A SEPTEMBER TO REMEMBER
Grilli knows opportunities are rare
Drafted fourth overall 19 years ago, Jason Grilli has developed a certain appreciation for meaningful baseball in September. Forget about October.
In order to even get to that point, the games in the ninth month on the calendar need to matter first.
That has the 39-year-old with 14 seasons in the major leagues savouring this Toronto Blue Jays run, even if the month of September, up to this point anyway, hasn’t exactly been what the club was hoping for.
Fresh off a 4-3 road trip the West Coast, one that provided glimpses of playoff-calibre baseball out of the birds in blue, but also reminders of a middling 8-12 record they’ve saddled themselves with since the start of the month, Grilli and the Blue Jays (84-69) are happy to be home.
Even happier to see the New York Yankees (79-74) and their flickering playoff hopes in the opposite dugout.
But really happy to be in contention, too.
“This is where you wanna be every year,” Grilli said. “I think if you had a crystal ball in spring training and it said, ‘This is where you’re gonna be,’ I think a lot of guys would say, ‘OK, I’m in for that.’”
One year after making the post-season for the first time in 22 years, expectations around the city are now sky high.
With the Boston Red Sox (9064) doing what the Jays did last September — running away from the pack — Grilli’s club is left to battle it out for a wild-card spot, a chase they’ve made even tougher by playing some bad baseball over the past three weeks.
Grilli has been through the stress of a wild-card situation back in 2013 while doing a lightsout closing job — he had 33 saves that season — for the Pittsburgh Pirates, helping them end a stretch of 20 straight seasons with a losing record.
After ably dealing with the Cincinnati Reds in a home wild-card game that October, the Pirates were ousted by the St. Louis Cardinals in a National League Division Series that went the five-game distance.
Despite pitching in 545 big league games to date, Grilli has thrown a total of 81/3 post-season innings, with his debut coming in 2006 with the Detroit Tigers.
Since then, he’s tasted October baseball on two more occasions, once in 2013 and a brief division series appearance with the Los Angeles Angels in 2014.
“Some guys go their whole career without getting a chance to know what playoff baseball’s like,” Grilli said. “Sitting on the couch watching it or going fishing, hunting, whatever — it’s disappointing. There’s a lot of work that goes into 162-plus games. There’s a of people you put on hold, your family, and a lot of sacrifice that goes into it. They see the glamour side of what we do, but they don’t see behind the curtain of the Wizard of Oz, so to speak.”
He’s hoping there’s another playoff appearance on the horizon, and interestingly enough, it was two players from the aforementioned Pirates squad helping that cause Friday, as starter Francisco Liriano spun six shutout innings — caught by former Pirate Russell Martin, who reached base three times — in the Blue Jays’ 9-0 whitewashing of the fading Yankees in the opener of a four-game series at Rogers Centre.
The owner of six straight scoreless appearances, Grilli was given the night off from bridge-toRoberto- Osuna duties when the Blue Jays broke open a 3-0 game with a four-run seventh inning.
The nine outs registered after Liriano left the game ran the Jays bullpen’s scoreless streak to 121/3 innings, and the fact Grilli wasn’t needed means the veteran has a little bit extra left in the tank for outs that will matter in the coming days and, if the Jays have their way, weeks.
One thing Grilli has learned about this time of year is there’s no conserving gas like there is, perhaps, in June or July.
“Time to empty the tank, man,” Grilli said. “This is when you empty the tank.
“There’s nothing to hold back for. You’ll see guys that may add a couple of miles an hour on their fastball and you see guys that are seeing the ball bigger, that intensity, concentration and focus. That’s why they say Mr. October is the guy that can relish it and enjoy it.”
First and foremost, the Blue Jays are simply hoping a few Mr. Septembers show up in order to get them to October.