TORONTO — Outside of a nightmare outing for Francisco Liriano last week, the Toronto Blue Jays are not 1-6 due to their starting pitching. This is a team whose offence has yet to find its feet, and with five of the club’s six defeats coming by two runs or less, it stands to reason that a clutch hit here or a misplayed ball there could have turned some of those losses into wins. At some point, your offence has to hit.
Rather, the Blue Jays starting staff has given the team a chance to succeed more often than not, and J.A. Happ knew that both before and after his outing Tuesday night. But that didn’t stop him from shouldering some blame for the Blue Jays’ latest setback, this time 4-3 to the Milwaukee Brewers in Tuesday’s home opener.
“I’m trying to get outs; trying to get them back in the dugout. I’m trying to get into some kind of groove, hopefully. I’m trying to get them off their feet a little bit,” Happ said of the Blue Jays’ offence, which is averaging 3.3 runs per game in 2017. “Tonight, I wasn’t great at that, obviously. It was a long game and I threw a lot of pitches. It doesn’t always go perfectly.”
Perfection is rare, but serviceable outings like Happ’s Tuesday night are not. He allowed nine hits and four runs, striking out eight and walking none. It wasn’t his best performance, but it was also far from his worst. Unfortunately for him, the way the Blue Jays offence has been going, he had to be near his best if his team was going to win its first game since last Thursday.
“He battled. He kept us right there in the game,” said Blue Jays manager John Gibbons. “He pitched good enough to win. Those guys aren’t going to be pinpoint perfect every time they go out there. But he really battled, got some big strikeouts. But the long ball got him a couple times.”
The first long ball came early, as Keon Broxton jumped all over a flat four-seamer in the first, driving it 379-feet over the fence in left field. The ball wasn’t crushed, but it was lifted high enough to get out of the ballpark.
“I left it middle and he put a quick, good swing on it,” Happ said. “I was trying to be aggressive.”
It turned into a two-run inning when Travis Shaw hit a two-out triple and crossed the plate as the Blue Jays infield failed to turn a hard groundball up the middle into an out. The next inning was smooth, but a lead-off single in the third came around to score on a tough play at the plate. Happ struck out the final two batters of the frame to stop the bleeding.
He allowed back-to-back singles to lead off the fourth, stranding them both with a pair of strikeouts and a fly ball. But in the fifth he got tagged with the second solo shot—this time a rocket off the bat of Domingo Santana—followed by a hard Jesus Aguilar double that ended his night.
So, are you an optimist or a pessimist? For the half-full crowd, Happ was able to battle out of a couple jams, lived in the zone (69 per cent of his pitches were strikes), and struck out eight. For the half-empties, Happ spent most of his night pitching with runners on, gave up the two long balls, and ran his pitch count up to a very uneconomical 85 through four innings after a long, laborious 31-pitch third. Even Happ himself was a little conflicted when asked to sum up his night.
“I felt good. I was ready to pitch, excited. The crowd had a lot of energy,” he said. “But they really fouled a lot of pitches off and made me work. It wasn’t the way I anticipated it going.
“It wasn’t quite enough tonight. I limited some of the damage. But I would’ve liked to get through that fifth.”
[snippet id=3305549]
The game plan coming into the start was for Happ to rely predominantly on his harder pitches and attack a lineup of Brewers hitters who hadn’t seen much of him before.
Of course, the left-hander will lean heavily on his four-seam and two-seam fastballs during most outings, focusing on location and command to move the ball just off the barrel of bats and induce weak contact. But on Tuesday night he used those two pitches nearly 90 per cent of the time, a high rate even for him.
It’s possible the strategy worked against him, as the Brewers fouled off a plethora of those fastballs and ran up Happ’s pitch count. Of course, if the Blue Jays offence could have scratched across another couple runs—or even mustered a hit after the fifth inning—Happ would likely be reflecting on his night much differently.
“In hindsight, looking back, maybe we do things a little bit differently,” Happ said. “But you can’t do that every outing. You’ve got to trust what you’re doing out there.”
[relatedlinks]
