CLEVELAND — This week, as his team set franchise records for the fewest hits (51) and lowest batting average (.190) over the first nine games of a season, Toronto Blue Jays manager Charlie Montoyo stressed the positives. Toronto’s starting staff was carrying its own franchise record, pitching to a 1.61 ERA over those nine games. Blue Jays starters had allowed two earned runs or fewer in eight of those outings, ranking third in baseball in strikeouts (56) and second in wins above replacement (1.4). If only Toronto’s bats could break through, the team could be faring so much better.
“You know what makes me feel good right now about this team?” Montoyo asked Friday night, after his team dropped the first half of this four-game series in Cleveland, mustering a combined six hits in the process. “Our pitching has been outstanding. They’re giving us a chance every day.”
Well, about that. As Cleveland leadoff hitter Greg Allen ripped the second pitch he saw in the first inning up the left-field line for a double on Saturday, it seemed it might not be one of those days. And when Allen crossed the plate a few minutes later on a scorched Carlos Santana single, scoring the first of many for Cleveland in a 7-2 rout of the Blue Jays, it quickly became clear that Toronto’s run of strong pitching was coming to an abrupt end.
“These guys, they don’t mess around. They’re good hitters and they have good approaches,” said Thomas Pannone, the Blue Jays starter who allowed those two hits. “Overall, I felt pretty good today. I just didn’t make pitches in crunch moments.”
Despite allowing the first inning run, Pannone at least showed some good flashes in the early going, striking out four through two innings and filling up the strike zone. But trouble brewed in the third when Eric Stamets hit a lead-off double and moved to third on a passed ball by catcher Danny Jansen.
Pannone came back to strike out Allen, but a Jose Ramirez bunt single and five-pitch walk of Jordan Luplow loaded the bases with only one out. Pannone walked a fine line from there, getting Carlos Santana to look at a full-count fastball down in the zone for his sixth strikeout of the afternoon. But he couldn’t do the same in another full-count spot with Hanley Ramirez at the plate, missing badly with a fastball to walk in a run.
Three pitches later, Jake Bauers hammered an elevated fastball — Pannone’s 30th pitch of the inning, 60th pitch of the afternoon, and final pitch of the day — into left, cashing a pair.
“That third inning got a little bit long on me. I threw a lot of pitches and then that’s kind of how it goes,” Pannone said. “That 3-2 count I had to Hanley — you don’t want to have to go back and look at the outing and say, ‘I wish I did that, I wish I did this.’ But it’s just a big pitch, I didn’t really execute it, walked the run in, and then from there, base hit.”
No, this wasn’t Pannone’s best day. To his credit, he was much better his last time out, throwing four innings of scoreless, one-hit ball in relief of Sean Reid-Foley on Monday. Of course, that outing against the Baltimore Orioles, who lost 11 more games than any team in baseball last season, featured a different degree of difficulty to Saturday’s against Cleveland, who last had a losing season in 2012.
Still, Pannone’s time in the rotation was likely limited to begin with, regardless of performance. That’s because the Blue Jays have two off-days next week and Clay Buchholz is nearly built up and ready to join the club. He’ll throw 75-80 pitches for the Buffalo Bisons on Sunday, and if all goes well, he could be in line to start against the Tampa Bay Rays next Saturday.
A short start certainly isn’t what the Blue Jays have come to expect, but it did allow for the second episode of The Great Elvis Luciano Experiment, as the 19-year-old Rule 5 pick took over for Pannone with two on and two out after Bauers’s two-run single. Luciano threw his first pitch right down the pipe, earning a foul ball from Cleveland catcher Roberto Perez. He then missed badly with four consecutive pitches, two in the dirt, to walk the bases loaded.
But after starting the next hitter, Max Moroff, with a slider that missed wildly, Luciano suddenly discovered command for the corners of the zone, perfectly locating a couple fastballs on either side of the plate to earn a foul ball and inning-ending fly out to right.
That’s how it went for Luciano, who came back out for the fourth and started three consecutive batters with pitches well outside the zone before immediately honing back in on his command. He struck out a pair before getting Jose Ramirez to fly out on an elevated, 96 m.p.h. fastball.
The Blue Jays clearly wanted to test Luciano’s ability to get up and down, bringing him back to start another frame in the fifth. But it was a bridge too far, as Luciano’s wild misses began to far outnumber his strikes. After loading the bases on back-to-back singles and a walk, Montoyo lifted him from the game.
This is what you’ll get from an undeniably talented yet unpolished teenager pitching at a level higher than rookie ball for the first time in his life. Extreme variance. Luciano’s arm is electric, and he can generate some awkward swings when he’s locating his fastball at 95 m.p.h. and playing his slider off of it. But his command can come and go from pitch-to-pitch, which is how you end up with a pitch chart looking like this:
“I thought he did a good job. He hasn’t pitched in a while. And, I’ll tell you what, he ain’t scared. He’s got good stuff,” Montoyo said. “He’s just a kid. And he hasn’t pitched. I thought he did okay for pitching his second outing in 10 days.”
Meanwhile, like Trevor Bauer and Shane Bieber before him, Cleveland starter Carlos Carrasco threw Blue Jays hitters an array of off-speed pitches, sometimes tripling up on his hard-biting slider within the same at-bat. The Blue Jays had more luck against Carrasco’s fastball when they could get to it, putting four in play for hits at over 102 m.p.h. But runners were stranded in each of the first four innings as the Blue Jays struggling to break through with men on base, battling the late afternoon shadows at Progressive Field which limited visibility.
“At the beginning of the game, it was tough to see,” said Teoscar Hernandez, who had two hits. “And [Carrasco] was making good pitches. Everybody knows that he’s one of the best in the game. And it was his day today. He got a lot of pitches to the corners. He was pretty good.”
The Blue Jays finally broke through in the fifth when Freddy Galvis took Carrasco deep on a 1-1 slider for his second homer in as many days. Hernandez ripped a single into right four pitches later and came around to score on a Randal Grichuk double to the wall in left-centre. But the inning ended with Rowdy Tellez taking a fastball for strike three, giving Carrasco his third called strikeout of the inning.
In all, the Blue Jays looked at six called third strikes from Carrasco — three on fastballs, three on sliders. The Blue Jays bench provided plenty of commentary on home plate umpire Dan Iassogna’s strike zone. But if the data demonstrates anything, it’s that both teams had reason to complain:
The zone was certainly inconsistent, but that’s to be somewhat expected when you’re asking a human to judge the location of a small object — one travelling at extreme velocities and making rapid, unpredictable movements — within a variable, imaginary box in real time. Some calls might not go your way.
That wasn’t the difference in this one, anyway. It was Toronto’s pitching having only its second bad day in 10 outings this season. These things happen. But that it occurred on the day the Blue Jays offence finally showed faint signs of life — Toronto had four more hits Saturday than it had on Thursday and Friday combined — is particularly tormenting, if not a little too appropriate for a game as torturous as baseball.
“The positive side of it, we swung the bats a little bit better today,” Montoyo said. “We’re 3-7, and we’ve probably had two bad games. And I believe this was one of those.”
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