Richard Griffin The goal now is to return to Cleveland,
It turns out that nobody in the Blue Jays dugout really wants to go home early. Suddenly, following Tuesday’s 5-1 win at the Rogers Centre, a Jays team facing elimination vs. the Indians, unable to score, stifled by an airtight bullpen, finds itself alive. The Jays can take the series back to Cleveland with a win on Wednesday.
One of the subtle heroes of the piece was shortstop Troy Tulowitzki, who scored the eventual winning run in the fourth. He led off with a walk against Indians ace Corey Kluber, pitching on short rest for the first time in his career. Standing at second with one out, Ezequiel Carrera flared a ball out towards centre. Tulowitzki read it perfectly and broke for third even as Francisco Lindor and Tyler Naquin were reaching with their gloves. He scored easily when few on this team would have.
“I’m not the fastest guy out there,” Tulowitzki said. “I have to get good reads to score and that one, I didn’t fall for the deke. That was a big run.
“The little things are important, especially in big-time games. Whether it be secondary (leads), balls in the dirt, scoring on plays like that. Instincts. Some people have better instincts than others. I make my fair share of mistakes too, but it’s just playing those plays over in your head and having nothing surprise you.”
Historically, the Jays are in some sort of LCS limbo, a no man’s land of past outcomes. They escaped the fate of the five LCS teams that had been swept when trailing three games to none, but can still only dream of duplicating the ’04 Red Sox, who won Game 4 against the Yankees and then kept on winning. The only thing certain in the 2016 ALCS is that there will be no Indians sweep.
Into the third inning, the Jays had not held a lead of any kind at the end of any inning. The last lead had been Josh Donaldson’s mad dash to the plate on a wild pitch against the Rangers to clinch Game 3 of the ALDS. That streak ended in the third inning against Corey Kluber when Donaldson slammed a twoout home run to left-centre for the first run advantage of the series. That changed the way the game was managed on both sides, with Jays skipper John Gibbons holding the upper hand in controlling the strategy of the other bench.
“It’s not quite the same when we have the lead,” Tulowitzki said. “They have to do things a little bit differently. We didn’t see (Andrew) Miller today. He’s that guy when they had the lead that puts it away. If we can jump on them early, that makes (Indians manager Terry Francona’s) decision a little bit tougher.”
Statistics can tell you whatever story you want them to. So when a study is made of the history of teams in the ALCS and NLCS that trailed a series 3-0 since the format changed to a best-of-seven in 1985, there have been six.
Five of those teams lost Game 4 to complete the sweep, while the 2004 Red Sox became the only 0-3 team to win Game 4 and the only team in history to come back from three games down. The Jays are just the second team in 31 years to follow that same path. Coincidentally Francona was the 2004 Red Sox’s winning manager and is now here on the other side of history. He knows it’s possible.
So does Tulowitzki, who was a 20-year-old at Long Beach State at the time. He watched all seven games with his teammates and marvelled at David Ortiz and company.
“I don’t know about (duplicating that),” Tulowitzki cautioned. “But I remember that series like it was yesterday. They do give every team that is down 0-3 a little bit of hope that it can be done. It’s an uphill battle. It’s not where you want to be. It’s not ideal. It has happened before and this group definitely has it in them.”
That being said, Big Papi’s dramatic performance in that series included a 12th-inning two-run homer in Game 4 off Paul Quantrill, a 14thinning RBI single in Game 5 and a two-run homer in the first inning of the clinching Game 7 vs. Kevin Brown. Is there such a broad-shouldered player to carry the Jays to a similar comeback?
“It’s going to have to be (a different player every day),” Tulowitzki shrugged. “We have some good players in this room, but these guys can’t do it alone. It takes a team effort. J.D.’s one of the better players in the game, but you look at a guy like (Carrera). Without Zeke today we probably don’t win the game. It takes a whole team.”
Tulowitzki insists the Jays are only thinking of getting the series back to Cleveland with a win on Wednesday behind Game 1 starter Marco Estrada, who was outdueled by Kluber but will now oppose left-hander Ryan Merritt.
“We’ve been down the whole series, only up by one a couple of times,” Tulowitzki said. “I can go out. As long as we play the game the right way, play the game hard. That’s how we’re looking at it. Give it everything we’ve got, and usually when we give everything we’ve got we end up winning.”