TORONTO — During the top of the eighth inning Sunday, as his Toronto Blue Jays were getting molly-whopped at the end of a terrible, horrible, no good, very bad weekend series with the Oakland Athletics, John Gibbons went looking for his designated hitter, Kendrys Morales. He wanted to tell him he was going to pitch the ninth.
There was a time when that wouldn’t have been the white flag it was Sunday. Morales pitched when he was growing up in Cuba, throwing a fastball in the low-90’s and even making an appearance for Havana Industriales in 2002, when he was 18 and in his first year as a professional.
Of course, that was nearly two decades ago. But Sunday, here in 2018, Gibbons had burned through as much of his taxed bullpen as he was willing to in a blowout with an inning still to be accounted for. And, as Gibbons said after the game, the least he could do was “give the fans a little bit of entertainment.”
So, upon receiving his assignment, Morales went back to the Blue Jays clubhouse and started warming up, throwing pitches into a net normally used to catch balls hit off a tee. His process was interrupted by the minor matter of an eighth-inning plate appearance, in which he singled and advanced all the way to third. But, when Curtis Granderson’s strikeout stranded him there, Morales went back to the dugout to grab a pitcher’s glove.
“Now pitching for the Blue Jays, right-hander Kendrys Morales,” crackled over the Rogers Centre public address system, as a crowd of 30,676 released its most vociferous cheer of a long afternoon. And if there is a more fitting end to what was an atrocious, uncompetitive, and, at times, embarrassing weekend for the Toronto Blue Jays, it’s hard to think of one.
Yes, when your designated hitter is taking the mound, things have gone awry. And that’s really putting it nicely when it comes to the Blue Jays right now. They just lost four consecutive games to the Oakland Athletics, including Sunday afternoon’s 9-2 humiliation, getting swept in a four-game series at home for the first time since 2001. And each loss had its own distinct, demoralizing flavour.
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Thursday, it was a bad start. Aaron Sanchez burned through his pitch count in only four innings, walking four and allowing four runs, as the Blue Jays were buried beneath an early deficit they could not overcome.
Friday, it was a punchless offence. Oakland lost its starter to injury after the first inning, but five relief pitchers combined to hold the Blue Jays to four hits over the final eight frames, as Toronto’s hitters swung their bats as if they were fresh out of the freezer.
Saturday, it was a bullpen implosion. The Blue Jays entered the eighth inning with a four-run lead and exited it with a one-run deficit, after a pair of meltdowns from John Axford and Tyler Clippard.
And Sunday, it was a dreadful defensive display. Ground balls skipped over infielders’ gloves. Fly balls were dropped. Double-play opportunities were botched. The sixth inning was downright difficult to watch, as Toronto committed two of its four errors on the day, one of them a three-base error in right field by Teoscar Hernandez that allowed two runs to score.
“It was ugly,” Gibbons said. “We’re obviously better than that. But we’re on a bad stretch right now. We’re not playing real good baseball. In a bunch of different areas. Seen it before. We’ll see it again. That’s the nature of the beast. But when you’re struggling, it’s magnified — no doubt.”
We might as well talk about Joe Biagini, who started the game and was fine. His pitching line certainly doesn’t look great, as he completed only four innings and allowed four runs, three of them earned. But that result had as much to do with the defence being played behind him as anything.
A ground ball that could have ended Biagini’s second inning skipped over Josh Donaldson’s glove at third, letting a run score. And it was a similar refrain in the fifth, as Donaldson was unable to turn two more groundballs into outs, the second a 94-m.p.h. short-hop that ate him up and bounced into left field as a run scored.
“I’ve got to be better, plain and simple,” Donaldson said. “I’ve got to make better decisions. That’s all there is to it. … I’m not going to make excuses. It was just one of those things where I made a couple bad reads today. And it showed.”
Biagini was lifted after that, having used 20 pitches to allow the first three batters of the inning to reach. Danny Barnes entered, got a groundball out that scored another run, and then left a fastball up to Marcus Semien, who crushed it 428 feet to left-centre for a two-run shot, further sullying Biagini’s line.
And that was before an atrocious sixth inning in which Blue Jays defenders treated balls in play as if they were lacquered in motor oil. Bad errors by Richard Urena (he made two on the day and was optioned to triple-A Buffalo after the game) and Hernandez threw things right off the rails, and let Oakland get out to a massive, nine-run lead.
Not that they’d need it, as Toronto’s offence was lifeless through most of the game, a fact that was shrouded by the defensive circus. Oakland starter Daniel Mengden — he of a 4.79 ERA over 30 career major-league starts — has a waxed mustache like Rollie Fingers and a wind-up like Early Wynn. And the Blue Jays spent their afternoon making him look like he possessed the ability of those two, as well.
The Blue Jays mustered just two hits over Mengden’s seven innings, flailing away at his steady mix of underwhelming-yet-effective 90-m.p.h. heaters, 80-m.p.h. change-ups, 80-m.p.h.sliders, and 70-m.p.h. curveballs.
Toronto’s only opportunity against Mengden came in the third, when Luke Maile walked after a Morales single and both were advanced to scoring position with one out by a Urena sacrifice bunt. But Granderson struck out and Donaldson grounded out swinging at a 3-0 slider to leave the runners right there.
From that point forward, 15 consecutive Blue Jays made outs until Morales broke through with his eighth-inning single. Yangervis Solarte hit a meaningless two-run homer with two out in the ninth, sparing his team the indignity of a shutout. It was not spared a seventh loss in its last eight contests, and a 13th loss in 19 games this month.
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“It’s just baseball being baseball. You’re going to run through highs and lows with 162 games,” Granderson said. “Unfortunately, it just happens to be a situation right now where we’ve run into some teams that are playing well, that have pitched well against us. And we haven’t been able to get things clicking on all cylinders like we want to.
“Guys are putting together good at-bats, just not necessarily getting their results. Also, the pitching staffs that we’re facing are pitching well against us. So, it’s a combination of a couple different things, the reason why you aren’t able to go ahead and stockpile a bunch of hits and a bunch of runs and big innings and different things like that. But that’s what makes the game so exciting and frustrating at the same time.”
And that’s how you end up with a designated hitter jogging out to the mound in the ninth. After some half-hearted warm-up throws, Morales buried his first pitch in the dirt at 85 m.p.h. and eventually allowed a base runner with a walk. But he navigated his way through it, hitting 87 m.p.h. a couple times and retiring the side with three flyball outs.
He walked off the field to a standing ovation. A mob of teammates were waiting to applaud him when he got back to the dugout. It was a long time coming for a guy who started pitching in Cuba decades ago, throwing 90-m.p.h. darts.
“I’m a little bit older now — I don’t think I can get there anymore,” Morales said later, water slowly pooling at his feet from the massive ice packs compression-wrapped to his right shoulder and elbow. “It’s been a long time. But they needed me for an inning and it happened. But hopefully it doesn’t happen again. Because, you know, that means that we’re losing.”
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