TORONTO – The Toronto Blue Jays went 22 years between playoff games, and 22 years and almost 14 innings before having a lead in a playoff game, though it didn’t last nearly long enough. The first time the Jays went ahead on the scoreboard was in the bottom of the fifth inning of Game 2, on Ben Revere’s hard single to right through the Texas Rangers’ drawn-in infield.
Kevin Pillar scored that go-ahead run, and he was able to do it because of the outstanding at-bat he had against Rangers’ ace Cole Hamels leading off the inning. He did it with a very un-Pillar-like at-bat.
Pillar hit .278 during the regular season, but an on-base percentage of just .314 shows that he wasn’t a hitter who takes advantage of the free pass all that often. Pillar walked just 28 times in 628 plate appearances. More importantly, Pillar saw only 3.60 pitches per plate appearance this season, below the major-league average of 3.82.
Pillar had his issues with two-strike counts, at times being extremely vulnerable to breaking balls off the plate. He struck himself out more than a few times this season, and hit just .208/.242/.315 when facing a two-strike count. But he was up to the task in that fifth inning at-bat.
Hamels, who had retired eight of nine to that point, missed well inside with his first pitch, and Pillar then swung through a change-up to level the count at 1-1. Hamels missed low with a fastball, and Pillar fouled off a high heater to get into that dreaded two-strike count.
The book on Pillar is that when you get two strikes on him, you can get him to chase, and that’s what Hamels tried to do with his first 2-2 offering, throwing a back-foot curveball, but this time the young Blue Jay was able to foul it off to stay alive.
Instead of going right back to the breaking ball, Hamels tried to pick the outside corner with an 89-mph fastball and Pillar showed great discipline to take it for ball three. On the next pitch, Hamels went right back to that corner, humping it up to 94, hoping to blow it past Pillar knee-high on the outside black, but the Jays’ centre-fielder simply dropped the bat-head on it and popped a little flare into short right field, just over the head of Rangers’ first baseman Mitch Moreland.
Pillar kicked it into high gear, rounding first as Moreland continued to chase the ball down the right-field line, and pulled into second base with a leadoff double.
Ryan Goins followed by executing a perfect sacrifice bunt left-on-left to move Pillar to third, and with one out in a tie game, the Rangers decided to play their infield in to cut off the run at the plate. The move backfired, as Revere’s grounder shot past Texas second baseman Rougned Odor almost before the 21 year-old even had time to move.
It was the Blue Jays’ first lead of the post-season, and it only lasted until Mike Napoli’s pinch-hit RBI single with two out in the top of the eighth, but it happened because of a great, disciplined at-bat by Kevin Pillar – something of which the Blue Jays need a lot more if they’re going to make a series out of this.
