Joaquin Benoit was a man looking for a chair Tuesday night – and to get some things off his chest, as well.
Hobbled by a left calf injury sustained when he blew a tire running out of the bullpen to take part in Monday’s wasteful, short-sighted team-wide loss of mind against the New York Yankees, Benoit is on the shelf for two to three weeks with an injury similar to that suffered by Brett Cecil in the American League Division Series against the Texas Rangers. Going nowhere, with their post-season chances down to a few flickering embers, the Yankees effectively goaded J.A. Happ into getting into a bean-brawl – leading to a dugout-clearing incident that cost the Blue Jays the services of their best hitter this month (Devon Travis) and their most consistent set-up man. Nice.
Benoit shuffled in through the clubhouse on crutches with a walking cast on his left leg, plopped himself on a chair next to the runway leading from the clubhouse to the field and answered the questions you’d expect to be asked in the manner you’d expect them to be answered. But then … well, then he said this: he said that hitters sometimes take things too personally.
“Baseball was about pitching,” Benoit said. “Now, it’s about home runs. Home runs sell … good. I’m fine with that, as long as they don’t take away the inside of the zone.”
As Arden Zwelling reported in his article on Sportsnet.ca earlier Tuesday, the root of Monday’s brawl with the Yankees lay well beyond the pitch thrown by Luis Severino that kissed the elbow pad of Josh Donaldson or the retaliatory pitches – remember, it took two tries – thrown by Happ at the Yankees Chase Headley. It goes back to a series in New York where according to Kevin Pillar, Donaldson (who has been hit by pitches eight times this season) let the clubhouse know that he was tired of it all. Hey, when the reigning most valuable player talks, you listen, right? And like every other manager in Major League Baseball, John Gibbons believes his hitters are targeted, and he can rattle off this at bat on that day or that at bat on this day as evidence.
But, man: the idea of picking Game 156 to second a message that you’ve got your fellas back – when you’re trying to pick your way through the final few games to secure a wild-card spot – is, well, silly, and suggests not all is right. Monday night was a freebie, with the Yankees reduced to a bullpen game due to Masahiro Tanaka’s injury. The focus should have been on a win ahead of the biggest series of the season against the Baltimore Orioles.
And now Benoit is gone, taking with him his swing and miss stuff and 17 holds. The Blue Jays brought up big-armed, 28-year-old right-hander Chris Smith, who was at Double-A and might be able to catch a few Orioles off-guard. Smith joined the team one night after Jason Grilli was rocked by the Yankees Mark Teixeira, lending credence in some quarters to the suspicion his effectiveness is waning in this final week. In Tuesday’s 5-1 win over the Orioles, Cecil was up three times in the bullpen, throwing twice. So was Grilli, and in the end Gibbons used Roberto Osuna in a four-run game. “Four runs, three runs … you got to win the game,” he said – in a statement that speaks volumes.
The injury throws the Blue Jays potential post-season roster picture into a tizzy, and likely guarantees that Francisco Liriano moves into the pen.
“It’s a big loss, because he’s been so good for us,” Gibbons said of Benoit. “But Cecil’s been better … we have (Joe Biagini). We’ll have to lean on those guys.
“You don’t like it,” Gibbons added, “but the game of baseball goes on.”
Benoit’s contribution to the mid-season makeover of the bullpen cannot be minimized. His first-batter efficiency is a sterling 42-for-51 and he has struck out 16 of the last 43 batters he faced. Benoit has allowed just two extra-base hits to left-handed batters in his last 30 games.
“It felt like something hit me, and then is started to hurt,” Benoit said of his stumble and fall, as he joined the rest of the Blue Jays relievers out of the left-field bullpen en route to the rumble near home plate. “It was a weird situation, because everybody runs out … it could have happened just going out to the mound from the dugout.”
Blue Jays trainer George Poulis said it was difficult to set a timetable for Benoit’s recovery.
“You pretty much just go day to day,” Poulis said. “It’s nothing that you can really predict. You just treat him daily and just hope for the best and that it’s a shorter timeline.”
Travis’ shoulder injury is a day-to-day thing caused, it seems, by his shoulder being wrenched during the pushing and shoving. That doesn’t sound all that bad, but day-to-day means something different when there’s five days left on the regular schedule. The thinking is between Darwin Barney and Ryan Goins the Blue Jays can cover off Travis’ absence; Benoit, you fear, will be something else entirely. In the meantime, it was nice of Donaldson to slug that two-run homer in the first inning on Tuesday, considering all the fuss he’s created.
After what they’ve put their pitchers through this season, the Blue Jays hitters owe some payback of their own. Tuesday night was merely the first instalment.