TORONTO – Walk-off victory No. 3 of the season for the Toronto Blue Jays started with manager John Gibbons’ decision to pinch-hit Munenori Kawasaki for Ryan Goins to lead off the ninth, and ended with Chris Colabello’s two-run single to clinch a 7-6 triumph, with plenty of drama in between.
This is how the bottom of the ninth, with the Houston Astros up 6-4, went down.
Kawasaki, a sparkplug infielder, was one of two left-handed bats on the bench, along with the speedy Ezequiel Carrera, and as is his tradition, he did a dugout dance and said “Put me in the game,” aloud in Japanese, his way of letting the manager know he was ready to go, Kawasaki told Japanese media.
“The power of Kawasaki,” quipped Gibbons. “You don’t know if he’s going to get on, but you know the crowd’s going to get into it. He’s done some great things for us.”
Once again, he did exactly that. Kawasaki took the first pitch all the way, an 88 mph two-seamer for a strike, and Luke Gregerson went back to the same thing on the next pitch, only this time, it was looped down the left field line, bouncing in for a ground rule double.
A crowd of 35,571 went nuts.
“You don’t always get a good feeling in the dugout in the ninth inning,” said Gibbons, “but for some reason when Kawasaki got on, I don’t know how anybody else felt, but I felt that it was one of those days when something good might happen here.”
Up came Jose Reyes, on an 8-for-21 run, and he fouled off a first-pitch slider, took three straight balls, and then shot a ball up the middle to easily score Kawasaki. The Blue Jays were within one with Josh Donaldson, Jose Bautista and Chris Colabello due up.
“I’ve seen his act for years, I’ve played with him and obviously against him and he is so pesky on the bases and even in his at-bats,” starter R.A. Dickey, who pitched 5.2 innings and left up 3-2, said of Reyes. “He takes you deep into counts, he’s fighting you off, he rarely strikes out, it’s tough man, he makes it really hard on the opposing pitcher. He’s constantly in a fight mode.”
Donaldson, already with two hits, was next and he took ball one, fouled off a two-seamer with Reyes going and then laced another fastball right at Colby Rasmus in left field, who made the catch. One out.
Bautista, with a pair of solo homers in the game, including one in the seventh inning that cut into Houston’s 6-3 lead after a four-run top of the inning off reliever Bo Schultz, stepped in. He fell behind 1-2 and after a couple of pickoff attempts, Reyes broke for second as an 89 mph two-seamer missed for Ball 2.
Reyes was safe, the tying run was in scoring position, and that ended up being pivotal as Bautista popped up the next pitch, a slider, to second base. Shortstop Jonathan Villar camped under it and as the ball drifted to second, Reyes scampered back to second to get a foot on the bag. Thinking the ball might hit him in the head, he put up his hands, crouched low and Villar ran into him, the ball hitting off his glove and scooting away.
“It’s not my fault,” said Reyes. “I have to stay on the base, I have no place else to go.”
Said Villar, in comments translated from Spanish: “I thought he should have moved a little bit to the other side of the bag. … The fly went to the bag. He moved to the side where the fly was.”
Umpire John Hirschbeck called everyone safe, and Astros manager A.J. Hinch came out to argue, to no avail.
“My interpretation was that (Reyes) has to make an attempt to get out of the way,” explained Hinch. “He can’t just hold his position or hold where his feet were. There’s an argument to say he did try to get out of the way by bending over and protecting his head or whatever he was doing. That does create a bigger obstacle than it does smaller, in my eyes.
“They (umpires) huddled to see if there was any intent either way. It’s a difficult play all the way around, but it’s all about intent. I don’t think he was necessarily trying to get in the way. My take was he wasn’t trying to get out of the way. And a lot of it has to do with the fact that the base is right there. He’s got a little bit of a safety net being on the base as opposed to if he was off the base standing in the middle of the baseline.”
Either way, the game was now in real peril of slipping away for the Astros, and momentum definitely swung toward the Blue Jays.
“I’ve played this game for 19 years, and I’ve never seen a play like that,” said Dickey. “And when that happened, we were all looking at each other like it’s probably destiny that we’re going to pull this one off.”
That brought up Colabello, 0-for-3 with a hit by pitch and his career-best 16-game hit streak on the line. During his first two at-bats, both groundouts to short, he was “out of sorts,” and made an adjustment before his next trip up, when he got hit by a pitch.
Against Gregerson, he swung big and missed on the first pitch, a low slider, and then fouled off another slider for strike two. Reyes and Bautista cleverly took off on the next pitch, a slider in the dirt, and catcher Hank Conger didn’t even make a throw.
“When Bautista got on base I told him to be ready at any time because I faced Gregerson a lot, I know he throws a lot of breaking pitches in the dirt,” said Reyes. “I just took a chance. Like I told you guys before, I’m not afraid to make a mistake running the basepaths, because that’s a big part of my game.”
The stolen bases changed the rest of the at-bat, forcing the Astros to bring the infield in, and making any more balls in the dirt too risky. And, of course, all the Blue Jays needed was a fly ball to tie the game.
On the next pitch, another slider, Colabello flung out his bat and slapped a groundball right up the middle, easily scoring Reyes with Bautista following him in, with Jake Marisnick’s throw home up the line.
“I think that was the moment I blacked out,” Colabello said of watching the ball slide through. “(First base coach Tim Leiper) was yelling at me to get to second and as I got around first I just stopped. If Jose got thrown out at the plate instead of scoring the winning run we might have had a nice little pickle between first and second.”
No worries this time. Everywhere there was bedlam.
“It’s crazy, this game is crazy,” said Colabello. “I know he’s slider heavy, we obviously have scouting reports and I’ve faced him a couple of times now. We were just talking about how great it was that the Joses pulled off a double steal because getting the runner to third makes it a little bit harder for him to want to bounce one or throw his really nasty one. I told myself if it’s above my waist I’m going to swing. Little did I know that I would swing at one in the other box, but thankfully it worked out.”
Colabello’s teammates chased him well into left field, roughing him up in celebration. It was a pretty memorable way to run his hit streak to 17 games.
Dickey described Colabello’s approach to the at-bat as “so frustrating,” for a pitcher. “Just to give you a little bit of insight into Gregerson’s mind, you’re looking for a punchout there, plain and simple. As a hitter, his first swing that he took was a big swing, trying to leverage the ball into a gap maybe, but he just played pepper, played pepper with that ball. It was a good pitch, and he did just enough with it to put the ball in play in a place that they weren’t standing, which was great.”
Gibbons often calls wins like this one magic. Given the dramatic way it played out after another bullpen implosion positioned the Blue Jays for more misery, none of his players would disagree.