TORONTO — As the ball left the bat at just under 105-m.p.h., screaming towards the right-centre field seats, Tyler Clippard crouched on the mound and put his glove over his mouth. He’d just surrendered a grand slam — and a three-run lead along with it — to Chad Pinder, Oakland’s No. 9 hitter, a utility bench player who had never hit a major-league grand slam before.
Clippard didn’t get out of his crouch until Pinder was nearing third base. He stabbed at a new ball thrown to him by the home plate umpire and cursed to himself as he paced the mound. The Blue Jays had just blown a lead and just found a new and somehow even more dispiriting way to fall behind in a game. But the 35,786 fans at Rogers Centre weren’t booing. They weren’t making a noise at all. The place just sat quiet.
And, really, what is there to say? The one dependable element of the 2018 Toronto Blue Jays, the sole area the team has been able to rely upon through 45 games, has been relief pitching. Toronto had a 3.22 bullpen ERA coming into Saturday, second-best in the American League. The club’s four most-used relievers, and six of its top seven, all had ERAs south of three. As the Blue Jays offence fluctuated, and its rotation spent the majority of the season lost in the wilderness, the bullpen was a point of stability.
Well, let’s go to Saturday’s eighth inning, shall we? The Blue Jays started it with a four-run lead, with John Axford and his 2.08 ERA taking the mound to protect it. Axford walked his first batter on four pitches, surrendered a single to the second, and started the third 2-0. Blue Jays pitching coach Pete Walker felt that was a suitable time for a mound visit, while Tyler Clippard started to throw in the left field bullpen.
“Today, I just don’t think there was really much in the sense of competitive pitches that I threw out there,” Axford said. “Starting off the inning with four straight balls, putting the guy on when we’re up four-nothing, it’s just not okay. It’s something that shouldn’t happen. And I put myself in that position.”
Axford battled back to earn a strikeout, but he surrendered a two-strike single to the next batter, scoring a run. This time, it was Blue Jays manager John Gibbons visiting the mound. He lifted Axford and replaced him with Clippard, who has served as the team’s closer of late and came into the game with a sparkling 1.17 ERA and 10.17 K/9 over a team-high 23 innings this season.
Clippard’s first pitch resulted in an out, the second of the inning, and for a fleeting moment it looked like he was about to pull the Blue Jays back from the brink. But he walked his next batter on five pitches. And then, after going 1-1 to Pinder, he left a fastball on the outter half.
“I got it away. I’m just trying to get it in lanes. So, I got it in my lane,” Clippard said. “He just put a good swing on it.”
Pinder didn’t miss it. And just like that, an inning that started with the Blue Jays up four ended with them down one. These are the Toronto Blue Jays in 2018. When they hit, they can’t pitch. When they pitch, they can’t hit. And on a rare day when they both pitched and hit, their bullpen can’t protect a lead. Oakland ended up with a 5-4 victory, their third in the first three games of this series. It was Toronto’s sixth loss in its last seven.
“We’re going through a rough stretch right now,” Clippard said. “I think when you go through these stretches, it tests your character as a ballclub. And we understand that as a baseball season goes, these stretches happen. We’ve got to do our best to limit the damage right now and kind of put all this stuff behind us, move forward, and start playing some good baseball.”
“It’s difficult. When certain things are firing well, we have other things that aren’t,” Axford added. “It is frustrating not putting all those pieces together. But we have at times already this year. We have been firing on different cylinders at times. So, we know that the possibility is there. That we can put together a full game with offence, defence, starting pitching, and the bullpen. It’s just a matter of finding that groove again.”
Yes, these are troublesome times for the Blue Jays. The club is now 6-12 in May, having been outscored by 31 runs over that stretch. It hasn’t won a series in its last six attempts. A win-loss record that was once seven games north of .500 has fallen all the way to two games below. Friday, after batting practice, a team meeting was called, in which the topic of discussion was “what we need to focus on as a team” according to third baseman Josh Donaldson.
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The club’s opening day shortstop and right fielder are both on the disabled list, its second baseman is in triple-A, and its designated hitter came into Saturday with three hits over his last 46 plate appearances. Its best pitcher from 2017 is also on the disabled list after a bafflingly unsuccessful start to the season. Its best hitter began the year trying to play through a mysterious shoulder ailment, missed three weeks of games, and has a .722 OPS since returning to the lineup. Its closer is on administrative leave after being charged with assault.
None of that is good. And all of it has contributed to the Blue Jays reaching a point where players like Sam Gaviglio, the club’s seventh starting pitcher this season, and Gio Urshela, its sixth shortstop if you don’t include Russell Martin, were being asked to start Saturday’s game.
The Blue Jays picked up Gaviglio from the Kansas City Royals for cash or a player to be named later near the end of spring training. They paid the same nominal fee to acquire Urshela from Cleveland last week. These are the kind of depth moves around the fringes a club makes to help guard itself against the possibility of its best laid plans going awry. Levees beyond the dam. And yet, those two helped put their team in a position to win Saturday’s game.
The Blue Jays couldn’t have asked for much more from Gaviglio, who neutralized the Athletics through five innings with a barrage of 89-m.p.h. sinkers and 83-m.p.h. sliders, targeting the outside corner against right-handers and working up in the zone to lefties. He certainly benefitted from a few favourable calls on the outter edge of the plate by home plate umpire Shane Livensparger. But credit Gaviglio for demonstrating some fine command and avoiding damage while throwing just under 70 per cent of his pitches for strikes.
“Gaviglio, I thought, did an outstanding job,” Gibbons said. “He couldn’t have done a better job.”
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Gaviglio began the sixth with a groundout, but gave up a hard double to Khris Davis and walked his next batter, which was exactly the moment Gibbons decided he wasn’t going to push his luck any further. Seung-hwan Oh was summoned from the bullpen and, although he loaded the bases, eventually escaped the jam.
Meanwhile, it was Urshela sparking Toronto’s offence in the fifth. After Dwight Smith Jr. took a first-pitch slider off the elbow, the utility infielder got a pitch to hit from Oakland starter Sean Manaea, a 2-0 change-up he shot over the wall in right for an opposite-field, two-run shot. It was only Urshela’s second big-league home run since 2015.
Manaea melted down from there, walking Donaldson and giving up a single to Justin Smoak before leaving a fastball up to Yangervis Solarte, who hammered it for a double to cash one of the runners. Kevin Pillar hit a sacrifice fly to bring in the other, and give Toronto a four-run lead.
Of course, you know by now it didn’t last. Only three innings later, Clippard was crouched on the mound, glove over his mouth, as Pinder rounded the bases. The Rogers Centre was quiet. And the Blue Jays were defeated again.
“Usually, before things turn, you end up losing a tough game like that somewhere along the line, anyway,” Gibbons said. ” So, maybe things are ready to turn.”
He sounded hopeful. His team’s play of late has been anything but.
