TORONTO — Insanity reigned as the Toronto Blue Jays advanced to the American League Championship Series in perhaps the craziest game ever played in franchise history.
It was a tight, tense, nervous first six innings. The Blue Jays only managed one run in the first five frames — on a two-out RBI double crushed by Jose Bautista into the left field corner in the third — and were down 2-1 when Edwin Encarnacion electrified the crowd with a mammoth home run to tie it up.
The momentum (if there is such a thing in sports) seemed to be shifting the Blue Jays’ way as they tried to become the first team to win a game at home in this series, as well as the first to win a game in which they didn’t score first.
Then, the seventh inning happened.
The way the Rangers took the lead back seemed just so terribly Toronto, an appropriate kick in the teeth to a city that just can’t seem to have nice things when it comes to its major professional sports teams.
With the Blue Jays looking to be the first Toronto team in the Big Three sports to win a playoff round since the Maple Leafs beat Ottawa in the first round back in 2004, the Rangers scored the go-ahead run on a bizarre play never seen before by pretty much everyone who was watching.
Rougned Odor led off the seventh inning by greeting reliever Aaron Sanchez with a single to left field. He was bunted to second and moved up another 90 feet on a grounder to third on which Josh Donaldson made an amazing barehanded play to retire the batter, Delino DeShields, Jr. Then, with Shin-Soo Choo at the plate and a 1-2 count, Sanchez missed with his next pitch and Russell Martin’s return throw to the mound glanced off Choo’s bat and dribbled down towards third.
Odor took off and scored the go-ahead run as home plate umpire and crew chief Dale Scott was waving the play dead. But, after the umpires conferred and talked to the officials in New York, they allowed the run to score. It was the right call, with Choo not having intentionally interfered with Martin’s throw, but it was a bizarre way to break a late-game tie and, apparently, an affront to the Baseball Gods, or karma, or whatever you want to call it.
It should be noted that in baseball, unlike hockey or football, a play cannot be “blown dead” by an umpire. Umpires have the discretion to place runners at the bases they think they would have gotten to had play continued, so Scott calling time didn’t mean he had to send Odor back to third regardless of the rule.
After the grounds crew finished cleaning up the garbage that was thrown onto the field by angry fans in the crowd, Sanchez struck out Choo to send the game to a seventh-inning stretch in which ‘Take Me Out To The Ballgame’ was actually booed from start to finish by a highly offended audience of 49,742.
And then the Rangers forgot how to play baseball.
Martin led off the bottom of the seventh with a ground ball up the middle that clanked off the glove of Rangers’ shortstop Elvis Andrus for an error. Kevin Pillar followed with a grounder to first. Mitch Moreland picked it up, bounced his throw to second and Andrus couldn’t hold it. Another error and there were Blue Jays at first and second with none out.
The errors saved Ryan Goins from spending the rest of the night on the bench, as Justin Smoak had been sent to the on-deck circle to hit for him while Pillar was batting. But in a clear sacrifice situation, Goins (and his glove) were allowed to stay in the game to drop down a bunt and Goins got a nice one down, towards third base. Injured Texas third baseman Adrian Beltre charged it, grabbed it and threw a bullet to third … but Andrus dropped it.
Three Blue Jays’ batters to start the seventh inning, three Rangers’ errors and instead of a perfect frame for Cole Hamels and a one-run Texas lead into the eighth, the bases were loaded with nobody out.
Ben Revere followed with a grounder to first on which Moreland made the play and his throw home was actually caught by Chris Gimenez for the inning’s first out. Then, Josh Donaldson tied the game with a little floater over second and Bautista carved his name ever deeper into Blue Jays’ history.
Bautista crushed an offering from reliever Sam Dyson, a former Blue Jay, and enjoyed it thoroughly, adding perhaps the most epic bat flip in the history of such things prior to starting his trot around the bases. Dyson took exception, saying after the game that Bautista “needs to calm that down, just kind of respect the game a little bit more” and comparing the celebration to one that would happen in a backyard Wiffle Ball game. Of course, Dyson was the one who instigated two bench-clearing incidents after the homer.
First, he came down off the mound to home plate to engage with Edwin Encarnacion as the Jays’ first baseman was trying to calm the crowd and get them to stop littering the field following Bautista’s homer. Then, Dyson came to the plate after getting Troy Tulowitzki to pop up foul to end the inning and, for some reason, patted Tulowitzki on the backside, leading to some more screaming and yelling and bench-emptying.
I guess we all respect the game in our own way. And the truth is that if Dyson didn’t want Bautista to celebrate the biggest home run he’d ever hit in his life, he probably should have kept Bautista in the ballpark.
The bottom of the seventh turned an angry mob of nearly 50,000 to ecstatic party-goers, and they exploded when Roberto Osuna finished things off by striking out pinch-hitter Will Venable. Osuna earned his first career playoff save, retiring all five batters he faced, four by strikeout. To put his accomplishment into perspective, consider that he was conceived the year after the Blue Jays last won a playoff series.
Thirty years ago, less two days, the Blue Jays played the only other winner-take-all game in franchise history, and they wound up on the wrong end of a historic collapse, blowing a three-games-to-one lead in a best-of-seven against the Kansas City Royals. This time, the Blue Jays became one of only three teams to come back and win a best-of-five series after dropping the first two games at home and now, they’re off to Kansas City to see if they can find their way back to the Fall Classic after 22 years.