ALCS Game 5: Mariner 6, Blue Jays 2

 

hoooooo boy

I am probably less hung up on that calamitous eighth inning than just about anyone who watched it, or has even heard tell (and word seems to be traveling fast!), but there's for sure no getting around the disaster of it (in the admittedly limited sense that disaster is possible in the outcome of a baseball game). The Blue Jays had traffic on the bases all night, but had only been able to score twice: Barger in the fifth, on the Springer double, and a scurrying Kirk in the sixth, on Clement's soft single to right. There was even a NOBLETIGER in there at one point, one that ended when an Ernie Clement groundball traveled directly down, right in front of the plate, and just totally stayed there for an easy double play. I've never seen anything quite like it. Colleagues stranding colleagues, suffice it to say, as happens against good pitchers who are bending but not breaking, which was what the Mariners were able to achieve. But Gausman had been so good himself (just the Eugenio Suarez solo shot in the second), and Varland, too, as the first man out of the pen, that we carried a 2-1 lead through seven. It never felt like enough, but a one-run lead in a playoff game, especially on the road, never will. Given the context, it seemed curious, then, that it was Brendon Little who got up in the pen, and desk-guy Joe Siddall was profoundly and transparently pre-spooked by it when the broadcast threw things back to the studio between innings, even before it was entirely clear Little was even going to come in (Siddall was tense and terse [he was ternse]). If Jeff Hoffman and Seranthony Dominguez—in that unusual but compelling order—had been brought in to pitch the eighth and ninth the night before in a game we were leading by kind of a bunch, why not those guys now, in a similar situation, but one made all the more pressing by this scant one-run lead? As the eighth began to unfold, Dan Schulman and Buck Martinez speculated that it must have something to with using the lefty Little to turn the switch-hitting Raleigh and Polanco around, and then dealing with the lefty Naylor behind them as his third batter, rather than leave that to Hoffman (who does not have particularly troubling lefty/righty splits) or Dominguez (who kind of does). Even if it had worked, this move to Little, it would have been quirky, but it didn't work at all, and so the word "quirky" really hasn't come up in any of the immediate reaction (people getting worked up on Reddit, as they say, is the first draft of history). Cal Raleigh's homer tied it, and, after two walks, a switch to Seranthony Dominguez, and a hit batter, Eugenio Suarez (remember him? he's from earlier) hit a grand slam to right field that might as well have been a walk-off. Not great!

And yet, while in the immediate aftermath, this move to Little—an up-and-down reliever who has definitely struggled with his command in the second-half (slightly less so in September, but problems against righties persist)—is being characterized as an all-timer of a bad managerial decision, not just on "the boards" but also on the Blue Jays broadcast itself (and it totally might be! everybody might be right!), I find that I am not actually minding it all that much? Or at least not as much as you might expect. Brendon Little had nothing tonight, poor guy, but neither, as it turned out, did Seranthony Dominguez, who followed, and Dominguez was definitely part of everyone's plan for those last six outs (I have not seen anyone argue that Hoffman should have been tasked with all six, though I'm sure if we had it to do over again, we'd all ask him to give it a real good try). John Schneider, asked about it all afterwards (if you can believe it), said he wanted to give the top of the Mariners order a different look than they'd seen last night (mission accomplished on that front, no denying it) with a guy that he trusts in big spots (more than Fluharty or Lauer, if you really wanted a lefty in there?). Really, what else could he say at that point? It was a bad decision, followed by two bad performances, but this really isn't hitting me any differently than any other bullpen loss. Actually, I think if you replace the "but" in the previous sentence with an "and so," it gets closer to the heart of it. It was a shame not to have brought more of those baserunners home in support of yet another very fine Kevin Guasman outing, but one-run road-game leads are just not something experience has taught me are especially likely to stand up, and so this loss does not sting like a bee so much as it feels like the attenuated bite of a cat you have scooped and held slightly longer than the enscoopened cat has chosen to enjoy. A disappointment, yes, but only a minor one, and understandable almost to the point of predictable.  

So, what did we actually do here, what did we actually get done this week: turns out we took two out of three games in Seattle to bring the series back home to [the] SkyDome for game six Sunday night, and quite possibly a game seven beyond. If Trey Yesavage pitches even passingly like he did against the Yankees, and Shane Bieber, aided by the full weight of the Blue Jays pitching staff, can put together a game anything like the one he just pitched against the Mariners, then even a handful of runs of support here and there (from an offense that has been the best of any team so far this postseason) means we're headed to the World Series. Not a bad place to be in October, and I remain really very stoked about it. Oh hey also, switching topics for just a sec, did you notice, too, that Shohei Ohtani pitched six scoreless innings tonight and struck out ten whilst also hitting three home runs? In what is almost certainly the finest game of Major League Baseball anyone has ever played? To finish off the Dodgers' sweep of the ninety-seven win Milwaukee Brewers (hey congrats on a great season guys)? A cynic might say that the Mariners and Blue Jays are really only competing to see who is to be granted the privilege of getting rolled by the Dodgers in the World Series, but I would suggest i) that would definitely still be pretty neat to be a part of, and ii) you never know! Baseball's pretty weird sometimes! 

KS