Jays’ battery wouldn’t change decision, just execution

One stray pitch Wednesday cost Toronto victory

TORONTO • Steve Delabar says he likes to focus on the affirmative, so each day he focuses on a word that lifts the spirit. He picks his words of the day in alphabetical order, and when he exhausts the alphabet, he starts over.

Thursday was D-day. Delabar’s word was delightful. It helped the Blue Jays pitcher shake off the effects of the previous night, when other D-words applied. Doleful comes to mind. And, of course, defeat.

Delabar threw the pitch that the Angels’ Marc Krauss hit for a tworun double that turned a 3-2 Jays’ lead into an eventual 4-3 loss. It was a split-fingered fastball, a breaking pitch he has used hundreds of times to generate swings and misses, especially from left-handed batters. Krauss, a left-handed batter, had missed a splitter on the previous pitch.

On Thursday, at a reporter’s request, Delabar and catcher Russell Martin analyzed the anatomy of that critical at-bat, which set up the Jays’ ninth loss in 11 games.

“After the fact, you can say you could’ve done this, or this, or this,” Delabar said. “Maybe I could’ve bounced it, or I could’ve thrown a fastball in, or elevated a fastball. I could have thrown the pitch I did, and he swings over top of it, and everybody’s saying, ‘Yeah, good job.’”

Instead, what everybody was saying is that the Jays’ beleaguered bullpen blew another one.

Having inherited two runners from starting pitcher Drew Hutchison with two outs in the seventh inning, Delabar needed a strikeout. The splitter is Delabar’s strikeout pitch against left-handed batters. When he nails it, the splitter breaks down and away from a lefty.

On the first pitch, Krauss swung through a 95-mph fastball up in the strike zone. Delabar came back with another heater: a wild pitch, putting runners on second and third.

Then came the first splitter, which Krauss missed.

“When he swung through that splitty, I was like, let’s bury another splitty,” Martin said. “Hopefully we can get him to chase. I feel like if we’re going to get beat, we’re going to get beat with his best pitch.” The call made sense to Delabar. “In the moment, you make the pitch you feel most confident with, and I felt great with the pitch,” he said. “I’ve had tons of swings and misses with that pitch, especially with lefties. My lefty splits are pretty good.”

Indeed.

Lefties against Delabar this season. For his career, he has held them to a .179 batting average in 311 at-bats. And he is a right-handed pitcher. The splitter is the key reason he has been successful against lefties.

With a 1-2 count, Delabar went for the strikeout.

“Typically, you want to put a guy away right there. You don’t want to mess around with him,” he said.

Ideally, the strikeout splitter will look like a fastball to the batter, then dart down and away, perhaps into the dirt, and cause him to swing and miss. This one darted down, but it caught more of the plate, didn’t dive quite as deep, as Delabar and Martin had hoped. Krauss leaned in ever so slightly and hit the ball hard into the left-centre field gap.

“By the way he hit it, I thought at first it was a split that didn’t split and just kind of faded,” Delabar said. “It was actually the good one that turned over.”

Later, however, he added: “I guess it was just a little bit too high.”

The alternatives are easy to itemize in hindsight. The most obvious: high heat.

Delabar: “Who’s to say, if I came in there with a fastball, he gets his hands in and flips it over the infield, and then everybody says, ‘Oh, why didn’t you go with the splitter?’ ”

Martin: “So many things can happen. I’ve been in situations where you go back up top and the guy kind of jams himself and he hits it over the third baseman.”

Delabar: “Everybody here has had that experience, where they’ve made a good pitch and they’ve actually been beaten, where you elevate a fastball and the guy gets barely enough bat on it and puts it over the infield. And also, every single one of us has thrown a terrible pitch, and the guy swung through it and struck out. It’s the game. You don’t look back and you make your pitches next time.”

Both Delabar and Martin said the pitch call was obvious, and they would make the same decision again.

Delabar: “There was no doubt in my mind, because I’ve succeeded with that pitch so much that I didn’t think that result would come of it — unless it was the one that didn’t turn over and just faded. It didn’t fade. It had the good action.”

But not quite enough to avoid from Krauss’s bat.

The next batter was Kole Calhoun, another lefty swinger. Delabar struck him out with a splitter in the dirt.