Swingin’ in the rain
The Blue Jays break out the big bats in Saturday’s soggy doubleheader in New York, and celebrate a young star’s triumphant return.
NEW YORK— One can imagine Marcus Stroman bouncing off the walls in the clubhouse.
He’s a boing-back rubber doll at the most sedate of times. These were not those.
This was crazy-time — four hours and 32 minutes of it, plus a half-hour timeout for everyone to catch their breath between baseball sessions. And Stroman — the freshly minted baccalaureate of sociology — had to wait it out, fretfully, as featured starter in the evening half of a double-header in the Bronx.
“I was so antsy, so antsy to get out there. I was waiting in here for a while. I couldn’t wait until that game ended. But when I got back out there I felt normal, I felt home, I felt great.”
Cut to the chase: Win No. 1 for Stroman, back-to-back wins for the Blue Jays, when all was said and done and wringed out, 9-5 to start, 10-7 to end. That’s back-to-back-to-back thus far in their three-game stomp through New York, closing out here Sunday afternoon.
Don’t look now but Yankees are quickly receding into the rear view mirror.
It was a two-headed baseball beast. And heads were exploding all over the place at Yankee Stadium on Saturday, frankly. Long-crank bats too. The scoring line in just the top end of the single-admission two-fer could read thusly:
Heads: 15, for the combined number of pitchers who took the mound, in a 4:32 purist’s abomination that ended in Toronto’s favour 9-5 after trailing 4-1 on Marco Estrada’s wobbly start. Homers: 7, in toto. Runs walked in with the bases loaded by the self-imploding New York relief corps, in the top of the 11th: 3.
Managers on the verge of opening a vein: 1.
That would be Joe Girardi, saddest Italian-American in the Big Apple, on an afternoon when the local paisans were dancing a tarantella as two Italian ladies improbably squared off for the U.S. Open women’s title, over in Queens.
Uptown, however, it was Pinstripe pennant hopes that were taking a licking, in a Game 1 that careered from highdecibel drama to slapstick farce.
Doubtless Girardi would like to have slapped his reliever Chasen Shreve about the ears in Game 1.
Instead, even more meanly, he left the lefty out on the hill through five walks and a hit batter.
By the time Shreve was mercifully hooked, he looked like a beaten dog, further kicked around by a yowling crowd raining boos and, one suspects, headed either for a saloon or a sanitarium. Jump ahead to Game 2, where Toronto’s prodigious hitters — abetted by a brace of hit batters — pounded the home side for six runs in the second frame. That triggered a quickie bye-bye for starter Ivan Nova. By which point Girardi must have been reconsidering his choice of profession. In the city that never sleeps, there was doubtless a long night of tossing and turning straight ahead for the Yankee skipper, his club absolutely clobbered back-toback, gutted, humiliated. Losers now of three in a row to the Blue Jays and reeling, 41⁄ games back in
2 the American League.
On July 28, they were eight games up on Toronto.
We’ll get back to Stroman shortly (that’s not a height shot). This was, after all, the mini-ace’s first start of the 2015 season, and it began with a strike at 6:28.
Rewind to the scariest episode of the entire baseball rave day; also, the most significant consequence from a Toronto perspective — the injury disappearance of Troy Tulowitzki. A weird No. 1 game sequence wherein three fielders converged under a pop-up with Kevin Pillar calling for the ball. As Pillar ventured forward, Tulowitzki edged backwards. When they inevitably spoon-collided — looking for a second like they were twerking — Pillar went down first, tumbling heels-over-head. Tulo- witzki took a brief glance at his teammate and then dropped. For a while, they both just lay there, as if more embarrassed than to surface that hurt.
But Tulowitzki was hurt, never to reappear on the field. Dispatches from the infirmary revealed initial X-rays of chest and ribs showed no damage. The third baseman had a more thorough MRI look-in later, diagnosed with an upper body muscle bruise and a small crack in the left shoulder blade. When he can return to game fitness remains unclear — but not imminently. This is a serious blow.
Do not put out a contract on Pillar. That was the centrefielder’s ball.
“The worst experience I’ve ever had on the field,” a devastated Pillar said afterward.
Meanwhile, Toronto rallied from the quartet of jacks Estrada surrendered with home runs from Jose Bautista, Ben Revere — his first since coming to the Jays from Philadelphia at the trade deadline — Edwin Encarnacion and Bautista again, his fourth multiple homer effort of the year. All of that preceded the kooky incompetence of the 11th frame, extra innings required after Aaron Sanchez got into base-on-balls-times two trouble in his second inning of relief.
It was bullpen madness, really, as both Girardi and Toronto skipper John Gibbons used up their primary relief arms too early in go-for-it gambits that left each team without a closer in the clutch. And so both teams went deeper and deeper into the dregs of the ’pen.
Liam Hendriks got the W for Toronto and Ryan Tepera the save, his first ever.
Which brings us back to where we started, and the Jays ended — 10-7 victors in a Game 2 that was going to get stuffed in the books come hell or high water. The waters did come, not just a drizzle either, by the fifth inning, just around the time Stroman gave up his first hit of the game — a homely thing from John Ryan Murphy that barely made it out of the infield, knocked down by Cliff Pennington but he was unable to make a throw to first. (Is this a good place to mention that Pennington, replacing Tulowitzki, acquitted himself well in both ends of the double-header with sharp defensive work and his first HR as a Jay in the later game, a two-run blast that made it 6-0?)
With the rain coming down harder, Stroman surrendered a three-run shot to Brett Gardner on a 91-m.p.h. fastball. When Brian McCann popped out to end the fifth, Yankees trailing 6-3, the wet mess was officially recorded as a sufficiently completed regular game. Torrential conditions notwithstanding, Stroman and ’mates sloshed their way back out on to the field, primed for a sodden sixth bottom. Instead the tarp came out, the players went in, and Stroman took shelter from the storm in interim possession of a debut win. That was the 24-year-old done for the night.
Following a 33-minute rain delay, the Jays segued to reliever Bo Schultz and Aaron Loup, the home side putting another run on the board, but Toronto added four more. In waning innings, Brett Gardner smoked his third home run of the day, off Jeff Francis, a threerun blast that made it 10-7.
“I’m proud of these guys,” said Gibbons. “It was a long-ass day.”
After the deluge, the fall — of the Yankees. In a ballpark decanted of its regular denizens, nine-plus hours after the baseball marathon began.
Eyes turned away from their team’s full frontal fiasco.