Johnny Cueto walked off the mound, holding his head, looking skyward, smiling, even laughing. The stocky right-hander’s dreadlocked mop bounced as he went. Cueto’s 70th toss of his night was a chunk of gum that he had gnawed through a spectacular, even unprecedented meltdown. It was the only thing he had thrown in a good long while that hadn’t found a bat, a gap, the seats or Russell Martin’s elbow.
In Game 3 of the ALCS, an 11-8 slugfest win for the Toronto Blue Jays, Cueto’s start and numbers were the stuff of pitchers’ nightmares: two innings, six hits, eight runs, all earned, four walks and a HBP. He was the pitcher of record in taking the loss and in a more far-reaching sense, according to ESPN’s stats departmenent, became the first pitcher in MLB post-season history to give up eight runs and 11 baserunners in two innings or fewer.
How Cueto managed to smile through the shelling is anyone’s guess. Perhaps he was instantly rationalizing his lot this night. You have to take the good with the bad. Yeah, but still, such extremes must make it hard.
Download it now: iOS | Android | Windows
In Cueto’s case, his last start was something far better than good and almost transcendent, that being a win in Game 5 in the ALDS over Houston a few days back, a start in which he gave up only two hits and two runs over eight innings with the Royals’ season hanging in the balance. In fact, in the crucible against the Astros, Cueto retired 19 straight batters, the first hurler to pull this off in the post-season since Don Larsen’s perfect game in the Yankees’ triumph in the 1956 World Series.
Larsen wasn’t an all-star nor Cy Young candidate. He wasn’t even in the top three of the Yanks’ rotation back when. He wound up 81-91 lifetime. He was coming off his best season, 11-5, but still. Cueto’s history is a contrast to Larsen’s: The 29-year-old Dominican has a tidy 96-70 record in the majors and was a prize catch for the Royals when he came over in a mid-summer trade with the Cincinnati Reds. That said, Cueto had disappointing results since coming to K.C., going 4-7 with a 4.76 ERA and a 1.451 WHIP.
All that said, though, if you looked at his most recent performance, a suggestion that Cueto came into the game in form would have been an understatement. In the circumstances you’d have to say that he was coming off the start of his life. In the run-up to Game 3, Royals manager Ned Yost made it sound like the stars had aligned perfectly for his crew. Asked if Cueto had made a change in his pitch selection against the Astros, relying on his breaking stuff more than in the past, Yost suggested that he had everything going for him, that catcher Salvador Perez could have put down any number of fingers and waggled in any direction and the outcome would have been pretty much the same. “I thought he commanded everything he threw really, really well [against the Astros],” Yost said. “He commanded his fastball well, commanded his change-up extremely well. And it’s got to be a balance and a mix.”
As you could have predicted, the storyline in Game 3 at the Rogers Centre was 180 degrees from Cueto’s last start. “[Cueto] couldn’t command the ball down,” Yost said in the wake of the contest. “He was up all night long. Just really struggled with his command.”
Speaking through a translator, Cueto said he didn’t pick up any portent of awful things to come. “I felt great in the bullpen,” he said. “My pitches were down.”
And really, through the first inning, Cueto seemed to more or less pick up where he had left off against the Astros. He induced a weak flyout to right field from Ben Revere. He got out in front of Josh Donaldson with an 0-2 count and then mowed him down with a breaking ball with great, late sink. He gave up a walk to Jose Bautista but then struck out Edwin Encarnacion to get out of the first inning seemingly unstained. Yet it wasn’t quite routine. The top of the Toronto order hadn’t dented him but it did make him work and Cueto threw 25 pitches in the bottom of the first.
As for Toronto’s second and third innings, well, manager and player offered two explanations at variance. Yost’s was physical: “Got his pitch count up and just couldn’t make an adjustment.” Cueto’s was metaphysical: “God only knows.”
Staked to a 1-0 lead going into the second, Cueto gave up a one-out single to Troy Tulowitzki and seemed to get himself in no more than a slight jam in the next at bat when he plunked Russell Martin. When Ryan Goins, hitting .087, 2-for-23, stepped up to the plate with two out, you had to figure that Cueto would get off the hook. Instead, he hung a breaking ball that Goins laced to right field for a two-run double, making the score 2-1 Jays. “I thought I made some good pitches [to Goins] but I didn’t get the call,” Cueto said. “[Goins] battled in that at bat.”
Revere walked at the top of the order and then Donaldson hit a hard grounder through the left side of the infield to make it 3-1. Cueto induced an innocent flyball from Jose Bautista to get out of the inning damaged but seemingly not mortally so. As it turned out, it would be the last out he would make in the game. And through two innings of work he had already thrown 50 pitches.
“I was trying to make adjustments to get the ball down,” Cueto said. “I couldn’t make adjustments.
Cueto faced five batters in the third: a single to Encarnacion, a four-pitch walk to Chris Colabello, a homer to deep centre field by Tulowitzki, a walk to Martin and then a double by Pillar that made it 7-2. The Royals looked for a way to stop the bleeding, as Perez came out for a conference with Cueto. Then another. And then another. A committee joined by other players and the pitching coach couldn’t come up with a solution. Cueto was pulled. He’d wind up being charged with an eighth run when Pillar scored on a Donaldson home run that made it 9-2.
Cueto didn’t owe any of his hardship to the hard time fans at the Rogers Centre gave him, as they chanted his name mockingly when his night went sideways very early. “It’s a tough environment, but it’s baseball,” he said. “I don’t hear what [the fans] say.”
Though he might have been able to tune them out, Cueto did seem to think that conditions at the ballpark might have been a factor in his inability to take his bullpen stuff into the game. “The mound was a little high, [higher] than the bullpen mound,” he said. “The bullpen is really flat. But I didn’t make the adjustment, no excuses. They just beat me.”
Cueto said that no one should read anything into his smiles and seeming bemusement when he walked to the dugout. “That’s just part of my DNA,” he said. “That’s just what came out. [The loss] is just part of the game. I’m confident,” he said. “This isn’t going to end here. I’m going to get another shot at it.”