BLUE JAYS HAVE HIT PARADE
Toronto evens series at 2, will try to close out Rangers at home
By the second inning, the Toronto Blue Jays’ offensive onslaught was in full gear, as Kevin Pillar turned on a changeup left up and in over the plate and crushed the pitch 412 feet into his team’s bullpen, where ace-turned-reliever David Price caught the home run ball.
Price immediately raised three fingers into the air to celebrate the club’s third home run in eight batters — a gesture Pillar mimicked when crossing home plate — as the Jays mashed seven extra-base hits off the Texas Rangers on their way to an 8-4 victory in American League Division Series Game 4, tying the ledger at two games apiece with the final Game 5 looming Wednesday back in Toronto.
The Blue Jays are one win away from becoming the third team in 30 tries to lose the first two games of a division series at home and still win the series.
“Our mind-set the whole time was that we had to win three games — it doesn’t matter how you do it, what order you do it,” Pillar said.
Most of the damage came off Rangers lefty Derek Holland, who had a good postseason track record but struggled against righty hitters in his injury-abbreviated season. Entering Monday, he had allowed 10 home runs in 178 right-handed at-bats; Toronto, incidentally, has a righty-heavy lineup, and by the eighth hitter of the game, Holland’s rate had escalated to 13 homers in 184 at-bats.
“We had talked about what side of the plate he likes to favor a little bit more,” Pillar said. “He favors throwing in a little bit more than away, so it’s one of those pitches I wasn’t looking for a changeup — just saw it up over the plate and capitalized.”
That Price snagged an early game ball was a bit of foreshadowing to manager John Gibbons summoning Price from the bullpen in the fifth inning of a game Toronto was leading by six runs.
Gibbons asked him to throw 50 pitches in three innings of work, and Price was credited with his first postseason win since 2008. Price did not pitch that well — he gave up three runs — but got the win because knuckleballer R.A. Dickey exited one out short of the five-inning minimum for starters, even though he allowed only one run. (“I wish the scorekeeper would just give him a win, because he’s the guy that deserves it, not me,” Price said.)
“Today was kind of a precarious situation, you know?” Dickey said. “It’s a do-or-die game.
“We’ve got a bazooka in the bullpen, so you try to see both sides as a diplomat. ... I’m not going to let (the quick hook) steal away the joy I have about getting to go back to Toronto, when there’s a lot of teams that would have folded.”
Price’s workload renders him unavailable for Game 5, Gibbons said later, which means secondyear pitcher Marcus Stroman — who has made five starts since returning ahead of schedule from an anterior cruciate ligament tear — will be the starter against former World Series hero Cole Hamels.
Stroman has pitched well (2.12 ERA), but he won’t have an obvious candidate to bail him out in the early or middle innings.
“In the postseason, not much is surprising to me,” Toronto catcher Russell Martin said of Price’s early and elongated appearance.
“You try to get outs, however you can get them. No lead is big enough.”
That point was reinforced earlier in the afternoon when the Houston Astros blew a 6-2 eighth-inning lead to the Kansas City Royals in the other ALDS.
“One thing I’ve learned, sometimes the best way you win games is don’t let the team get back into it,” Gibbons said, expressing his desire to have Price face lefty batter Shin-Soo Choo, who was 2for-2 off Dickey with prior success, too. “And of course you watched that Kansas City game, too. You know how that works.”
The Jays traded three pitching prospects for three months of Price — the third month being October — and went 9-2 in his 11 starts while the pitcher had a 2.30 ERA. But Gibbons will instead entrust an elimination game to supremely talented but less experienced Stroman, a decision that will inspire either praise or scorn depending on the result.
Price called the team “selfless” about its goals and insisted that he would be available in Game 5.
“I’ll be ready, you know?” Price said. “Whatever they need me to do on Wednesday.”
“We’ve got a bazooka in the bullpen, so you try to see both sides as a diplomat.”
R.A. Dickey, Blue Jays starter, on his fifth-inning removal in favor of David Price