NINTH LIFE!
Martin, Travis help Jays rally to victory in ninth for only second time this season
BLUE JAYS 10, RED SOX 9 Devon Travis jumps into the arms of Josh Donaldson after driving home the winning run Saturday at the Rogers Centre. Travis’s hit allowed Jays teammate Russell Martin, left, to score in the bottom of the ninth inning.
Do the hustle, Russell.
A two-step walk-off shimmy-shake with Devon. Beat out a bad throw here, RBI scooting across the plate there. Pivot, hop, pile-on. Mercy me.
Maybe the swagger’s back with these Toronto Blue Jays. Re-claimed in the lengthening shadows of a whacky slaphappy afternoon at the ball park.
But for only the second time this season, the Jays rallied after trailing in the ninth as Russell Martin and Devon Travis sent a sell-out crowd into eruptions of giddiness — and there hasn’t been a whole lot of that ’round these parts.
Four wins in a row now with Saturday’s thrill-a-minute 10-9 dispatch of AL East-leading Boston, taking the mickey
out of hot-shot closer Craig Kimbrel, merely among the best shut-down artists in baseball. Get to Kimbrel on the bump and it’s usually game over.
In fact, it felt like, oh, half-a-dozen games packed into one, so often did the momentum and the lead change. By the end of nine, with Toronto finally doing a bang-up job of bringing a man in scoring position home, both starters — Marcus Stroman and Rick Porcello — had been rendered fading memory footnotes, excluded from the decision despite decent outings, though the Jays’ ace got hit hard and often in a performance that brought a scowl to his face afterwards.
Heroics went mano-a-mano with smack-your-head inanity, errors served up like canapés, batters plunked — nothing intentional — the home plate umpire practically eating a pitch and forced to withdraw, reducing the crew to three, both teams surging, then stumbling, in what was ultimately a grudge-match in
the short strokes of the ninth frame. Let me take you there: David Ortiz, in familiar Big Papi fashion, took a salivating gander at the juicy hanging breaking ball offered by Gavin Floyd with one out and torched it into the first-level seats beyond right field for his 13th homer, Sox up 9-8.
For Toronto, it must have been a bit like looking in the rear-view mirror and seeing themselves from last summer — the team that just kept coming, no opposition lead safe, tons of testosterone in their bats. And, given how the fates have conspired against the Jays this year — count the multitude of ways they’ve managed to land in the loss column through 50 — and how realistic was it to suspend disbelief, especially facing Kimbrel, who’d been sent out by manager John Farrell to stifle the havoc of, at that point, a three-run eighth.
Last season, no lead seemed too big for the Blue Jays’ offence to overcome. They were entirely unfazed by early deficits and they exuded an assured confidence that their lineup meant they were never out of any game.
This year, however, the Jays’ offence has struggled to string together rallies and have been among the major leagues’ least productive teams with runners in scoring position. Manager John Gibbons and his players have repeated the refrain that the tide will eventually turn and their veteran hitters will start performing up to their long established standards. Now, as the season’s second month is nearly through, the
results are finally starting to come.
The Jays won their fourth straight — and seventh of their last nine — on Saturday afternoon, mounting their largest comeback of the season and outlasting the first-place Boston Red Sox, baseball’s highest-scoring team, in a back-and-forth offensive battle that ended with the Jays’ third walkoff victory of the season.
Devon Travis, playing his fourth game of the season since coming off the disabled list, hit a game-winning infield single in the bottom of the ninth off Boston’s all-star closer, Craig Kimbrel, scoring Martin to win the game 10-9 in front of a soldout Rogers Centre crowd.
Martin, who both drove in and scored three runs on Saturday, tied the game in the preceding at-bat with a two-out double to the gap. He
then executed a crucial steal of third when he noticed Red Sox catcher Christian Vazquez had lost sight of a blocked pitch — a subtle play that was just as important as Travis’ hit.
“The potency of our lineup, I feel like no lead is really big enough,” said Martin, who also hit his third homer of his last four games on Saturday as he continued to emerge from his early-season slump. “We can always find a way to get runners on and if the other team makes a mistake, capitalize on those mistakes. I think that was the key for us today.”
Before the walkoff dramatics, Boston’s veteran slugger David Ortiz looked like he had delivered the game-breaking blow with a go-ahead homer in the top of the ninth off Jays reliever Gavin Floyd.
Ortiz’s blast seemed to undo the excitement stirred by the Jays’ game-tying, four-run rally in the eighth, in which Jose Bautista performed the most important piece of
hitting with a simple, two-out single against Kimbrel to the opposite field.
The Jays have now notched runs against two of baseball’s top closers — Kimbrel and the Yankees’ Aroldis Chapman — in the last three games.
Red Sox manager John Farrell had called upon his closer earlier than usual in an attempt to quell the Jays’ eighth-inning comeback against Junichi Tazawa, who has struggled against Toronto throughout his career. While Farrell’s decision initially looked shrewd, by the time Travis notched the game-winning hit, Kimbrel had thrown a career-high 39 pitches and was likely worn down.
The Jays’ spirited comeback covered for what was a dismal start for Marcus Stroman, who allowed seven runs for the second time in his last three starts.
“I feel like my guys always pick me up, in every circumstance,” Stroman said afterward.
“I was pretty bad today and it’s un-
acceptable for the amount of runs that we got and the way our offence played all around. I have to be a lot better than that from the beginning all the way to the end.”
Stroman’s primary pitch is his sinking, two-seam fastball. It’s why he has the highest ground-ball rate of any starting pitcher. On Saturday, the pitch did not have its usual depth, Martin said. All Stroman’s pitches, in fact, were up.
“When he’s on, everything is down,” Martin said. “He’s burying his breaking ball, he’s burying that changeup.”
Stroman said he would look at video of Saturday’s outing on Sunday in hopes of getting back on track. In the meantime, he felt good about his teammates’ offensive breakout.
“I feel like we’re getting on a roll. We’re looking to just keep this going.”
The Jays will have the chance to sweep their division rival on Sunday, when old friend David Price takes the mound for the visitors.