TORONTO — Troy Tulowitzki has only been a Blue Jay for 85 days, but boy has it felt like an eternity.
An awful lot has happened. There was the shock and disappointment in the days after his trade to Toronto—not necessarily in his destination but in a Rockies front office that said they would keep him in the loop then didn’t. There was the three-hit performance, including a long home run, in his first ever major league game for a team other than Colorado, as the Rogers Centre crowd went nuts for their new superstar.
There were the 13 wins in 14 games immediately following his acquisition, and the 43-19 run his new team finished on. There was the early offensive slump in his Toronto tenure when he went 12-for-68, and the 13-for-42 stretch in late August when he really started heating up. There was the graceful, smooth, ballerina-like defence at shortstop that made fans completely forget about the eccentric, lovable guy who played the position before him.
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There was the awkward collision in centre field in New York, which cracked Tulowitzki’s scapula and held him out of the lineup for 18 games. There was the improbable return three weeks later, with Tulowitzki still clearly bothered by the injury but determined to play through.
And now there are two postseason home runs in the midst of an offensive funk, both of them three-run shots in games when the Blue Jays were down 0-2 in a series, that just might be a turning point in his new team’s remarkable season and his own. It really is a lot.
“More than anything, you just feel good for that guy,” says Blue Jays centre fielder Kevin Pillar, who was on the other end of the outfield collision at Yankee Stadium. “We all know he’s playing hurt. He’s been struggling a little bit. For him to get that big hit is a big confidence boost, not only for him but for our entire team.”
That big hit came in the third inning of Monday night’s not-a-must-win-but-a-really-need-to-win game against the Kansas City Royals, the third of this ALCS. Johnny Cueto was wobbling on his feet, with three runs already to his name and the first two base runners of the inning aboard.
Tulowitzki came to the plate, fouled off a cutter up in the zone, and then took another mighty hack at a 93-mph fastball that was even higher than the first pitch, almost half a foot above the strike zone, and hit it somewhere north of a kilometre to dead centre, where it crash landed in the batter’s eye. As he rounded the bases he pointed at someone in the Blue Jays dugout and showed the kind of untethered emotion Blue Jays fans have only witnessed when he’s mad.
The fact he came into the game riding a 4-for-29 slump in his seven games this postseason likely contributes. Tulowitzki wants to win, wants to perform well. It eats at him when he doesn’t. He seethes in that failure. So now that he’s 4-for-6 with a double and a homer in his last two games, he’s going to embrace the success, too.
“I’m just trying to get good pitches, put good swings on them,” the always-understated Tulowitzki said after the game. “I’m battling with the shoulder at times and trying to gut it out and give everything I have. And tonight it was enough to help us get a win.”
Right, the shoulder. He hides it well most of the time he’s on the field, but its important not to forget that Tulowitzki is very, very hurt.
During an at-bat in the fourth inning that guard momentarily came down as he fouled off a pitch and winced uncomfortably. He stepped out of the box for a moment and collected himself, adjusting his batting gloves and buying time to let the pain subside.
He stepped back in and stared at the pitcher with that upright, wide-eyed stance of his before swinging right through the very next pitch and dropping his bat to the ground because he couldn’t stand the pain. He crouched for a moment to gather himself, refreshed the blank stare he wears throughout most of his games, and walked over to shortstop.
“Yeah, it’s been a battle for him. He’s still in pain with that shoulder,” Blue Jays manager John Gibbons said. “But you look at it—in two must-win games he’s had the big home runs. He hasn’t been getting a lot of hits, but they’ve been big, big hits.”
His last big hit was the one in Texas—the three run shot off Chi Chi Gonzalez to blow open a must-win game for the Blue Jays and set the club on its way to winning three elimination games in a row just to reach this ALCS. And now there’s this one off Cueto. While his postseason production has been, by his own admission, nowhere near his all-star standard, it’s unlikely, perhaps impossible, that the Blue Jays would be where they are today without his contributions on both sides of the ball.
“I got some pitches to hit, put good swings on them. It’s a tough game, you’re not going to be on top all the time,” Tulowitzki said. “You try to find ways to contribute. Sometimes when you’re not swinging the bat people talk about defense—but you can win games defensively, too.”
Tulowitzki would eventually be tossed from Monday night’s game, his trademark intensity getting the better of him as he vehemently argued balls and strikes with home plate umpire John Hirschbeck after a questionable called strikeout in the seventh inning. Tulowitzki stewed in the dugout as Russell Martin took a dubious called strikeout of his own and then continued his discussion into the top of the eighth when Hirschbeck decided he’d had enough and ended the shortstop’s night.
“I think it was obvious I didn’t agree with the called third strike. And there were other pitches that were questionable. I’m walking out to the field and he’s looking at me. And I told him that wasn’t a strike,” Tulowitzki said. “It was a quick trigger. Obviously he was either holding on to something or something was going on. But I didn’t think what I did was going to eject me out of the game.”
We’re all holding onto something. For Hirschbeck, it was the argument from the previous inning. For Ryan Goins, one of many Game 3 heroes for the Blue Jays, it was his untimely defensive miscue a couple nights prior. For Tulowitzki, it has to be his performance this postseason which, while admirable for the condition he’s playing in, he clearly hasn’t been pleased with. He held onto it throughout the ALDS, when he hit .095/.174/.238 with that one huge home run. And maybe in the first two games of this ALCS, with another massive home run to his name, he’s starting to let it go.