Blue Jay bats beat up Baltimore bullpen
BALTIMORE— Before Monday’s game against the Baltimore Orioles, Blue Jays manager John Gibbons was talking about baseball’s unpredictable “beauty.”
His Jays had lit up Orioles starter Chris Tillman all season, for instance, scoring 31 runs on 35 hits, including nine homers over five terrible starts, leaving the right-hander with a bloated 15.50 ERA against the league’s highest-scoring offence.
But Gibbons wasn’t about to expect the same on Monday. “When he’s on, he’s still tough.”
Even with armies of scouts and reams of data, the game is impossible to predict, he said. “We’ve never done anything against (Chris) Archer, he pitches the other day and we hit him well. There’s really no explanation.”
As Gibbons foreshadowed, Tillman all but shut down the Jays’ fearsome offence on Monday night, the opening game of the team’s final road trip of the season. And just as unpredictably, when Tillman was gone the Jays’ rallied for three runs against one of the best bullpens in baseball — and they did so not by their usual means of thumping home runs, but by piecing together rallies of singles.
“We can win it any way possible,” said Justin Smoak, whose game-winning drive was a soft nubber that allowed pinch-runner Dalton Pompey — who has scored five times in seven pinch-running appearances this month — to score from third. “He hits it a little harder and he might be out,” Gibbons said.
Kevin Pillar, fresh off his first career player of the week honour, tried a kamikaze attempt to score on the same play but was tagged out in a play that was confirmed upon review.
But the lone run was enough as the Jays won 4-3, their 91st victory of the season and their second comeback win in as many days.
With the Yankees losing to Boston, the Jays increased their lead over New York to five games and moved one step closer to locking up their first division title in 22 years. They can clinch as early as Tuesday.
“This is something that as a team we’ve been trying to play for, for a long time, and finally I feel like all the pieces fit,” said Brett Cecil, the team’s longest-tenured pitcher, who on Monday extended his streak without allowing an earned run to a remarkable 301⁄ innings. “I can’t tell you
3 how good a team this is — personality-wise, in the clubhouse, away from the field, on the field, it doesn’t matter. It’s just a great group of guys and we’re having a lot of fun.”
The Jays’ only extra-base hit Monday was Edwin Encarnacion’s 36th homer of the season, which made the Jays just the sixth team in baseball history to have three players hit 36 or more homers in a single season.
But while the Jays’ offence remains its calling card, their starting pitching has been among the best in baseball over the last two months, leading the American League with a combined 3.33 ERA.
Abig part of that has been the unexpected success of Marco Estrada, the rare finesse righty, who came into Monday’s start with the fifth-best ERA in the American League.
Estrada, a fly-ball pitcher who doesn’t strike out many batters, has been aided by the majors’ lowest batting average against on balls in play, which suggests he has benefitted, at least in part, by some good luck. But those waiting for his regression have waited all season and will have to wait at least a little longer. Estrada threw 71⁄ innings on Monday, retir
3 ing 18 of his final 19 batters after allowing a three-run homer to Ryan Flaherty. He kept the game close long enough for the offence to get to work.
“I knew if I kept the score the way it was, we’d eventually come back and that’s what happened,” Estrada said.
Backup catcher Dioner Navarro, who has caught Estrada for most of this season, did so again on Monday and Gibbons said he would keep the battery together into the post-season. “I think you have to. It’s been so good.”
“We just seemed to have synced really well,” Estrada said. “Navi’s incredible behind the plate. You just never know what he’s going to call, and I don’t have that many pitches, but he keeps me guessing at times.”