Pain in the pen
Tough debut for Jays reliever,
Amidst the grand vision that is the Blue Jays’ drive for the post-season, there remains the need to correct the mistakes that lead to losses.
Just ask reliever Mark Lowe, who made his debut out of the Jays’ bullpen Saturday but had it turn forgettable in a 7-6 loss to the Kansas City Royals before 37,932 at the Rogers Centre.
“I have a reliever’s mentality,” Lowe said after giving up three runs on four hits and a sac fly in the eighth inning that erased a 5-4 Toronto lead. “The sun comes up tomorrow and there’ll be totally different results there.”
This may have been Lowe’s most forgettable outing in a season in which he’s been fairly spectacular. His teammates will also be dismissing this one quickly, even though it was peppered with some great baseball albeit with a couple of costly moments.
The Jays managed back-to-back ho- mers from Josh Donaldson and Jose Bautista in the fifth to take a 5-1 lead. Bautista crushed a solo shot off superb eighth-inning specialist Wade Davis, marking the first homer Davis had given up in 1252⁄ innings, dating back to Aug.
3 24, 2013 when he was a starter.
In fact, Toronto had the look of a team bound for another late-inning victory to match Friday’s triumph in which Josh Donaldson walked off the win with an 11th-inning single.
But the Royals are the defending American League champions, and for all the positive energy surrounding these Blue Jays and their tremendous trade dead- line efforts, the Royals were bound to have something to state in this four-game series.
But in the end, Donaldson couldn’t deliver the magic with a runner on base in the bottom of the ninth, and the Royals won for the first time in this series that had Jays fans imagining what a post-season series between these two teams would look like.
They found out it would look a lot like Saturday afternoon — a battle on so many levels, with so much smart and highly talented baseball being played.
Perhaps the most elevated baseball effort Saturday belonged to Ben Zobrist, who went deep off Mark Buehrle in the first inning and also keyed that eighth-inning with a blast off Lowe.
Zobrist’s at-bat against Lowe was genius; Lowe planned a back door slider but left the ball a little fat over the plate, but still outside. Zobrist swung where the pitch would end up, reflecting the Royals’ excellent scouting reports and his pure talent.
“It wasn’t a bad pitch . . . for some guys,” Lowe said. “Trying to go back door slider, but it rode into his swing.”
Buerhle committed an error in the sixth with one out that led to two runs. A four-time Gold Glove winner, the veteran left-hander got tangled in a comebacker to the mound and simply couldn’t recover in time to get the out.
“It wasn’t a bad pitch . . . for some guys. Trying to go back door slider, but it rode into his swing.” JAYS’ MARK LOWE ON ZOBRIST’S EIGHTH-INNING HR
He’d been hit on the right knee previously, taking a hard grounder up the middle, and was limping afterwards. Amazingly, in his seventh and final inning, he came within a pitch of an immaculate inning — he’d used just six pitches to strikeout the first two batters, then went 0-2 on the next one, needing one more strike for a nine-pitch, three-strikeout frame. But his 0-2 pitch narrowly missed. And so it went, back and forth, some great baseball with some tough luck moments. Toronto lost but, in doing so, still played an entertaining game.
Newly acquired left fielder Ben Revere went 0-for-5 at the plate but also made a spectacular catch out in left field.
It appears fans can get used to such games, given the immense volume of talent on the Blue Jays’ revamped roster.