KANSAS CITY — Crazy things happen in the heat.
It felt like 100 degrees Fahrenheit (38 Celsius for us Canadians) at Kauffman Stadium, which may have had something to do with the ludicrous, unpredictable, back-and-forth game that was played here Sunday afternoon.
There were 27 hits, 21 runs scored (just 10 of them earned), nine men left on base, seven errors, two reviews and an ejection all culminating in an 11-10 Kansas City Royals victory over the Toronto Blue Jays.
“It was a game of attrition on both sides. Neither team played particularly good baseball,” said Blue Jays manager John Gibbons, whose team takes a 45-46 record into the all-star break. “But they played gutsy baseball. Guys were running on empty out there, it was so hot.”
An awful lot of stuff happened. Let’s talk about it.
Felix Doubront, making his second start for the Blue Jays, endured a nightmare first inning as the Royals batted around, plating six runs in the process. Half the damage came when Kendrys Morales crushed an 87 mph Doubront offering to deep left-centre field for a three-run shot.
A Jose Reyes error two pitches later gave the Royals an extra out and Omar Infante made the Blue Jays pay immediately with a loud run-scoring double, also to left-centre. Infante would eventually come around to score on a well-struck single by Royals nine-hitter Paulo Orlando.
In all, Doubront needed 37 pitches to get through the frame.
“[Doubront] didn’t have his best command, but they were also finding holes — seeing-eye singles. Weren’t able to get those outs on weakly-hit balls,” Doubront’s catcher, Russell Martin, said. “It’s definitely frustrating, but he stayed in the game, calmed down, settled down, and got some innings for us.”
Doubront managed to hold the Royals off the board in the middle innings, giving the Blue Jays’ powerful offence an opportunity to strike in the sixth, when Toronto got all seven runs back and more, sending 12 batters to the plate and taking advantage of some shoddy Royals fielding to earn a most unlikely of leads.
It would take a few hours to provide an adequate description of the wild inning, but what’s important to note was a throwing error by Mike Moustakas early in the frame and a horrifically botched double play three batters later, when Infante and Alcides Escobar literally dropped the ball multiple times, allowing a run to score and giving the Blue Jays two more outs. Danny Valencia, Kevin Pillar, Ezequiel Carrrera and Devon Travis each came up with important hits following the Royals’ misplay as the Blue Jays piled on and took the lead.
But four batters into the bottom of the frame the Royals were back on top as Reyes let a ball skip under his glove and into the outfield for the second time on the afternoon, allowing two runs to score off Steve Delabar. Aaron Loup relieved Delabar, hit a batter with the fist pitch he threw, and then surrendered a hard-hit, 0-2 single to Lorenzo Cain, as the Royals went ahead, 10-8.
The Blue Jays got one back almost immediately when Chris Colabello reached on the game’s seventh error and scored on a Russell Martin double behind him, but when Kelvin Herrara uncorked a wild pitch to the next batter, Martin advanced to third and strayed too far off the bag, getting nabbed by Salvador Perez and Moustakas as he tried to scamper back.
“If you look at it, I really wasn’t that far. That kid’s got a cannon arm,” Martin said. “The pitcher was kind of lazy to cover home plate, so as I’m rounding third with a full head of steam, I’m thinking aggressively, like, if this guy’s not paying attention, I’m gonna take the extra base. But as soon as I saw [Perez] had the ball in his hand, I realized that wasn’t a good idea. Put on the brakes and he threw a missile down to third base and got me by a fraction of a second.”
The Blue Jays would end up tying the game anyway in the next inning, when Pillar tripled and scored on a Reyes single two batters later. After a Travis strikeout, Jose Bautista was ejected by home plate umpire Jerry Meals for arguing that Royals reliever Wade Davis wasn’t coming set and stopping his motion before delivering the ball. It was a hell of a scene.
“What I said, I don’t feel was deserving of an ejection. [Meals] pretty much went out of his way a lot to confront me,” Bautista said. “I didn’t mention the strike zone. I didn’t use any curse words. I simply voiced my opinion and said that the pitcher was not coming to a stop because his leg kept moving — that he started his delivery without coming to a full stop. And [Meals] apparently didn’t want to hear it.”
Bo Schultz came on for the Blue Jays in the bottom of the eighth, threw two balls to Orlando, and then served up a 96-mph fastball that the Royals hitter smacked into a crowd of shirtless men in the left field bleachers for the winning run.
“I’m proud of our guys. We battled back. The key is, you take the lead there after being down and you’ve got to get some outs. You’ve got to have some shutdown innings,” Gibbons said. “It’s tough because we’ve done that many a time. You’ve got to go out there and shut somebody down.”
Naturally, the game ended on a strike-out-and-caught-stealing double play, with Martin at the plate and Ryan Goins, the tying-run, trying to take second base.
“I don’t think either team really played well. They just did a little bit more at the end there,” Martin said. “But definitely a frustrating loss. We definitely should’ve played better. We made some mistakes, but we fought to get back in the game. But, you know — didn’t come through.”
And after it all, everyone packed their things and went home for a four-day break. Because after a game like that, they all needed it.