1ST INNING JITTERS HAUNT JAYS
In deep hole after Game 2 loss
The nerves were supposed to be all gone by now. The Toronto Blue Jays were unmistakably, understandably tight in their return to playoff baseball after two decades on Thursday afternoon.
David Price, the losing pitcher, had said that even in his sixth playoff start, the nerves were tough to overcome. He used the analogy of a duck on water: everything looked calm on the surface, but underneath there was furious action.
But that was Game 1. The Jays righted themselves. Too late to pull out a comeback against the Texas Rangers, but the jitters were at least solved, right?
Unless they were not. Less than 24 hours after Game 1, the Blue Jays were back out on the field and looking nothing at all like the team that had cruised through August and September with the best record in baseball. Nerves, again? So soon? Perhaps it is the natural consequence of a team that has been rolling downhill for two months with a certain goal in mind, and has seen a city, and to an extent a country, lose its collective mind for them.
Maybe when they finally got here, finally broke through after 22 years and untold disappointments, they felt the thunder from the packed, wild Rogers Centre and they thought to themselves: don’t screw this up. Not, “we got this,” but “we better not lose this.”
That way lies tension. That way lies trouble. A bobble, a botch, an errant throw. That way lies a two-run deficit in a must-win game before your yellow-haired wunderkind has retired anyone.
The 49,716 fans at Rogers Centre were nervous as hell, but they didn’t expect the team to still be playing like it, too.
Delino DeShields began the game with a leadoff double that could have been ruled an error after right-fielder Jose Bautista got his glove on it at the wall.
After a Shin-Soo Choo single scored DeShields, Prince Fielder hit a bounding ball up the middle. Ryan Goins, the slick-as-oil second baseman, allowed the ball to bounce off his glove, putting runners at the corners.
The next batter, Mitch Moreland, tapped a ball to first. Chris Colabello fielded it, came home, and Choo was trapped in a rundown. Russell Martin, the catcher signed in part for his leadership and playoff savvy, took a few steps and then fired a wayward throw to third. Choo scored, and the Rangers were up 2-0.
Martin is playing in the postseason for the eighth time in 10 seasons; shouldn’t this all feel comfortable by now?
“It was a little rocky first inning,” manager John Gibbons said, 14 innings later, with the Jays staring at a 2-0 hole in the series after a 6-4 loss. “There were a couple of plays we didn’t make.”
They sure didn’t. That it fell to Marcus Stroman, the 24-year-old magician with the healing powers of Wolverine, to provide stability to his wavering cast of veterans, was remarkable in itself.
He laboured through a 27-pitch first inning as his teammates handled the ball like it was on fire behind him, and then threw just 66 pitches over the next six innings. He retired 14 Rangers in a row at one point. The kid with the least experience, who wasn’t even supposed to pitch this year after blowing out his knee in the spring, was the coolest of them all. You’re crazy, baseball.
Outfielder Kevin Pillar said the playoffs are a different beast.
“It’s a once-in-lifetime thing,” he said.
The pressure was there. They felt it, sure. But Pillar said once Stroman started rolling, they were confident again.
Josh Donaldson blasted a home run to dead centre that jolted the Rogers Centre back to life in the first.
Colabello drove in a run on a pair of hits and played defence at first base that made you wonder why he is part of a platoon. Troy Tulowitzki played spectacular defence at shortstop even as he struggled at the plate.
They fought, they clawed. They had a lead, then they lost it. They didn’t play tight anymore, but the hits dried up.
Bautista crushed a ball deep, but just foul, in the fifth that would have blown the game open. Donaldson did the same thing, eight innings later, that would have won it.
Two batters later, Edwin Encarnacion hit a shot to the centre field warning track that could have ended the game, but instead just ended the inning.
In the top of the 14th, Rougned Odor scored the go-ahead run even though he appeared to be out at second a batter earlier when Bautista made a laser throw and Tulowitzki applied the tag as Odor’s foot came off the bag a touch. The play was reviewed, shown on the scoreboard — “OUT!,” 49,716 yelled at once — and, amazingly, not overturned by the MLB reviewer, who apparently demands not just conclusive evidence but extra-super-conclusive evidence.
“That’s the way it goes,” Gibbons said afterward.
There would be no rally, and a 6-4 loss to put the Jays in a deep hole in the best-of-five series that heads to Arlington, needing three straight wins to survive.
But that first inning would haunt.
Gibbons was asked this week if his players would be nervous on this stage.
Of course they would, he said: “They’re human beings.”
Frailty wins again.