ARLINGTON, Texas – Deep in the heart of Texas the narrative around Jose Bautista’s epic bat flip in Game 5 of the American League Division Series is quite obviously somewhat different than it is north of the border. People around here still seem pretty sour about it, with sports talk radio predicting venom from the fans at Globe Life Park, and Fort Worth Star-Telegram columnist Gil Lebreton writing that “we don’t have to remind you how to welcome the Blue Jays.” He, bizarrely, also complained Torontonians and fans in other cities won’t give Rougned Odor all-star votes, so yeah, sure, whatevs.
Predictably, a crowd of 40,304 booed Bautista each time he stepped to the plate, chanting “2-0-5,” his batting average at the time, during his at-bat in the sixth. Yet a more appropriate object for their scorn would have been the latest costly Elvis Andrus error and sketchy relief work that the Blue Jays pounced on for a 5-0 victory over the Rangers on Friday night. R.A. Dickey, employing a new variance of tempo in his delivery, threw eight innings of three-hit shutout in a brilliant performance, while Edwin Encarnacion and Troy Tulowitzki, with the 200th of his career, homered in the eighth inning to crack open a close game, and finally give the knuckleballer run support.
“That’s as good I’ve seen him,” manager John Gibbons said in praise of Dickey. “He stepped up against a good hitting team in a tough ballpark to pitch in.”
And Bautista, public enemy No. 1 apparently, singled with one out in the sixth, advanced when Andrus booted an Encarnacion grounder and after Justin Smoak walked, scored the game’s first run on Tulowitzki’s fielder’s choice. The angry fans really showed him.
“It’s alright,” Bautista said before the game. “I’ve figured out a way to channel those energies, whether they’re positive or negative, to my favour. But we always get good support, even here in Texas where it’s a little far away from Canada. We had outstanding support in San Francisco and round-of-applause to all the people that came out, and hopefully we’ll have a good group here, too.”
A third win in four outings on the current road trip pushed the Blue Jays back over .500 at 19-18 and lifted them to 4-1 this season versus the Rangers (20-16). The way they tacked on late runs is particularly encouraging, given how they’ve struggled to do just that, and score in general for that matter, as a rotation that started the day first in the AL in ERA, innings pitched and batting average against has carried the load.
“Our starting pitching has been fantastic, probably the best in the league,” said Tulowitzki. “If our offence can just hold its own and start doing more of what we know we can do, it’s definitely going to be a good team and a hard team to beat.”
The Blue Jays helped insure their early edge in the seventh, when Darwin Barney led off with a single against Martin Perez, Josh Thole sacrificed him over, and with two outs, a wild pitch from Sam Dyson that sailed dangerously above a ducking Josh Donaldson brought him home to make it 2-0.
They then unloaded on Tom Wilhelmsen, as Encarnacion rammed his seventh to deep left while Tulowitzki followed a Smoak double, the first baseman’s second of the game to go with two walks, with his seventh homer of the season. The milestone made Tulowitzki the 13th player to have spent a significant portion of his career at shortstop to break the 200-homer plateau.
“That’s definitely pretty cool,” he said. “There’s probably not too many shortstops that can say that, so it’s something I’ll always remember. Hopefully there’s many more to come and obviously the most important thing is that we won the game.”
Dickey used the occasional quick pitch to great effect, allowing only one baserunner to reach second and walked just one against six strikeouts over his eight frames. After putting two on with two out in the second, he retired 19 of his next 20 batters.
“When I’m filling up the strike zone with a knuckleball, it’s hard for anybody, and I’m usually at my best when I’m doing that,” said Dickey, who worked on the tweak to his delivery between outings. “As long as the foundation is there, and I know checkpoints enough to know that if I get my weight on my back foot, and because I quick-step in my stretch, it’s not a big stretch for me to take it into my windup. So as long as I don’t overexpose it to certain guys, I think it could be a real weapon.
“I got a lot of strikes with it, struck a guy out with it and I was throwing multiple types of pitches out of that so they couldn’t just sit on one, and I was able to throw it in the strike zone.”
The win was only his second of the season, but came after a series of hard-luck outings. Dickey had allowed three earned runs or less in five of his past six outings but the Blue Jays lost each of those games, scoring a total of 10 runs in those six games.
“You come to the baseball game, to play, to compete, so that you can contribute to a game where your team wins and feel good about leaving it all out on the field,” said Dickey. “I feel like I was able to do that tonight, I try to do that every time out, and just trust the process. I’ve had years where I’ve been really, really good and had an 8-13 record, last year, I felt like I was pretty good and only got 11 wins, so a lot of that is outside your control, but as long as you trust the process and give your team quality innings, at the end of the year you’ll look back and be satisfied with your effort.
“That’s what I try to tell some of these guys in here that are younger. It’s not all about putting up goose eggs every night, you’re not going to be able to do that, it’s about going deep into games even when you don’t feel great, it’s about picking other guys up when they have a rough outing the next day, there are a lot of things that go into a good staff. Right now we’re on a good roll.”
Of all the things Rangers fans could be booing, that’s the one that’s most on point right now.
Notes: Matt Bush, the former No. 1 overall pick who ended up in prison on DUI charges, made his big-league debut for the Rangers with a scoreless ninth. He was with the Blue Jays for about a month in the spring of 2009, where his stuff awed everyone in camp, including Roy Halladay who’d watch his bullpen sessions. The Blue Jays released Bush because of some off-field incidents. … Chad Girodo pitched a clean ninth inning and is steadily earning more trust from John Gibbons.