Jays muscle up at home
Toronto climbs back into series with 11-8 victory
Kinetic energy diffused circularly throughout the spherical Rogers Centre from the Toronto Blue Jays dizzying carousel around the bases at the exhortation of third-base coach Luis Rivera’s frenetic right-arm windmill.
Toronto’s six-run, third-inning scoring binge incited the twirling of the fans’ rally towels and the seismic roar that spun decibel meters as the crowd nearly drowned out the foghorn that bellowed after home runs.
All this commotion emanated from the round patch of dirt where, from his half-turn corkscrew windup, Kansas City Royals right-hander Johnny Cueto tossed pitch after laboring pitch.
The Blue Jays lapped the bases three times on three singles, a walk and a hit batter in the second inning, before twice as big of an outburst in the next frame. Troy Tulowitzki shot a baseball
through the black tarp in the center-field bleachers and, five batters later, Josh Donaldson gave the second-deck fans in left field a free baseball to plate the team’s ninth run en route to an 11-8 final, as Toronto won American League Championship Series Game 3.
After dropping the first two games in Kansas City, the Blue Jays have set the stage for a memorable ALCS. Game 4 is Tuesday at Rogers Centre, and should Toronto twice more exploit its home-dome advantage, it can take a 3-2 series lead back to Kansas City.
Cueto, for whom the Royals traded three pitching prospects, had been brilliant in last round’s deciding game but needed 25 pitches to get through his one scoreless inning, the first.
With two outs and two on in the second, Cueto had a chance to escape unscathed by putting away the No. 9 hitter. Toronto’s leftyswinging Ryan Goins is so valuable defensively at second base that he started every game of the previous series — even the four in which the Jays faced a left-handed pitcher — while compiling a 0for-17 ledger at the plate.
Against Cueto, however, Goins fouled off three two-strike pitches and culminated a nine-pitch at-bat with a sharp liner to left that scored two. In the fifth inning, Goins added a solo homer off reliever Kris Medlen. That was one of two runs scored off Medlen, who lasted five bullpensaving innings the night before journeyman Chris Young makes his first playoff start since 2006.
When booed during pregame introductions, Cueto doffed his cap and turned around in mock appreciation. The fans’ mercilessness only intensified in the early innings when — in replication of the effect Pittsburgh Pirates fans had in rattling Cueto during the 2013 National League wild-card game — they kept chanting the pitcher’s name. After his stroll back to the dugout, they taunted in calling for his return, “We want Cueto.”
The Jays failed to homer in the two games in Kansas City after a season in which they slugged a major league-best 232 homers and went without any in back-toback games eight times all season.
Toronto starter Marcus Stroman benefited from the run support as he allowed four runs on 11 hits in 61⁄3 innings of work. The Royals were the hardest lineup to punch out this season, and Stroman tallied one strikeout.
There were no bats to flip or late-game dramatics to instigate, just an old-fashioned beat-down, like one of the baseball-leading 37 the Jays doled out by at least five runs during the season. They scored double digits in 26 games, the most for any club since 2003. Kansas City’s late-inning scoring binge forced Toronto to burn its two best relievers, Aaron Sanchez and Roberto Osuna.
The Blue Jays’ outburst was completed in such swift order that Toronto had a 9-2 lead less than 90 minutes into the game. That meant Game 3 was largely in hand shortly before the CTV projected a Liberal Party victory in Canada’s national election, meaning that the opposition took control of Parliament around the same time that the trailing ballclub was reasserting itself.
Toronto center fielder Kevin Pillar ranged back for a spectacular catch on the warning track before crashing into the wall in the first inning, and Goins made a diving stop up the middle for a groundout, prompting many on social media to call for those to work in tandem as the country’s new Ministers of Defense.
If not at the polling places, there was clear national unity in the ballpark, where another sellout crowd rose as one to fill the dome with sound.