tells you that the shift hasn’t changed the game, they’re talking through their hat.
That’s a lot of words for two at-bats, but what can you do? It’s the Trop, right? It goes like that here. Besides, this was the high point of the game for the Jays. Let’s get out of the first, shall we? Michael Saunders grounded out to first with Edwin moving to third. Russell Martin then grounded one up the middle that Forsythe ran down, but couldn’t make a play on. Edwin scored on the infield hit, and then Troy Tulowitzki hit a hard grounder to short that Logan Morrison handled nicely for the third out.
Going into the Jays’ second, Cobb was down 2-0, and had thrown 27 pitches. The Jays had two more base runners in the second, but couldn’t capitalize on Kevin Pillar’s single and a walk to Jose Bautista, as Josh Donaldson popped out to first to strand the two runners. Yet once again Cobb had laboured, throwing another 26 pitches, leaving him at 53 for two innings. He should have been pretty close to the end by then, especially since the Rays had him on a 75 or 80 pitch limit for his first outing.
Yet somehow Cobb found his rhythm, and the two-out walk to Bautista in the second was the last baserunner he allowed. He retired the last 10 batters he faced and struck out five of them. The next time the Blue Jays would score after the first would be in the eighth inning, by which time they were down 8-2. The run came off Eddie Gamboa, a rookie knuckleballer making his major-league debut. Danny Farquhar in the sixth, who benefitted from the decisive home run by Logan Morrison in the bottom of the sixth, and so got the win, Kevin Jepsen in the seventh, Brad Boxberger who picked up Gamboa in the eighth, and Ryan Garton in the ninth kept the Jays off the scoresheet while their mates were building up an insurmountable lead with timely hitting at the plate, and a lot of help from the sloppy Jays.
It doesn’t appear that the management of the Blue Jays is altogether clear on where they want to go with the rotation. Originally, this was to be Francisco Liriano’s fifth straight Friday night start, but by Thursday it had been announced that Marcus Stroman would get the start on something resembling normal rest, and that Liriano would be sent down to shore up the bullpen, giving the relief corps another left-handed option. Not a lot of consideration was given, it would seem, to whether Liriano would be able to adapt to pitching out of the pen on such short notice. Of course, the typical response from Manager John Gibbons on this would be something like, “he can do it, he’s a veteran.” Like I said Wednesday about the Aaron Sanchez saga, this ain’t science, folks.
No need to spend time on the what’s right/wrong with Marcus Stroman question tonight. Leaving aside the pitches to Matt Duffy and Logan Morrison in the sixth, I thought he had a fine outing, and the numbers generally bear me out, six innings, three earned runs, five hits, two walks, three strikeouts, 94 pitches. Most significantly, he was working generally in the lower regions of the strike zone. If Marcus Stroman had a problem tonight, to me it was with the zone of home plate umpire John Tumpane, who seemed very reluctant to call some of the low strikes thrown by Stroman. A good gauge of whether the ump is a problem is how many times Russell Martin points with his glove at the pitcher in his “good pitch” gesture when a pitch has just been called a ball. It happened a lot tonight, and the squeezing of the bottom of the zone by Tumpane resulted in counts that were less favourable to Stroman than they should have been. Another oddity with Tumpane was the number of times that he seemed to be going into his strike call, and then backed off, lending an air of uncertainty to what should be a decisive act.
Gifted with the two-run lead before he took the mound, Stroman pitched around a leadoff single by Logan Forsythe in the first. He gave up a rather soft run in the second when he walked Logan Morrison with one out, then gave up a looping double to right by Nick Franklin, with Morrison stopping at third, until he could score on Corey Dickinson’s groundout to second. He gave up the tying run in the third, an even softer one precipitated by another Devon Travis error at a crucial moment. Logan Forsythe led off, again, with a grounder up the middle for a base hit. Kevin Kiermaier, who runs like the wind, and always hard, then hit a medium-slow bouncer to Travis’ left. With Kiermaier running, the obvious play was to first. Who has played baseball and not heard “take the sure out”? But Travis’ eyes were bigger than his stomach, he thought he could start a double play, despite his awkward orientation toward first, and in his haste dropped the ball. E4, runners on first and second. Another Travis error that hurt, I might add.
I said above that Stroman’s only problem tonight was being squeezed by the umpire. Well, not quite. Besides the obvious damage caused by Travis’ error that was precipitated by a bad decision on the fielder’s part, Stroman himself made a bad decision that allowed the run to score. Evan Longoria grounded to short for a fielder’s choice on which Forsythe smartly advanced to third, now with one out. Then Brad Miller bounced one back to Stroman, a little on the first-base side. Take the sure out? Not our guys. Without even looking at third, Stroman rushed an ill-advised throw to second, hoping for a miracle double play, just like Travis. He got Longoria but there was no chance for a throw to first, and Forsythe checked, then broke for the plate as soon as Stroman let fly to second, scoring easily. The obvious play, the mature play, was to check Forsythe at third and take the out at first. But no, a second run batted in, this time on a fielder’s choice/no out recorded. And the game was tied.
It stayed that way until the sixth. Stroman retired six of seven he faced in the fourth and fifth, walking only Logan Forsythe (good job, that!) and the game remained tied going to the bottom of the sixth after the Jays had failed to capitalize on their base-runners against Danny Farquhar in the top of the inning. After fanning Brad Miller to lead off the sixth, Stroman made the only two (pitching) mistakes he made all night. Matt Duffy slashed a wrong-way double to right, and Logan Morrison followed with a shot over the wall, for a two-run Tampa lead. Stroman finished the inning, but departed on the hook for his sixth loss, with Toronto trailing 4-2.
After Kevin Jepsen disposed of the Jays in order in the seventh, Manager Gibbie decided it was time to introduce his new reliever, Francisco Liriano. It did not go well for Liriano. Luke Maile greeted him by stinging a line drive over the little home run porch down the left field line for a home run on a three-two count in an 8-pitch at-bat. By the way, what in the world is that anomaly in the fence all about? What justification is there for having a spot where a ball can be a home run, and yet ten feet to the right the ball hits off the wall and stays in play?
If the lead being extended to three runs wasn’t disheartening enough, what happened next certainly was. Forsythe having already been on base three times, twice with base hits and once on a walk, Liriano was finally able to do what Stroman hadn’t been able to, get him to make an out, but it didn’t stick. He hit a bouncer to third that Josh Donaldson first mishandled, and then dropped again and kicked around when he tried to pick it up to make a throw. The soccer pitch is the next gate over, Josh. Forsythe scored from first when Kevin Kiermaier hit a shot to right centre, a double that he ran into a triple with the help of Michael Saunder’s errant heave that missed two cutoff men. With Kiermaier’s speed, he no doubt would have made third anyway, but I still have to ask, yet again: why is Saunders in right and Upton in left when Bautista is the DH? Moreover, why are we kicking the ball around in a pennant race?
Having helped the Rays to two more runs, the Liriano experiment was over, for tonight, in any case.
It was Ryan Tepera’s turn to try to contain the feisty Rays, who, by the way, despite trailing badly in the East, have one of the best second-half records in the majors, and he didn’t do a lot better than Liriano, though he did get out of the inning eventually. Tepera, now that it’s September, can presumably leave the keys to the Buffalo Shuttle home on his night table and unpack his suitcase for once. He started well by striking out Evan Longoria on a foul tip, but Brad Miller proved another matter as he took Tepera deep to right for an 8-2 lead. Matt Duffy flied out to centre, Morrison got himself plunked—serves him right, after the dinger off Stroman—just joking—and then Nick Franklin fanned to bring the mess to a conclusion, the game now out of reach.
The Rays decided it was a good time to debut the latest knuckleball convert, Eddie Gamboa, a 31-year-old Californian who has been reinventing himself in the minors to get one last shot at the show. Sound familiar? Gamboa had an adventure in his one third of an inning. He got his first strikeout, gave up his first run and his first hit and his first two walks, and left the bases loaded for the first time, for Brad Boxberger, who came in and retired the two hitters he faced, Tulo and Upton, though Tulo’s force-out grounder to third plated Donaldson, who had led off with the single.
That run made it 8-3 and that’s how it ended. Danny Barnes, part of the seven-man contingent of reinforcements from Buffalo, mopped up for the Jays in the bottom of the eighth, with two strikeouts, a most prudent base on balls to Forsythe, and an infield popup by Kiermaier. He looks good. With his earlier callup, is he eligible for the playoffs? Ryan Garton retired the dispirited Jays in order in the top of the ninth to close it out.
My dad, who grew up on a farm outside Detroit and was born two centuries back (actually, in 1897, but it’s kind of funny to think of it as the second century ago), had a wealth of folksy expressions that he employed whenever they were called for. He announced that he was going out for a walk by saying that he was “going out to blow the stink off”. Which usually meant adding to the local funk in Detroit by smoking one of his big nasty cigars, but that’s beside the point. I hope the Jays all went for a nice long walk after the game tonight, because they sure had a lot of stink they needed blown off!
Let’s put this one behind us and look forward to Marco Estrada on the mound, and an all-around better performance, befitting the leaders of the American League East.
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