Francisco Liriano will be available to the Blue Jays out of the bullpen Saturday for the first time since he was struck in the back of the head by a 102 mph line drive a week ago and suffered a concussion. The left-hander threw a side session on Thursday to test if he was over the injury, and came away from it feeling fine.
“He’s good. He’s feeling great. He got cleared,” Gibbons said. “All indications are his arm’s good and he’s feeling good. He’s ready to go.”
Liriano’s concussion diagnosis forced him to sit out seven days but allowed the Blue Jays to remove him from their ALDS roster and maintain his eligibility for the ALCS. The 32-year-old finished the regular season on a tear, posting a 2.03 ERA in 26.2 September innings. He threw 1.2 scoreless innings of relief behind Marcus Stroman in the AL wild-card game, but faced just four batters in the ALDS before suffering his concussion.
Gibbons said he would likely ease Liriano back into action, preferably using him in middle relief or in a low leverage spot Saturday, instead of throwing him into a late-and-close situation.
“I don’t think you’ll see him in the seventh or eighth inning coming in to a close ballgame. But it’s really hard to say,” Gibbons said. “If he comes in you’d like him to be able to throw a couple innings. One of those kinds of set ups. But if we need him, we need him. And you just roll the dice and see how he is.”
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BAT FLIP: A loss in Game 1 of the ALCS prompted manager John Gibbons to forego his reluctance to disrupt the batting order and flip Russell Martin and Troy Tulowitzki in the five-six spots.
Martin had batted fifth in the Blue Jays’ last 20 games and 25 of the last 29 contests, with Tulowitzki behind him. But Martin slashed .161/.315/.310 with four homers and 13 RBI over the regular season’s final month and has just one hit in 20 post-season at-bats, a homer in Game 3 of the ALDS versus Texas. Tulowitzki is 7-for-21 with five RBI so far in the playoffs.
“We sit around and we’ve been talking for a while, as a coach or a manager you sit there and you watch every day who’s hot and who’s not, that kind of thing,” said Gibbons. “But I also believe we’ve been on a nice roll, winning a lot of games on a nice little streak. I’ve watched it and experienced it, when things are going good, don’t mess with things. Tulo has been so hot, so we’ll just flip those today since we got beat last night.
“But there is something to it, whether you like it or not. When things are going good, get out of the way, don’t interrupt. I know some of you may not agree with that or like that, but that is a fact.”
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ROTATION SHUFFLE?: Cleveland has Trevor Bauer slated to start in Game 3 of the ALCS with Mike Clevinger heading up a bullpen day in Game 4, but manager Terry Francona suggested Saturday that there may be some flexibility there.
“We’ve talked about not just Game 4 but Games 3, 4, 5, 6, and 7 because there’s a little bit of ambiguity there, with Trevor and his finger, with Clevinger not being stretched out. So there are some options I think for us moving forward,” he said in reply to a question on whether Corey Kluber could pitch Game 4 on short rest. “I think we’ll go game by game. And all of our pitchers are unbelievably co-operative, which is not shocking. And we’ll keep communicating with them. Because the one thing we don’t want to do is make a decision that we think puts our team in a good spot if the pitchers don’t feel that way. So we’ll keep communicating with them. And we’ll do what we think is in our best interest. But it can’t just be for one game, because there’s always a trickle-down effect.
“So if you’re going to do something in Game 3, you’ve got to be prepared for 4, 5, and 6, too.”
Bauer, pushed back to Monday after cutting his right pinky on a drone, is expected to be ready.
“(Friday) night, they were going to actually put a couple more stitches in just to ensure the healing and they decided not to,” said Francona. “They thought even in a day’s time it was already progressing very well. I think he’s going to be just fine.”
