Normally reliable bullpen has a day to forget
After knotting game with 5 in 9th, Cleveland gets tying homer in 13th, winning blast in 14th
CLEVELAND — This was just a day in May, innocuous in the long life of a baseball season yet the center of the sport’s entire focus. The starting pitchers drew the attention, two men once college teammates and can’t-miss prospects who’ve since diverged on dissimilar paths of professional baseball.
But this game, one so many tuned into for Gerrit Cole and Trevor Bauer’s anticipated showdown, devolved into a staggering implosion of two bullpens, one accustomed to such misery and another that so rarely feels it.
Three Astros pitchers could not hold a five-run lead in the ninth inning. Collin McHugh wasted a one-run lead in the 13th inning when Yonder Alonso took an elevated four-seam fastball to right field for a home run to waste Evan Gattis’ go-ahead solo shot in the top half of the inning.
Brad Peacock entered in the 14th and threw one pitch, yielding a walkoff home run to Greg Allen that gave the Indians a 10-9 win, completing a stunning collapse by an Astros bullpen that entered with a 2.63 ERA and had an 8-3 lead in the ninth inning.
“It’s tough,” closer Ken Giles said. “The pen overall this year is doing a fantastic job. We’re going to have one of those days, but we’re really motivated and really determined, and we’ll just brush it underneath us and move on to
the next day.”
The longest-rested reliever in the bullpen, Giles began the ninth inning. He had not pitched since Wednesday and carried a perfect 9-for-9 line in converting save opportunities. This, of course, was not one. Jose Ramirez loomed, a two-run homer already on his line.
Giles jumped in front 1-2. Ramirez fouled off 11 two-strike pitches, including seven in a row once the count ran full. Four of those were fastballs in excess of 99 mph. Others were sliders, all of which were spoiled.
Ramirez laced Giles’ 17th pitch to the opposite field for a leadoff double.
“It doesn’t affect my outing,” Giles said. “He had a good at-bat, I was throwing good pitches, and my whole outing I felt great. I felt good about myself. It just wasn’t my day, and overall, it’s just not a good day. I went after him, and he won the battle.”
Edwin Encarnacion and Alonso followed with singles — Encarnacion tagged a slider and Alonso hit a fastball — to make it 8-4. Astros bench coach Joe Espada, managing after plate umpire Tony Randazzo ejected A.J. Hinch in the sixth inning, emerged from the dugout.
Bullpen unravels
Randazzo employed a tight strike zone, perturbing both pitchers and dugouts.
“I felt like he was a little too engaged with our dugout and not worrying about what was going on on the field,” Hinch said. “I told him that, he didn’t really like that, had a little short temper, and I ended up coming out of the game.”
Espada lifted Giles in favor of Will Harris, who began warming just after Ramirez’s 17-pitch battle. Harris struck out Rajai Davis for the first out before getting ahead 1-2 to Jason Kipnis and pinch hitter Erik Gonzalez.
Both hit curveballs for runscoring singles. Kipnis laid off a 1-2 cutter that Harris insisted after the game was a strike. Randazzo deemed it a ball.
Gonzalez’s hit ended Harris’ afternoon. Hector Rondon inherited two men aboard and the winning run at the plate. Greg Allen lined his first pitch to Tony Kemp in left field for the second out. The Indians’ lineup turned over for Francisco Lindor and Michael Brantley.
Rondon jumped ahead to a two-strike count on both. Both scalded singles — each on low four-seam fastballs — to tie the game at 8.
“Those pitches were down and away, and I give the tip of my hat to those guys,” Rondon said. “They did a good job to go the other way, and I tried to, in that situation, keep it to singles and no hard contact or anything like that. I feel like today I made my pitch and they got me. That’s the game.”
Ramirez, the man who started all this, blistered a missile at 102.3 mph down the right-field line.
First baseman Yuli Gurriel dove to his left and corralled it, allowing the game to go to extra innings and rendering two marvelous starts moot.
Strengthening as the game progressed, Cole and Bauer pitched seven and 71⁄3 innings, respectively. Five of Cole’s eight strikeouts came between the fourth and the seventh. He struck out the side in his seventh and final frame.
Cole could not harness his command early. Forty pitches were required to get the game’s first six outs. His 12th was annihilated by Ramirez, an outside four-seamer pulled to the rightcenter seats for a two-run homer. Allen, the nine-hole hitter, tagged Cole for an RBI double in the second.
Wasted mound duel
Bauer struck out a seasonhigh 13 and threw 127 pitches. His curveball was devastating. Fifty of them produced nine swings and misses, and 10 others were called strikes. Max Stassi annihilated a second-inning solo home run on an elevated fastball, the only damage the Astros could muster for five innings, settling this game into the sort of combat many expected.
The pomp and circumstance surrounding it did not dissuade the Astros from a stated goal. In the three games preceding this one, even sometimes while being stifled, they taxed an Indians starting pitcher.
The hope was to get to Cleveland’s forlorn bullpen with a lead or within striking distance of one. Sunday followed the script in more ways than the Astros anticipated.
Bauer started the eighth with a 3-2 lead and retired Kemp before giving up a double to George Springer and walking Alex Bregman with his 127th pitch. Jose Altuve grounded reliever Evan Marshall’s first pitch up the middle for a game-tying single, and the Astros scored six times in the inning, highlighted by Gattis’ three-run homer. It afforded them an 8-3 lead that, as it turned out, was difficult to hold.
“Whoever lost this game was going to feel like they should have won the game and should be walking out of here with a win,” Hinch said from the office where he was forced to watch his team collapse. “But we’ll pick ourselves up.”
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