Hello, Blue Jays offence, nice of you to drop by.
Riding an early home run from Jose Bautista and solid starting pitching from Marcus Stroman, the Toronto Blue Jays hung around long enough in the AL Wild Card game to see their closer suddenly leave the game in the 10th inning with an injury, only to win it in the 11th with a long-awaited killer blow provided by Edwin Encarnacion.
His three-run bomb off Baltimore’s Ubaldo Jimenez gave Toronto a 5-2 win that sends the Jays through the torture of the one-game playoff round and on to Texas for the American League Division Series, where they will face the Rangers in a rematch of last year’s epic five-game battle.
In a game that had home runs, key late strikeouts and one moronic toss of a beer can from the outfield stands, the Jays improbably won a battle of the bullpens after theirs had been mostly disastrous for the past week, and after Roberto Osuna was quickly pulled with one out in the 10th. Francisco Lariano, who was considered for the start coming in, finished up and retired the Orioles to set the stage for the Encarnacoin dramatics.
But they will take it.
“We were fortunate we had the last at-bat,” said manager John Gibbons, “and Eddie came through.”
“I was looking for a fastball, to try to put the barrel on it, and I got it,” said Encarnacion, through a translator.
“It was a very special moment,” he said. “Thank God I did the job for us.”
This game was always going to be unbearably tense, requiring fans to have a good supply of paper bags on hand to either prevent hyperventilation or be a repository for their vomit.
And it has been known for weeks now that this was the best the Blue Jays could hope for, once they swooned through September and surrendered the AL East title to Boston.
Gibbons theorized before the game that, maybe, the team’s September struggles would come in useful now that the team was suddenly in a must-win game.
“It was a battle to get in. The guys hung tough,” he said, understating it more than a little. The Blue Jays were 11-16 in September and needed both of their wins in October to give them home field for Tuesday’s game.
Compared with last season, when Toronto went 43-18 to tear into the playoffs and promptly dropped the first two games at home to the Texas Rangers, maybe all the adversity would pay off.
“This is all gravy here,” Gibbons said about still being alive when it often looked last month like the Blue Jays were in a death spiral. But a feeling of relief can only do so much for a team. “The format, you know, is difficult,” Gibbons said, again putting it rather mildly.
The format is absurd: a one-game playoff after a regular season of 162 games would be like deciding the first round of the NHL playoffs at the first intermission.
A fluke hit, a weird play, a ball that drops three inches to the right of the line instead of three inches to the left of it, any of it could have been the difference between advancing to the American League Division Series and going home.
Absent their slump, the Jays could have avoided this lunacy. But they didn’t, and so the crucible it was. “One game, see what happens,” was the manager’s succinct description of what would unfold.
What happened was not all that surprising, until late.
Bautista popped a soaring home run into the left-field bullpen in the second inning, sending an already hopped-up Rogers Centre crowd into delirium.
This is what Bautista does. Marcus Stroman, the Toronto starter, did more than enough to justify Gibbons’ decision to use him in an elimination game, tossing six innings of four-hit ball at the powerful Orioles lineup.
His only blemish was a two-run homer surrendered to Mark Trumbo in the fourth inning. It was a good pitch, low and on the inside corner, but Trumbo, who led the AL in home runs this season with 43, reached down and golfed it off his shoetops over the left-field fence to give the Orioles a 2-1 lead. Sometimes, good players hit tough pitches, which is what makes the one-game format so agonizing.
The Jays finally got a hit from someone other than Bautista in the fifth, an opposite-field double from previously sonambulant Michael Saunders, which was followed up by another double from Kevin Pillar and then a run-scoring single from Ezequiel Carrera to tie the game.
With the win, the Jays put off for at least three games and possibly as many as five the questions about their future, of which there are many.
There are the huge stars who are pending free agents such as Bautista and Encarnacion, the lesser who might also have played their last games here, and even the manager whose future is uncertain.
This first year of the Mark Shapiro-Ross Atkins era was in many ways a holdover from the last year of Paul Beeston-Alex Anthopoulos, but with so much potential upheaval in the off-season it’s a good bet that the new guys will truly put their stamp on the team for 2017.
All of that, though, can wait, thanks to Encarnacion himself. There is still more baseball to play. It probably won’t go according to plan.
Postmedia News
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