TORONTO – Shelby Miller is just the third starting pitcher to beat the Toronto Blue Jays in their last 25 games, joining Jason Vargas and Corey Kluber in the accomplishment.
The right-hander led the way with a three-hit shutout as the St. Louis Cardinals also became the first team to blank the American League East leaders since Kyle Gibson and the Minnesota Twins did it on April 17 in a 7-0 win.
So props to them for dousing one of baseball’s most torrid outfits in Saturday’s 5-0 victory, played before a crowd of 42,981 under serene blue skies. Very, very few have managed to do what they did of late against the Blue Jays.
“I tell you what, he’s got the sneaky fastball, he threw a lot of fastballs and he located, mixed it up, in and out, he carved us up pretty good,” said manager John Gibbons. “They’re good over there, they attack, they’ve got that mentality and there’s a reason they play in the World Series so often.”
Mark Buehrle lost for just the second time this season and fell to 10-2, surrendering a solo shot to Randal Grichuk in the fifth that was the 22-year-old’s first homer in the big-leagues, but no other runs over seven innings despite a season-high matching five walks while throwing a season-high 118 pitches.
Miller, however, ensured Buehrle didn’t end up with a better outcome, barely giving Blue Jays hitters any room to breathe and snuffing out their lone rally by striking out Jose Bautista with two on and two out in the sixth on a 97 mph fastball that was his hardest of the night.
The Cardinals proceeded to pop things open with a four-spot in the eighth off Aaron Loup and Steve Delabar, and boom, the six-game win streak was finished.
Such losses are inevitable over the course of a 162-game season, of course, and one of the most interesting questions facing the Blue Jays is how they’ll respond to any potential extended period of adversity they may face.
It’s been a long time since they’ve hit any sort of significant bump in the road – remember all those late-game leads blown in mid-April and early May? – and the success they’ve had may make future hiccups much easier to swallow, or perhaps more difficult to recover from.
Still, they’re a long way from having to consider anything of the sort. They lost two straight when their nine-game winning streak came to a close, and they responded to those setbacks with the six-game run that ended Saturday.
“In my mind, knowing if we were going to be healthy, I felt like we could have this chance,” said Buehrle. “We just have to try to win series, that’s how we’ve got to go from here on out, not really scoreboard watch or look at what other teams are doing, just go out there and try to take care of ourselves and hopefully we’re in first place at the end of the year. We’ve got a long ways to go.”
Miller was terrific, but fly balls right to the wall in centre by Bautista in the first and Juan Francisco in the fifth were mere feet from dramatically altering this game.
Brett Lawrie’s chopper to first that Allen Craig cleverly fielded for an out right before Francisco’s drive in the fifth also might have altered the course of play.
Same thing for Buehrle and the one costly mistake he made to Grichuk in an outing so much like all the others he’s enjoyed this season.
“It was a changeup away, on the outside of the plate, may have been up just a tad,” said Buehrle. “I knew he hit it pretty good, but when he hit it I thought it was more of a pop fly so it kind of surprised me. It seemed like we hit a few balls that we thought same thing, the ball was going to go out of there but they caught the ball at the warning track.”
Sometimes that’s the thin line between winning and losing, and for a change the Blue Jays fell on the wrong side of the divide.