Falling short again painful blow for Jays
Russell Martin said it “sucked” just as much as it did last year, losing in the American League Championship Series. But for Marco Estrada, this time hurt more. “Maybe because I was the one pitching out there and I’m the one that gave up the only three runs of the game,” he said at his locker, in a sombre Blue Jays’ clubhouse, after the team’s season ended in demoralizing fashion Wednesday night with a 3-0 shutout loss to Cleveland. “It’s hard for me to take.”
Estrada may have given up the game’s only runs — two on solo homers — but he was hardly to blame in Game 5 or the series as a whole. The Jays didn’t score a single run in either of his two starts. Collectively the Jays scored eight times in the series, hitting just .201 with two homers. Cleveland actually had fewer hits in the series, but more of them left the park and those runs were the difference.
“They pitched extremely well all the way through the series,” Martin said. “. . . We never really had a big inning. We were never able to string some hits together and get a rally going.”
Cleveland’s patchwork pitching staff was bolstered by an exceptional bullpen, but the Jays’ relief corps also did its part. Toronto’s relievers didn’t allow a single run in the series. Trouble was they hardly ever had a chance to preserve a lead.
Martin said Cleveland played nearly mistake-free baseball and “deserved to win.”
But amid the goodbye hugs and handshakes inside the Jays’ clubhouse — which could look very different next season — it was tough to look past the missed opportunities to see the bright side of making it to back-to-back league championships.
“Obviously we’re all very proud of each other for getting here, but this isn’t what we wanted,” Estrada said. “With this team we should still be playing.”
Even against Ryan Merritt, Cleveland’s rookie lefty who had made just one previous big-league start and whose fastball barely touched 88 m.p.h., the Jays’ vaunted offence couldn’t mount much of anything. “Even though he didn’t have great velocity he was still commanding the inside part of the plate with the fastball, the cutter, changing speeds with his changeup, even using his curveball,” Martin said. “. . . He pitched a simple game and it worked for him.”
Estrada and Martin are two veteran pieces who will be back next season, but with a number of pending free agents — chief among them Jose Bautista and Edwin Encarnacion — there was a deeper sense of finality to this season compared to last year.
“I know some very, very key pieces are free agents this year and I hope we do our best to bring them back because we need them,” Estrada said. “. . . You get this core back for next year, add a few more pieces and it’ll be another unstoppable team.”
Time will tell. But with Wednesday’s loss still so fresh, Estrada said he wasn’t worried about next year. “I’m just thinking about this stupid game.”