TORONTO — The fans stood and cheered for a good, long minute after the final out of the Blue Jays half of the sixth inning, relenting only when Mark Buehrle, clad in a hoodie on a cool Toronto evening, emerged from the dugout for his curtain call.
There were just 16,836 fans at Rogers Centre Wednesday night, but they all knew what was at stake. Buehrle needed six innings pitched to reach 200 for his 14th consecutive season.
“I put this goal on myself in spring training and getting there means a lot,” Buehrle, calm and calculated as he always is, said after the game. “It seems like each year it’s getting harder and harder.”
Buehrle didn’t need much time to get there, reaching the end of the sixth when the game was barely an hour old and punctuating the feat with a called third strike to Dustin Ackley, a nifty little 87-mph two-seamer on the corner that was vintage Buehrle.
When he got back to the dugout all he wanted to do was put on his hoodie, sit down and wait for the next inning to start. But the crowd wouldn’t stop cheering and Blue Jays catcher Josh Thole was goading Buehrle to go out and tip his cap.
“I think I was almost caught up in the moment,” Buehrle said. “I was like, ‘are you serious? We’re mid-game. I can’t do this. We’ve still gotta play.’ But it was awesome that [the fans] recognized what was going on.”
That the Blue Jays defeated the Mariners 1-0 in an innocuous game of baseball was hardly relevant on this night, as both teams have played themselves out of the post-season picture, the Blue Jays officially and the Mariners eventually.
That was evident as the clubs breezed through the quickest seven-and-a-half innings you’re ever going to see, combining for only seven baserunners before Ryan Goins hit a dunk shot to shallow centrefield in the bottom of the eighth that drove in Munenori Kawasaki from first base with the winning run. That brought the crowd to its feet for the first time since Buehrle walked off the mound in the sixth, but it was really just a footnote.
What was important was Buehrle, who left after eight innings with 10 strikeouts, giving way to Aaron Sanchez who recorded the save. The veteran left-hander said his stuff felt as good as it had all season, and after the sixth inning he told Blue Jays manager John Gibbons that he felt like he could pitch six more.
But Gibbons took Buehrle out after he allowed a hit to lead off the ninth, letting him leave to a loud standing ovation. He’d reached the 200-inning milestone, which is what Wednesday night was ultimately about.
“He’s a throwback type of guy. He understands the game; he deals with the game. He just does everything right,” Gibbons was saying before the game, leaning back in his office chair with one eye on the television in front of him, showing the Detroit Tigers fighting to stay ahead in the playoff race his team was eliminated from the night before. “He’s reliable. You can count on him. He’s kind of the old breed of player.”
It’s true. Buehrle’s a pitcher, not a thrower. His fastball averages less than 85-mph and he relies on working quickly, guile, and solid defence behind him to get by. He doesn’t strike many batters out and he doesn’t appear on many lists of the best pitchers in the majors, but he’s unfailingly consistent and he keeps his team in ball games. He’s never been to the disabled list and never missed a scheduled outing in his 15-season, 461-start career. He simply gives his team reliable starting pitching every time they ask him to. And he does it for 200 innings a year.
However, this year has been somewhat different. Buehrle was everything and more than the Blue Jays could have possibly hoped for, coming out of the gates with a 2.04 ERA in his first 13 starts and looking like a Cy Young contender. He predictably returned to his career norms in the season’s second half, unable to sustain a blistering pace that had left even Buehrle himself bemused. But the 3.53 ERA he took into Thursday night’s outing was still a step better than his career average of 3.82. It had been a terrific season. All that was left to accomplish was the 200-inning plateau, something Buehrle had begun to doubt would happen for him when he looked at his stats with eight starts remaining. “I kind of did the math,” Buehrle said, “and I didn’t like my chances.”
When he did it Wednesday night, his teammates all lined up on the dugout steps to congratulate him, doling out kudos and praise you can be sure he was uncomfortable accepting. The 35-year-old doesn’t like drawing attention to himself—he just wants to do his job. When he took the mound for the seventh inning after accomplishing the feat, he retired the next three batters with ease, two via strikeout. If you’d gotten up to grab a beer you might have missed it.
Buehrle was always going to get to this point. Gibbons had a contingency plan in place that would have seen him pitch an inning or two in relief during Sunday afternoon’s season finale—a situation Buehrle was incredibly uncomfortable with and may have even declined—if that was required to help him reach the summit of 200 inning mountain. But there was little chance that glass case would ever need to be broken, as Buehrle isn’t a man to mess around and neither is Gibbons, who would have likely left his starter in Wednesday night’s game through hell and high water.
“He’s a teammate’s dream because they’re on their toes out there. He’s an umpire’s dream because he throws strikes and he works fast. He’s a fan’s dream because they’re not sitting in the stands all night,” Gibbons said, pausing for comedic effect before adding, “and he’s a banker’s dream because he makes good money.”