NEW YORK – Slumps are an inevitable part of baseball, John Gibbons mused pre-game Tuesday, and conversations on how to get out of them are as old as the game itself. Sure, he was frustrated, but not concerned. "We’re due," the Toronto Blue Jays manager said, "we’re due to get hot."
Through five innings, it didn’t look that way. Michael Pineda held them down on four hits. Marco Estrada gave up a season-high three home runs, one of them a three-run drive. That wasn’t good for an offence that had gone 14 straight innings without a run in the Bronx.
Then came the rain, which washed away both 42 minutes and Pineda, and suddenly, the Blue Jays found life. They scored four in the sixth, keyed by back-to-back homers from Troy Tulowitzki and Russell Martin, and then tacked on eight more in the eighth, started by Josh Donaldson’s 12-pitch walk and highlighted by two-run homers from Edwin Encarnacion and Martin.
The resulting 12-6 victory over the New York Yankees, before a crowd of 31,874 full of rowdy hosers, marked the Blue Jays’ biggest comeback win of the season. They’d previously erased a four-run deficit.
"Just a huge game," said Gibbons. "Maybe that’s the start of something."
The Blue Jays have been up and down at the plate this month, scoring three runs or less in eight of 14 games before this one, including Monday’s 1-0 loss to rookie Chad Green and the Yankees, which triggered the latest round of hand-wringing.
They trailed 5-0 when the rains hit Tuesday and the Yankees tacked on another run against Scott Feldman in the bottom of the fifth when play resumed, but everything changed once Anthony Swarzak took the mound in relief of Pineda.
Devon Travis opened the sixth with a double and scored when Chase Headley threw the ball away on Donaldson’s infield single. Two outs later, Tulowitzki poked his 21st of the season off the top of the wall in right field, and Martin followed with a solo shot, the eighth set of back-to-back homers this season for the Blue Jays.
"It felt like the momentum was shifting in our direction," said Martin. "When everybody gets that good feeling and is anxious to get back up to the plate, it’s a good sign."
Then in the eighth, Donaldson opened the frame with a tenacious walk against Adam Warren before Encarnacion pounded his 34th of the season over the wall in left to tie things up 6-6.
"That was definitely key," Martin said of Donaldson’s walk. "Making that pitcher work, threw some really tough pitches, he was fouling them off, it looked like he was on everything that at-bat, and then laid off a tough 3-2 slider down, just below the zone, and at that point it’s tough for a pitcher to shake that off and get ready for the next hitter. Eddie looked like he was on that slider, just waiting for it, and he didn’t miss it. That got us going right there."
Said Encarnacion: "They’ve been throwing me a lot of breaking pitches so in that situation, I knew they weren’t going to throw me a fastball."
An out later, Tulowitzki singled and Martin homered to put the Blue Jays ahead, and after Chasen Shreve hit Darrell Ceciliani, walked Melvin Upton Jr., and Ezequiel Carrera singled to load the bases, Travis singled and Donaldson worked another six-pitch walk to make it 10-6.
They kept piling on from there, an Encarnacion fielder’s choice giving him 100 RBIs for the season before Michael Saunders added an RBI double.
It felt like a referee should step in and stop the beating.
"That was an awesome, awesome job by our hitters there," said Feldman, who bounced back to strike out five in clean sixth and seventh innings, holding the deficit as is for the offence to earn the win. "It’s been a little bit of a grind since I got here, I haven’t been pitching as well as I wanted and getting the results, but it’s been a fun team to come over to, we’re in first place and I look around and see the talent in here, it’s a lot of fun to be coming to the park everyday with these guys. It’s good to feel like I’ve contributed a little bit."
The end result turned around an uneven outing for Estrada, who gave up a solo homer to Didi Gregorius on a hanging cutter in the first, a solo shot to Gary Sanchez in the second on a messy changeup and a three-run shot to Sanchez in the fourth on another flat change.
He allowed five runs on five hits in four innings with two strikeouts.
"I actually felt pretty good out there," said Estrada. "The pitch to Didi wasn’t terrible, it was a get-me-over cutter, I got two quick outs, I didn’t think he was going to swing, it wasn’t a bad pitch but he got it. I was upset about the two homers I gave up to Sanchez just because they were terrible changeups. I can’t be doing stuff like that, it changed my entire outing. … But like I said, I felt pretty good, I thought I made a lot of good pitches, it’s just the way baseball works sometimes."
The same holds for the offence, one that hasn’t pummelled opponents as regularly as it did last season, but remains deadly. The double-digit outburst was the first for the Blue Jays since July 20, although they pinned a nine on the Astros on Sunday.
"We don’t know that we’re scuffling, we always believe that we’re good," said Martin. "Sometimes you don’t score any runs, it doesn’t mean you’re not good. Our lineup’s been good all year long and it’s going to continue to be good. We have good hitters who put tough at-bats on pitchers, and even if a pitcher is good that day, we tend to get the pitch count up and get him out of there."
And sometimes it rains at just the right time.
Notes: Both starting catchers hit multiple home runs in a game for just the fourth time in big-league history, and first time in the American League. Arizona’s Miguel Montero and San Francisco’s Bengie Molina were the most recent to do it Sept. 29, 2009; Montreal’s Gary Carter and San Diego’s Gene Tenace on Aug. 9, 1977 and Houston’s John Bateman and Chicago’s Randy Hundley on Aug. 9, 1966 were the others. … Martin has 12 career multi-homer games, the last three all coming at Yankee Stadium. … Donaldson’s two walks in the eighth marked his first career multi-walk inning. … Kevin Pillar took full batting practice in the cage Tuesday and will do a full set of drills Wednesday before next steps are charted. A rehab assignment on the weekend is possible. … Why wins and losses never tell the full story: "Poor R.A., he gave up one run and he got a loss, I gave up five and I got a no-decision," said Estrada.