Thunder and heightening
Late-inning homer heroics drown out trade speculation for a day but the buzz about Stroman, Giles and the rest has just begun
As showcases go, this was no cinemascope with stereophonic sound — until the credits were about to roll. Then bada-bing, bada-BANG-BANGBANG.
Three short-stroke jacks, six runs in the eighth and ninth innings, Toronto drawing even with Tampa Bay at 9-9.
And for the next half-hour or so, it was all blissfully about baseball again, the game on the field at the Rogers Centre, not the game being played out behind the curtain, other side of the front-office sliding doors and over GM-to-GM phone calls.
The thrill was in the moment, not next week, not next month — as in Aug. 1, when maybe Bo Bichette is called up from Buffalo — and not next season.
Sputtered out after that whirligig, turned into a bullpen grudging grind. Until the final BANG of the day, walk-off style, by Teoscar Hernandez, all gaga giddy as he came helmet-flinging across the plate with the 10-9 run.
So, savour it. As Charlie Montoyo relished the opportunity to talk about his battling team, ain’t got no quit. Which would sound more impressive if this weren’t but Toronto’s 40th win of the season. “It was a great game.” Short and sweet from the skip. Here’s the thing: Marcus Stroman didn’t start and Ken Giles wasn’t expected to finish, certainly not after Toronto had stumbled into a 9-2 trough on Saturday. Planet Jays continues to revolve around those two at the moment.
They’re still the major attractions as the clock ticks down, TD-minus 72 hours, give or take.
Not much to raise a scout’s eyebrow, in other words, on a yawning afternoon under the hermetically sealed dome. Maybe check under the hood of a Freddy Galvis or an Eric Sogard. Heck, Justin Smoak wasn’t even in the lineup and Daniel Hudson wasn’t even a bullpen flicker.
Which is about the sum of what Toronto has of trade deadline interest, or so the tom-toms are thumping. Stroman ’n’ Giles ’n’ Smoak ’n’ Galvis ’n’ Sogard ’n’ Hudson ’n’ Sanchez, as in Aaron (one can only hope).
As it turned out, Giles slammed the door 1-2-3 in the 10th on 10 pitches, Smoak pinch-hit in the 11th, Hudson took the bump in the 12th — and earned the W on Hernandez’s dinger, his second of the game, in the bottom of that frame, four hours and seven minutes after the Toronto-Tampa encounter had begun.
Bats cold as a witch’s you-know-what suddenly scalding, late bombs tacked on by Brandon Drury — a brace of them! — and Hernandez, Guerrero with a three-run shot in the ninth. Turning on an Oliver Drake splitter.
Rewind the tape back to the start and Tampa Bay’s opener — they invented the gimmick — endured longer than Toronto’s starter and threw fewer pitches.
A generous scorer gave Guerrero a pass on at least 21⁄ 2 errors.
Clueless Jays hitters took — well, actually, I stopped counting — but lots of second and third called strikes.
And that was my opener — one col
umn inning, before it all went ballistically crazy, in a good way for Jays faithful.
Now that we’ve got that out of the way — yes-yes, 10-9 win, very nice — we resume our trade deadline intrigues.
Stroman won’t start again, ahead of Wednesday’s date of expiration as a Blue Jay. (Spare me the prattle about Jays brass having a second think and maybe not dealing their wee ace. As if. To quote Stro on Twitter: “LOL”)
Closer Giles wasn’t supposed to get a sniff of the mound either, in the best-case scenario, likewise to avoid any chance of injury. Because pop would the weasel go on Toronto’s two most tinsely (also expendable, unlike their Next Gen glitterati) assets.
Naturally, much of the conversation and consternation is whither the Jays starting rotation, once Stroman has been stripped away from it. Jerryrigged as the starting rotation will be next week, with Thomas Pannone — as per stated rollout — inserted for Monday’s gig in Kansas City, in lieu of Stroman, even if still on the cusp of acquirement by another club.
Frankly, I’m getting woollymouthed debating the inverse possibilities of a Stroman-less Jays team, with pitching wares so scarce at the Triple-A level.
Yet what about a closer too? True, seems almost ridiculous to give it much thought. Giles has racked up only 14 saves in his clamp-it-down season (one blown save), so infrequent have those save occasions been on this team this year.
Pre-game, Montoyo was thinking out loud about a post-Giles closer, landing on David Phelps as a maybe — “he’s done it before’’ — and Markham-born Jordan Romano, who’s been out with an oblique injury, currently rehabbing in Florida. “Romano can do it, whenever he gets back.”
It’s a glitzy job, with often salary to match. But it takes a certain kind of baller to thrive in the role, as Roberto Osuna did before getting swapped for Giles, and let’s not revisit that darkness.
“Not everybody can do it,’’ Giles was saying pre-game. “People think it’s easy to get the last three outs. Uh, I don’t think so.”
Fearlessness, as Montoyo had put it, with which Giles concurred. Something else though, an edge, a nervy trait. “You gotta be a little crazy,’’ Giles discloses. “You’ve got to have that mentality. When it comes to closers, we’re a different breed. A little bit unorthodox, outside the box of a normal baseball player.
“We just think things a different way, how we approach the game. To be fearless, to not be intimidated. You have to check all those boxes. Dealing with pressure, dealing with failure. It’s different when you fail in the sixth compared to the ninth, where the last three outs are a do-or-die situation.
“It’s just the way I’m wired,” he shrugs. “And a little weird at the same time.”
Giles was in the clubhouse and cooled out by the time Hernandez got a good chunk of a slider on a 2-and-2 pitch, blasting it over the centre-field wall.
Maybe felt a twinge of pity for Tampa reliever Emilio Pagan, who served it up.
Ha-ha. Nope.