Blue Jays bounce back after blowing lead
Tolleson cashes winning runs with bloop single in ninth; Kawasaki, Reimold injured
ST. PETERSBURG, FLA.— With its 162game grind, the baseball season can feel relentless. For hard-charging clubs on the upswing, the constant motion is a boon. You ride the high for as long as you can and keep the good times rolling. But for those on the other side — the teams getting beat down seemingly night after night — relief is hard to come by. Struggles compound and pile up. Turning the ship becomes a daunting task.
That’s how it felt for the Blue Jays on Friday night when they blew a three-run lead and looked as if they would lose another game they should have won, while another two players exited with muscle-strain injuries.
But when both teams are struggling on a given night, a little luck one way or another can make all the difference. Such was the case Friday when, after blowing a 5-2 lead in the seventh, the Jays came back to beat the Tampa Bay Rays 8-5 in the ninth on the back of a leadoff walk and a pair of bloop singles against the Rays’ scuffling closer, Grant Balfour.
“We needed that,” manager John Gibbons said afterward. “The way things have been going and then you blow a comfortable lead. That would’ve been tough.”
Playing in his first game as a Blue Jay, Dan Johnson — the former Ray best known for a season-saving, ninth-inning home run that lifted Tampa to the playoffs on the final day of the 2011 season — led off the ninth with a different kind of heroism: he worked a walk, his fourth of the night, and came around to score the game-winning run when Steve Tolleson — another minor-league call-up — dunked a single into shallow right field that also scored Jose Reyes.
Johnson, the 34-year-old journeyman called up to replace Adam Lind, tied his career-high with the four free passes. He also leads the entire minor leagues this season with 79 walks. Before the game, he laughed at the coincidence of making his season debut in Tampa, where he had his most memorable at-bat. “On a day when you don’t get much sleep it might add a little pep in the step,” he said. But the late-game dramatics were only necessitated by a miserable relief outing from Dustin McGowan, who with two outs and the bases empty in the seventh inning, entered to face the Rays’ right-handed mash- er, Evan Longoria. McGowan walked Longoria and James Loney before giving up a game-tying three-run blast to Sean Rodriguez. It looked then like the Jays had wasted a serviceable outing from Mark Buehrle — who allowed nine hits in his five innings but limited the damage to just a pair of runs — and failed to capitalize on an atypically shaky one from Rays right-hander Chris Archer. But fortunately for the Jays, Balfour’s disastrous season continued and they did not hesitate to pile on. With the win, the 49-45 Jays ensure they will head to the All-Star break with a winning record for the first time since 2006. But naturally, given the club’s fortunes over the last month or so, there was some bad news to go along with the good as both Nolan Reimold — one of three veteran outfielders the Jays have claimed off waivers this year to paper over a growing list of injuries — and Munenori Kawasaki left the game with a calf strain and hamstring tightness, respectively. They’re both day-to-day. Good news has come so rarely to the Jays of late that even a lessening of the bad feels triumphant. That was the sentiment before Friday’s game when word came down of Lind’s second opinion from a doctor in Charlotte, N.C., which found the designated hitter’s broken right foot will keep him out two to three weeks, rather than the first-feared six to eight. Before the game, Gibbons said the team would shuffle its rotation so R.A. Dickey will start Sunday’s game instead of J.A. Happ, due to Dickey’s history of success inside the domed Tropicana Field.