The strangest night of my career.
How strange and outrageous must any baseball game be for the greatest horror author of his generation, Stephen King, a lifelong Red Sox fan, to tweet in the middle of it: “I’ve seen some crazy baseball s--- in my time, but nothing like the current Blue Jays-Rangers game.” The man had that right. In 42 seasons, I have not either. The Jays 6-3 win to clinch their American League division series over the Rangers was weird, wacky and wonderful with more late-inning twists and turns than . . . well, a Stephen King novel.
The twists started after Edwin Encarnacion tied the game with a 457-foot blast in the sixth, the longest home run of the 2015 playoffs. Aaron Sanchez was one out away from escaping a jam in the top of the seventh, when Shin-Soo-Choo extended his arm, with his bat held at a 90-degree angle, to adjust his elbow armour. Russell Martin’s throw to the mound hit the bat and skidded to third and Rougned Odor scampered home.
That umpire Dale Scott threw his hands in the air to call time as Odor raced home, mattered not, because the runner did complete the act of crossing the plate and there was no Blue Jay close enough for manager John Gibbons to argue that he had given up on the play when he saw Scott’s arms raised.
It was careless on Martin’s part. The moment was not right in a game of this magnitude, but the call was. The sequence was comical. The umpires got together and confirmed the run. Then Gibbons came out and asked for a review from the seemingly self-appointed baseball gods in the replay office in New York. The call stood again.
But that woke up the real baseball gods, who waited until the bottom of the seventh to exact revenge on the false idols in the replay room and the umps on the field.
“In my mind, I looked down and was telling those guys there is no way this game is going to end like that, you don’t have to worry about that, just go out and play,” said R.A. Dickey, the champagne-soaked 40-year-old teetotaller who had a front-row seat to the play.
“There’s no way that a baseball game like this is going to hinge on Russell Martin hitting Choo in the batter’s box with a baseball. There’s no way that’s going to happen.
:Sure enough, next inning those flukey errors happened and here we are.”
After the Odor-Choo dust had settled and the Jays trailed 3-2, former Jays prospect Sam Dyson entered and the baseball gods took over.
Groundball to Elvis Andrus. Clank! Grounball to Mitch Moreland. Bounce and clank! Bunt to move the runners over but too hard with a force from Dyson to Andrus covering third. Clank!
All of a sudden the bases were loaded with nobody out. I’m not sure if the baseball gods have fingers like us, but if they do, one was surely raised in the direction of the review centre in New York.
In any case, after a freaky flare dropped over Odor’s head — the Rangers managed a force at second but the Jays scored the tying run on the play — Jose Bautista stepped in and the “craziest game ever” place in history was sealed. The Jays’ best hitter turned on an inside pitch and drove it deep to left-centre field for a three-run homer and the lead. His stare at the ball, at the mound and then his bat flip should always be replayed in slow motion to appreciate the sweetness of the moment for the Jays.
“I didn’t plan anything that I did, and so I don’t even know how I did it,” Bautista said. “I just enjoyed the moment, rounded the bases and got to the dugout. After all the guys stopped punching me and hitting me is when I started realizing. I knew I did something great for the team at the moment of impact. Because I knew I hit that ball pretty good and gave us the lead in a crucial moment.”
But the excitement and animosity reached a boiling point as Bautista continued to celebrate as he crossed the plate and greeted teammates.
Dyson who had allowed the blast, took exception. He yelled and took a few steps towards the line and the next batter, Encarnacion, who turned to meet him. The dugouts and the bullpen cleared, with general milling. With order restored, the inning finally ended and Round 2 began with the same participants and the same long run from the bullpens.
But back to Dickey, the Jays’ thoroughly impressed Game 4 starter, who after his own start on Monday had seemed in a different place of personal dissatisfaction, after being taken out in the fifth inning, one out short of qualifying for the victory. In fact, never in the three years the former Cy winner has been with the club has Dickey seemed more like a true blood-brother, sworn into the Blue Jays fraternity with that secret handshake of stirring the pot or whatever it has become now. He is all in now. “You’ll hear at the end of the year that this team or that team was a team of destiny,” Dickey drawled.
“It’s a sports cliche. A lot of it goes back to games just like the one we had. I’m not going to say we’re a team of destiny. I am going to say we’re a team that plays hard every day and we’re not scared of anybody.”