Dickey pitches well, but home run ball bites Jays again
Suzuki joins elite company with 4,000 hits
It seemed almost a non-sequitur, this little pre-game discussion with the manager about whether the Toronto Blue Jays’ pitching staff has an “ace.” This is a team, after all, whose rotation entered Wednesday’s action with a 5.00 ERA, which is worse than 28 other teams in Major League Baseball. Toronto’s starters had recorded only six more wins than its relievers.
But the chatter in John Gibbons’ office turned to the qualities of an ace, and whether R.A. Dickey possesses them, and whether someone who throws a knuckleball can even be an ace, even though Dickey was voted the top pitcher in the National League last year by baseball writers, who surely cannot be wrong about such things.
Gibbons observed that yes, Dickey was acquired “to be one our top guys. You look at his year, he’s pitched pretty good, but he’s been vulnerable to home-run balls, especially late in games,” Gibbons said. “That’s cost him. But we need a shutout thrown every now and then too, especially now, when our offence hasn’t been scoring a whole lot more lately the last couple weeks. That would be huge.”
Dickey allowed only two runs through 7 2/3 innings, but the offence behaved as usual, with the usual outcome. A two-run homer by Alfonso Soriano in the bottom of the eighth snapped a tie and gave the Yankees a 4-2 win. The homer came on one of those meatball knuckles Gibbons was talking about, one of the few Dickey threw.
In the first inning, the game was stopped so the Yankees could mob Ichiro Suzuki on the occasion of his 4,000th hit, counting the 1,278 he collected against inferior pitching in Japan before his remarkable MLB career.
Before the game, Gibbons gave a simple description of what makes an ace: “They go out there and win for you damn near every night.”
On most nights, pitching for a team that could hit a little bit, Dickey would have been an ace.