TORONTO — Rogers Centre is a pretty fun place to hit regardless of conditions. The ball flies, dome open or closed, and the park is a regular presence in the top 10 MLB stadiums when it comes to home runs.
But it’s not often like it was Sunday, when a warm, exceptionally breezy Toronto summer’s day and a collection of pitchers all too willing to leave breaking balls over the plate combined to make the place seem like it existed in zero gravity.
The Blue Jays and Orioles combined for nearly a kilometre of home runs—2,912 feet or 888 metres, to be exact—as they took turns knocking the snot out of each other’s pitching before eventually arriving at a 10-9 conclusion in favour of the Blue Jays. It was Toronto’s third consecutive win, the club’s fourth in its last five, and the second game in a row that the team has scored 10 runs or more. As it turned out, they needed every single one of them.
“When it starts heating up around here, and there’s a pretty good breeze circling, and there’s a good hitting team over there that hits a lot of home runs—it’s gonna be one of those days,” Blue Jays manager John Gibbons said. “But we outlasted them.”
Aaron Sanchez and Ubaldo Jimenez were the first pitchers to step into the Thunderdome, and while one lasted much longer than the other, the damage done was about the same.
Jimenez’s impression on the game was like a supernova or Canada Day fireworks—brief yet spectacular. He faced seven batters and retired only one, as the Blue Jays sent poorly located sliders and two-seamers sailing into the outfield. The average exit velocity of the six hits (four of them doubles) Jimenez allowed was 92 mph, and by the time Orioles manager Buck Showalter emerged from his dugout to make a humanitarian decision and lift his starter from the game, the Blue Jays were ahead by five.
Sanchez was fine in the early going, allowing a couple runs in his first four innings and walking a pair, but otherwise getting outs when he needed them and flashing the exceptional curveball he’s used to such success this season.
Meanwhile, the Blue Jays added on in the second when Edwin Encarnacion doubled, stole a base and scored on an error, and added again in the third when Kevin Pillar crushed a 2-0 Vance Worley slider 417 feet into the third deck in left field. After the fourth, the score was 7-2, and the Blue Jays looked to be comfortably cruising to a lazy Sunday victory.
But things quickly unravelled for Sanchez in the fifth, as he allowed a leadoff home run to Adam Jones and two more long balls later in the inning to Chris Davis and Matt Wieters, as the Orioles charged back within a run. The four homers Sanchez allowed Sunday afternoon matched the four he’d allowed in 80.1 innings coming into the start.
“I felt like I made good pitches out there. It was just one bad inning, really. They were able to lift some balls up and obviously the wind was doing its thing today. It’s no excuses, but, I make a pitch, they hit it inside first. I make a pitch, it’s a swinging bunt. I make a pitch, it’s a bomb,” Sanchez said. “It’s just one of those days where they got the better end of me. But I’ll learn from that inning and move on.”
Sanchez relied more on his offspeed stuff than he has in previous starts, throwing 29 curveballs and nine changeups. While his two-seamer is always going to be his most prominent pitch, it was getting hit around on Sunday (three of the Orioles’ four homers against Sanchez came off of two-seamers) which likely explains why Sanchez and catcher Russell Martin moved away from it.
He’ll spend his next four days working to get back on top of the pitch, while carrying forward some optimism in how well his curveball was working. He was able to locate that important secondary pitch for strikes all afternoon, and only made one mistake with it, which naturally led to the Jones home run.
“I felt like my curveball was really good today. I flashed a change here and there that was OK. My fastball had good life. I felt like I was throwing it where I wanted to,” Sanchez said. “But I’m a groundball pitcher. I need to keep the ball on the ground. That’s what it comes down to in those situations.”
Aaron Sanchez delivers a pitch Sunday. (Chris Young/CP)
Of course, that was far from the end of the lightshow. In the sixth, Josh Donaldson and Michael Saunders drew walks against Orioles reliever Mychal Givens, before Martin turned around a 95-mph fastball and drove it over the batter’s eye in centre field to put the Blue Jays ahead by four.
An inning later it was Jones teeing off again, taking a 72-mph Pat Venditte slider over the wall in left to cut the Blue Jays lead to two. Jason Grilli took over in the ninth, loaded the bases, and watched Pedro Alvarez smoke a 2-0 fastball 355 feet to the height of the wall in right field where Ezequiel Carrera made a brilliantly timed jumping catch to hold the damage to just a run.
“As soon as the ball was hit, I knew I had time. I just calculated and made the adjustment to be able to jump and catch the ball at the wall,” said Carrera, who banged his elbow into the wall on the play but was no worse for wear. “It was very windy and I knew that from the beginning of the game, so when the ball was hit I knew I needed to play depending on where the wind was. I knew I had a chance to catch it, and I did.”
After Carrera’s grab, Grilli came back to strike out Jonathan Schoop on three high pitches to put an end to the madness and earn his first save as a Blue Jay. With Roberto Osuna unavailable, the Blue Jays bullpen—Jesse Chavez, Venditte and Grilli—held the powerful Orioles to three runs over the final four innings, striking out eight.
“I just didn’t want to give in. I was a little bit tired today, honestly. But I always give out what I have, and it was enough. It worked out in our favour. I didn’t want to let the guys down,” Grilli said. “This team, they’ve got a lot of fight. Everybody’s trying to pick each other up. And to win this series is pretty big.”