STRANDED IN KANSAS
JAYS SEASON ENDS: The Royals are going to the World Series after a 4-3, rain-delayed win over Toronto.
Playing elimination games in baseball is not like walking on a tightrope. It’s like walking on a greased tightrope amid heavy gusts through a swarm of bees in freezing rain.
For the Toronto Blue Jays, 4-0 in elimination games in these playoffs heading into Game 6 of the American League Championship Series, a foot finally slipped off. And then Jose Bautista, wobbling, with both hands outstretched, got his team steadied. But then, whoops. A run for the Royals off Toronto closer Roberto Osuna, in the game after a 45-minute rain delay when the visiting team had just tied it, was in the end what sent the Jays, and their season, crashing to the ground. A rally in the ninth, with two men on and none out, fell short when Royals closer Wade Davis struck out two and induced John Donaldson to ground out.
Kansas City won the game 4-3 and the series 4-2.
They had many chances to go down hard, these Jays. They trailed early, they trailed late, and again and again they hung around. The Royals were just that little bit better. It was thrilling and crushing all at once. Two decades out of the playoffs? Oh yes, this is what the post-season gets you.
It looked for a time like the winning run would be provided by the outstretched glove hand of a bearded teenager from Blue Springs, Mo., which would be a hell of a cruel way to have a season end, but Bautista’s two-run bullet over the left-field wall in the eighth inning, as Davis idled in the bullpen, evened things at 3-3 just when it seemed like the Toronto season was all but over.
First, the teenager. His name is Caleb, and in the second inning, he reached over the railing in right-centre field and snagged, backhanded, a Mike Moustakas shot that looked like it would rattle off the green outfield wall. The right field umpire signalled for a home run. Bautista signalled right away that the fan had interfered, and Jays manager John Gibbons asked for a replay review. The word from New York was that there was not “clear and convincing” evidence that the call on the field should be overturned and the home run stood to give Kansas City a 2-0 lead.
It was a perplexing decision. Replays showed that the glove was below the level of the wall, and the force of the ball smacked the glove into it. How clear does the evidence need to be? Must the kid shout “I am catching this illegally” as the ball hits his glove? Does he need to wave a sign to that effect?
Major League Baseball should explain why it has a system in which the officials watching a clear, slow-motion replay are not able to make a judgment call that overrules the guy who was standing 100 feet away and watching in real time, but the reality is that this is the system it has.
The controversy will live on, perhaps in infamy, but it obscured what looked to be the lasting memories of the game: That David Price pitched very well with the season on the line, in the playoffs, and that his teammates couldn’t provide the runs to bail him out after the wonky homer and help him finally win a game as a post-season starter. Instead, the Bautista home run in the eighth prevented Price from going to 0-8 as a starter in the playoffs. After the Moustakas homer put Toronto in the tworun hole, Price retired 14 of the next 17 Kansas City batters, eight of them on strikeouts. The Royals rarely strike out. Blue Jays’ hitters, meanwhile, left five runners on and went hitless in eight at-bats with runners in scoring position. Josh Donaldson smoked a ball with two men on — it was 114 m.p.h. off the bat, the hardest one he hit all year — but right at Moustakas, the third baseman. Greased tightrope, etc.
Price did his job, plainly. He is soon to be a free agent, and if you think that the Jays should not offer him the wealth of a small nation because he didn’t win in the playoffs, I don’t know what to tell you.
In the end, it was the greatest Toronto season in 22 years, which should make the postmortems less painful. They were great, they were fun to watch, they were close. So close.
In the ninth, after Dalton Pompey stole second, and then third, and Kevin Pillar followed him to second, all the Jays needed was a deep fly to tie things. Even a moderate fly. Strikeout, strikeout — some questionable calls in each — and then Donaldson, grounding a ball off to third base for the final out. Those strike calls, like the phantom home run, will loom large.
None of that is intended as an excuse for the Blue Jays. Every team gets their share of breaks, good and bad. But as they ponder the wreckage of a oncepromising post-season run, it is worth keeping those moments on the slippery tightrope in mind. The Jays were considered good enough to win it all. They were, in fact, good enough to win it all. They just didn’t.