KANSAS CITY — The second game of the American League Championship Series seemed to shift on one play, with the Toronto Blue Jays snatching defeat from the jaws of victory in a nightmare bottom of the seventh inning that started with a not-so-simple pop fly down the right-field line.
It was hardly a mirror image of the bottom of the seventh three nights earlier in Toronto that saw the Jays take advantage of three straight Texas Rangers errors to turn a one-run deficit into a three-run lead, but if there was a roof at Kauffman Stadium, it would have fallen in.
The narrative surrounding the Blue Jays’ mercenary ace, David Price, was that his regular-season success doesn’t translate to the playoffs, having been winless in his first six post-season starts with an ERA above five. But the lefty was silencing his doubters rather emphatically as he blew through the Royals over the first six innings.
Price gave up a single to Alcides Escobar on the first pitch he threw in the game, and then retired the next 18 batters he faced on just 65 pitches. Only two balls were hit out of the infield. It was Price’s most dominant performance as a Blue Jay, to be sure, and perhaps the best start of his career.
Then the pop-up.
It wasn’t exactly automatic — Ben Zobrist hit a high pop fly down the right-field line in a spot too deep to be routine for the second baseman and too shallow to be routine for the right fielder. Jays’ catcher Russell Martin referred to it as "the Bermuda triangle."
Ryan Goins raced back and Jose Bautista raced in, with Goins calling for the ball and waving off his incoming outfielder. Bautista backed off to allow Goins to make the catch, but at the last second, Goins thought he heard something and backed off as well, the ball falling harmlessly between them for a single.
A three-run lead with a man on first and nobody out shouldn’t be an untenable situation, but that key mistake by Goins — arguably the best defensive player on a team full of outstanding defenders — gave the Royals the tiny shaft of light they needed, and Kansas City proceeded to kick the door down. They went from a team that had no answer for what Price was serving up to one that just plain teed off on him.
The Zobrist hit — it has to be ruled that way until MLB institutes the "team error" because the official scorer has no way of knowing who screwed up, and most official scorers won’t give an error when a ball isn’t touched, anyway — was followed by a hard line single to right field by Lorenzo Cain and a line-drive single up the middle by Eric Hosmer that cashed Zobrist with the Royals’ first run.
Kendrys Morales was next, and with Hosmer taking off for second, he hit a grounder to shortstop. A textbook double-play ball had the runner not been in motion, it turned into an RBI groundout that got Hosmer to second. To his credit, Troy Tulowitzki was able to make the play despite Goins cutting in front of him, but even had Goins gone to the bag there would have been no play.
Price couldn’t right himself with the tying run at second and left-handed hitting Mike Moustakas at the plate. The Royals’ third baseman hadn’t been able to put a Price fastball in play in his previous two at-bats, but he smacked a 2-2 changeup into right field and Bautista’s throw home was wild, allowing Hosmer to score with the tying run.
Price rebounded to strike out Salvador Perez, bringing up Alex Gordon, another left-handed hitter he’d handled well. They got to a full count and after Gordon fouled off a 96-mph fastball right down the middle, Price came back with another one that was lashed into the gap in right-centre for an RBI double, giving the Royals the lead.
It was Price’s 30th pitch of the inning, and his last pitch of the night.
Had the Blue Jays won the game, the story might have been that the Josh Donaldson foul pop-up which deflected off a wire that holds up the backstop led to the two-run rally in the sixth that put the game away. But after that pop-up hit the wire, Donaldson had to get a hit. That was followed by a walk to Jose Bautista, an RBI single by Edwin Encarnacion and, later in the inning, an RBI double by Tulowitzki. The wire had nothing to do with those things.
The only thing Goins’ misplay did was give Kansas City a runner on first with nobody out, down by three runs against a pitcher who had retired 18 of the last 19 batters he’d faced, as opposed to one out and nobody on with a pitcher who had retired 19 straight. That’s not the end of the world, by any means, and while it might have been the first drip, the flood came afterward.