TORONTO — Jason Grilli sat in his black chair in front of his stall in the Blue Jays clubhouse, his bearded face resting on his right hand, his blue eyes staring vacantly ahead.
It was just minutes after Toronto lost its third straight to Cleveland, and most of his teammates were already in their street clothes, or nowhere to be found in a clubhouse that for the first time following a game this post-season wasn’t filled with celebrating players, booming music and spraying bottles of Italian sparkling wine.
Grilli sat there wearing a blue October Baseball long sleeve and his baseball pants, flip-flops on over his socks.
“It’s hard to put stuff into words,” the Michigan-born right-hander said. “I know you’re looking for material, and I wish I could give you some.
“But it’s not where we expected to be right now.”
No, it’s not. Down three games to none to Cleveland, Toronto faces four must-wins in this ALCS series to keep its season alive. As manager John Gibbons put it, this is “definitely a daunting task.”
Definitely. And it was written all over Grilli’s face on Monday night, which perhaps should come as no surprise, that he’d be the Blue Jay who looked most inconsolable following their 4-2 loss. We’re used to seeing emotion from the veteran in the bullpen with the long brown hair who pumps his fist and yells and gets fired up after every strikeout. He wears his feelings.
And for a while there, he felt like Game 3 was going to go Toronto’s way. It looked promising early, especially when he saw Michael Saunders hit a solo shot in the second inning to tie the game at 1.
You probably saw it: Grilli watched that ball sail over the wall and he stood up in the benches above the bullpen and pointed toward the crowd and pumped his fist and yelled.
As far as his own performance goes, Grilli, who turns 40 next month, has been near-perfect in limited work this post-season: He has given up just one hit in 2.2 innings of work. He’s struck out three, walked none and he sports an ERA of 0.00.
“Any time you get to play in these games, it’s extremely fun,” he said. “You wanna do extremely well to help in any way possible to just secure some wins.”
A win has yet to be secured against Cleveland, however. “Obviously there’s some things we’re not capitalizing on,” Grilli said. “We’re giving it our best. It’s never a question of effort, sometimes it’s just the way the game goes.”
The Blue Jays clubhouse was eerily quiet Monday, and few players stuck around or made themselves available for post-game comment. You didn’t see Josh Donaldson or Jose Bautista in there. Grilli was later surrounded by a scrum of reporters and cameras, and he got out of his chair and answered questions after taking a moment for a deep breath. But the man who’d Tweeted “FIRED UP!” and #letsgoooooooo hours earlier didn’t have many answers.
“You’re asking a reliever to answer a lot of questions,” he said. “I’m not gonna come up and do a soapbox ‘Rah, Rah thing.’ I don’t even know how to answer some of these questions, honestly….I don’t know what I can really say at this point other than we’re gonna come out and play tomorrow, play like we have, play for the city like we have. We have a good group of men in this room, we have each other’s back. So, tomorrow is the most important game of our season.”
With Aaron Sanchez on the mound, he said, “I like that we’re gonna go out fighting, just like we always have.”
Earlier, before the scrum of reporters surrounded him, Grilli talked about the importance of momentum in baseball. All it’ll take, he figures, is a shift in that momentum.
“We’ve won four in a row a lot in the regular season. I’m a guy that’s always optimistic, the glass is half full rather than half empty,” he said, even if his body language on Monday night was more of the half empty variety.
“We just gotta play our hearts out. That’s it.”