TORONTO — Liam Hendriks arrives at the ballpark every single day expecting to pitch. He just doesn’t always know when it’s going to happen.
It could be with no outs in the first, which was the case this July in the infamous Matt Boyd start, or it could be with two outs in the ninth, a situation he faced against the Yankees this August. But what he does know is when he’s given the ball he’s going to take it and get outs until they tell him to stop.
“I love it—I love being in the bullpen,” says the converted starter after he pitched 4.1 innings of scoreless relief in Tuesday’s 14-2 trouncing from the Royals. “It’s a bulldog mentality. You need to go out there and go right after guys.”
Tuesday’s drubbing could have been much worse if it wasn’t for Hendriks—a longtime starting pitcher who’s been primarily a one-inning reliever this season—who entered the game in the second inning and wouldn’t leave until he had to after the sixth. The Blue Jays wanted to take Hendriks out of the game twice, but both times they relented.
The first time, after the fourth inning, the Blue Jays manager John Gibbons wanted to make sure Hendriks was feeling okay. He was on pace to throw more pitches than he had all season, and Gibbons didn’t want him to get hurt. Hendriks told him he was good to go, and went back out. The second time, after a clean fifth, Gibbons told Hendriks good job, thanks for your work, you’re done.
“I was like, no, I’m sticking in this game,” Hendriks says. “I want to stay in.”
Sure enough, Gibbons let Hendriks go back out for the sixth and watched as the right-hander retired three straight Royals to keep the Blue Jays deficit to just three runs.
“I don’t like backing down. I don’t like being taken out of games, regardless of the situation,” Hendriks says. “I just wanted to keep going. I wanted to keep putting us in a position to win. I had feel for my pitches; I was doing what I needed to do.”
And he’s absolutely right. Hendriks dominated a Kansas City lineup that was swinging out of their cleats Tuesday afternoon, striking out two and allowing just one hit as he kept the game within reach for the Blue Jays. He used a wicked combination of 95-mph two-seamers, 96-mph four-seamers and 89-mph sliders to keep the Royals off balance, earning 10 swinging strikes.
“He was awesome. He had a live fastball, good stuff. He really just showed his competitive nature out there. He battled his butt off,” said Russell Martin, who caught him. “He was in the zone. He stayed aggressive. He looked like he was a starter out there in a big game.”
Hendriks nearly threw a starter’s workload, ending up with 59 pitches. He hadn’t thrown that many in a single outing since September 2014 when he was pitching for the very Royals he faced Tuesday afternoon. This season, he’d never surpassed 40. That’s likely explains why, when Hendriks argued to stay in the game for yet another inning after the sixth, Gibbons was less receptive to the idea.
“Liam did a heck of a job—but that was his limit. It was borderline abuse,” Gibbons said. “But he did some kind of job. He really kept the game close, gave us a shot”
Of course, Hendriks will tell you it’s all in a day’s work. It’s been an interesting season for the 26-year-old Australian, who came up in the Minnesota Twins system as a starter before landing in Toronto last year.
He was traded to Kansas City at the 2014 trade deadline but ended up back with the Blue Jays during the offseason. On the first day of spring training, Gibbons called Hendriks into his office and told him his best shot at making the team was in long relief.
Of course, they didn’t really have to tell him. Hendriks had looked at the roster; evaluated the battles. He knew he was out of options and that he wasn’t going to make Toronto’s rotation.
“I was just lucky for the fact that they gave me a chance at the start of the year,” says Hendriks, who was nearly left off the roster altogether. “I pitched well at the start of the season and I’ve been able to continue that for the most part.”
Hendriks turned into one of Toronto’s most prolific relievers, pitching 64.2 innings out of the bullpen and posting a 2.92 ERA in the process. Along the way he got used to appearing in some pretty unusual situations, but coming into the second inning of game four of the ALCS with his team asking him not to let the game get out of hand was something else altogether.
He had started lightly tossing in the first inning when Blue Jays starter R.A. Dickey allowed the first four batters he faced to reach base. But then the knuckleballer got three outs in a row and Hendriks sat back down. But after Dickey hit the third batter he faced in the second inning with a pitch, the Blue Jays told Hendriks to get hot.
Hendriks had his doubts. It’s a running joke in the Blue Jays bullpen that Hendriks is a double play good luck charm. Often times this season, when he’s been asked to warm up while a pitcher is struggling on the mound, that pitcher suddenly induces a double play. Sometimes they’ve gotten him up just to see if it would help the starter.
But this time Hendriks was really going in, and he entered with two runners on and two outs. He threw his warm-up pitches and then took the mound to face Eric Hosmer, but before he even wound up for his first pitch, he noticed Alcides Escobar leaning off second base behind him. He also noticed Troy Tulowitzki taking a couple steps in from short. That’s when Hendriks turned, fired, and nabbed Escobar by a foot, ending the second inning before he’d even thrown a pitch.
“Its not the foremost thing you think of coming into a situation like that,” Hendriks said. “But it worked out.”
That first out—along with the erasing of his lone base runner allowed, Alex Rios, who was caught off second base following a steal—allowed Hendriks to post a most unlikely of pitcher’s lines. He faced 12 batters, and got 13 outs. By comparison, Dickey faced 12 batters and got five.
“It’s always interesting—I didn’t really think about that too much,” Hendriks said, bashfully. “As long as I can keep guys off base, I don’t care if I get more outs than batters faced or whatever. As long as I can keep guys off base and keep the score as close as I can, that’s all that matters to me.
It matters a lot to him. During spring training, when Hendriks accepted he was destined to pitch out of the bullpen, he made inherited runners a focus. He worked on his approach with men on base and told himself he wanted to be at the top of the league in not allowing inherited runners to score.
Funny enough, it’s something he learned from a couple Royals—Luke Hochevar and Wade Davis—when he was pitching out of Kansas City’s bullpen last season. They, too, had made the transition from starter to reliever and Hendriks spent a lot of his short time in Kansas City talking to those two pitchers about how they handled the transition and what they did when they entered game situations where they had the previous pitcher’s runners on base.
“I was very lucky to be around those guys,” Hendriks says. “You can see what they did, see what their mentality was like. I think being in the bullpen plays to my mentality a little bit more. It’s more of a go-out-and-get-them deal, rather than, okay, lets go out here and see what I can do.”
All in a day’s work. Hendriks didn’t do anything out of the ordinary after his longest outing in a year, getting stretched out and icing his shoulder as he always does. He’ll probably feel it tomorrow. But, with the Blue Jays down 3-1 in the ALCS, tomorrow could be the last day of his season. So he’ll show up to the ballpark as he always does—expecting to pitch.
“I’m sure they’ll try to tell me I’m down tomorrow,” Hendriks says. “I’m not gonna let ‘em. I’ll tell them I’m ready to go tomorrow—because we need this.”
