NEW YORK — It was a miserable night and it turned out to be a miserable game as far as Toronto Blue Jays’ fans were concerned.
The dream of a perfect 162-0 season came to a crashing end with a bullpen implosion that was all too familiar to fans who endured those ugly two weeks in late April of last season.
Forgotten, of course, is that after that horrible fortnight, the Blue Jays wound up moving into first place in the AL East and staying there for six straight weeks. But never mind that, of course.
Here’s what I liked and didn’t like about the Blue Jays’ first loss of the season:
THE PLEASANT
THE KIDS REMAIN ALL RIGHT: Devon Travis followed up his first major-league home run on opening day with his first career multi-hit game. He singled twice, drove in a run and scored another.
Miguel Castro needed just four pitches to get out of the seventh inning, taking over for R.A. Dickey with the tying run on base and one out. He gave up a loud fly ball to Alex Rodriguez that was caught in deep left field, then struck out Stephen Drew on three pitches, making yet another big-league veteran look silly.
Castro was the youngest pitcher in Blue Jays’ franchise history, but Roberto Osuna took that title from him when he made his major-league debut in the eighth inning, entering with the bases loaded and one out, the Blue Jays already down a run. Osuna struck out Rodriguez and got Drew to fly harmlessly to right.
FROZEN DICKEY: On a cold, rainy, awful night, there was great concern as to whether Dickey would even be able to feel his fingers, let alone have any feel at all for his knuckleball. Those concerns grew as Dickey walked the first man he faced, but he picked off Jacoby Ellsbury and wound up taking a one-hit shutout into the fifth inning, leaving in the seventh having allowed just a run on three hits. He issued two more walks — back-to-back with two out in the third — but popped up Carlos Beltran to emerge unscathed. Dickey also seemed to work well with Russell Martin in their first regular-season game together.
SMOAKED: Justin Smoak made his first start as a Blue Jay, and in his first at-bat drilled a bullet off the right-field wall. He hit it too hard, on too much of a line, to get enough loft on it to get it into the seats, but it felt like if the ball hadn’t hit the wall, it probably would have kept going another 800 feet or so, clothesline-style. Just another look at the raw power Smoak has that should serve the Blue Jays well as part of what should be a much better bottom of the order than many anticipated. He also continued to show his skills on defence, making a great pick of a bad-hop hard grounder hit by Brett Gardner in the sixth and feeding Dickey covering at the bag.
THE UNPLEASANT
MELTDOWN: It wasn’t so much that there was a blown save that led to the season’s first loss, but how that blown save came about. Aaron Loup and Brett Cecil had far too much of a hand in their own misfortune. The bottom of the eighth started innocently enough, with Loup being called upon to protect a two-run lead and three left-handed hitters scheduled for the Yankees. Lefties had hit .187/.253/.260 against him over his career, including 0-for-3 in Monday’s win, though he did hit a batter.
The first lefty didn’t come up, as Didi Gregorius was pinch-hit for by Chris Young, but Loup got the job done against the righty, popping him up into shallow right field. Problem was the ball fell in between the outgoing Smoak and Travis and the incoming Jose Bautista for a leadoff double. But that was the last time the Blue Jays could blame the vagaries of cruel chance as the inning unravelled.
Next was Jacoby Ellsbury, and he hit an absolute rocket right back through the box for a single. Loup then hit Brett Gardner on the wrist with a pitch, loading the bases with nobody out and giving way to Cecil, who threw a wild pitch that allowed a run to score and moved the go-ahead run into scoring position.
Cecil then struck out Beltran and intentionally walked Mark Teixeira to re-load the bases and set up the potential for an inning-ending double play. But the lefty drilled Brian McCann with his next pitch to force in the tying run. He finally got his ground ball, off the bat of Chase Headley, but it kicked off Cecil’s wrist and into left field, scoring the eventual game-winner.
WHAT HAPPENED BACK THERE? Russell Martin just wasn’t himself behind the plate in that eighth inning, dropping a couple of pitches, getting crossed up a time or two and seeming to really fight the ball a lot of the time. A real reversal of form for the generally-outstanding receiver, it was quite surprising and led one to wonder what exactly was going on.
It doesn’t seem to make sense that Martin would have trouble re-adjusting back to a conventional pitcher after catching Dickey’s knuckleball all night. He didn’t have any trouble with Castro, but then Castro only threw four pitches.
The likeliest cause of Martin’s rough inning was the weather. The later it got, the colder it got, and the wetter and more miserable it got. One would have to think that it was awfully difficult back there as the game went on. It’s nothing we’d ever seen from Martin before and it’s doubtful we ever will again.
SLOW STARTS: The Blue Jays won their season opener despite a combined 0-for-12 from Jose Bautista, Josh Donaldson and Jose Reyes, and the three of them combined to go 1-for-11 in Game 2, the only hit being a chopper by Reyes that tipped off Teixeira’s glove at first and went into short right field.
It’s only two games, Bautista was facing a nemesis in Yankees’ starter Michael Pineda, against who he’s now 2-for-17, and both Bautista and Donaldson drew a walk in their final plate appearance of the night. Those two are going to do a lot of damage for the Blue Jays this season, but the sooner they each pick up their first hit of the year, the better.