TORONTO – Edwin Encarnacion spotted the exuberant gathering of his teammates around home plate and knew immediately some lumps were coming. He remembered the way Josh Donaldson got mauled at the dish after his two walk-off homers earlier this season, and how Chris Colabello got chased all the way into left field after his game-winning single Sunday before a joyous pounding was lovingly delivered.
Amid the delirious bedlam that followed his walk-off two-run homer Tuesday night, Encarnacion kept his head enough to realize that similar treatment could have dire consequences for his troubled left shoulder. So as the slugger approached the plate to secure a dramatic 4-3 victory for the Toronto Blue Jays over the Miami Marlins, he pointed to his shoulder and repeatedly made a stop sign with his hand. Just back in the lineup thanks to a cortisone shot Saturday, he didn’t want any accidental setbacks.
"That’s why I told them before – because anything can happen," explained Encarnacion. "I don’t want to get hurt again. They took care of me."
On a larger scale, the Blue Jays continue to take care of each other, with a seventh straight victory that brought them back level at .500 for the first time since May 12 with a 30-30 record. Really, the lone hurdle remaining before we can definitively say they’ve turned the corner is for them to start regularly winning these types of low-scoring games, the one area where they remain deficient.
Even with five or more runs in a remarkable 32 of 60 games so far, the Blue Jays simply can’t bludgeon the opposition into submission every night. They are now 3-25 in games when they score four runs or less, and 4-12 in contests decided by one run, and as good as their offence is, there are plenty of dudes who can really pitch in the big-leagues.
Dan Haren is one of them and he nearly sent them to an 11th straight loss decided by two runs or less until Encarnacion rocked his 13th homer of the season, the first allowed by A.J. Ramos since May 28, 2014. If the Blue Jays had managed to merely split those, how different does their season look now?
At least they’re starting to even the ledger.
"Even today, you can just tell, we’re down one run going into the ninth inning, you have that confidence in knowing we’re going to come back," said Mark Buehrle, who threw six strong innings of two-run ball. "Previously when you’re down one or two runs late in the game, you’ve got that feeling that the game is over, we’ve lost this game. That’s what is nice about having the momentum and with this offence, we can strike any time. … We’re going to have games when we don’t, but most of the time we’ve got too good of an offence that they’re going to take care of it."
Often times the culprit in the close, low-scoring losses has been the bullpen, and while Giancarlo Stanton’s second solo shot of the game, off Roberto Osuna in the seventh, seemed to put the Marlins ahead to stay, it would have been hard to hang this one on the relief corps.
Pivotal in that regard was home plate umpire Angel Hernandez, who didn’t give Osuna an 0-2 fastball to Stanton that sure looked like strike three. Two pitches later, the Incredible Hulk-sized slugger ripped No. 21 into the seats in left.
"He’s a strikeout guy so you can strike him out if you get him to chase," said manager John Gibbons. "We tried to come up and in a little bit and left it out over the plate. That can’t happen in that situation and you saw the results of it. But if you expand, you see if he’ll chase and if he doesn’t then you walk him. We’ll learn from that."
The Stanton homer came right after a 13-pitch at-bat with Martin Prado in which the infielder might have gone down looking twice on pitches called balls, before finally grounding out to second. Dioner Navarro wisely came out to the mound to give Osuna a breather before Stanton stepped in.
Hernandez’s strike zone also had the Blue Jays up in arms in the bottom of the seventh, as Encarnacion took a third strike he didn’t like, barked at the ump, and then smashed his bat against a dugout wall upon his return, the thud echoing through the dome.
"He called that pitch and we didn’t get the call on Stanton," said Encarnacion. "It’s part of the game, sometimes they miss, there’s nothing we can do. We just have to keep playing the game and don’t think about that."
Even the mild-mannered Justin Smoak looked back in shock at a called second strike, something he hardly ever does. He went down swinging two pitches later.
Regardless, the Marlins needed to deal with Hernandez’s whims, too, and there will be times when the Blue Jays have to work around such irritations.
Coming off back-to-back complete games, Buehrle gave up solo shots to Stanton and Christian Yelich but little else before handing the reins to the bullpen.
After Haren was perfect through the first three frames, the Blue Jays tied the game 2-2 in the bottom of the fourth when Jose Reyes led off with a double, Donaldson singled, advanced to second on a wild pitch, and Jose Bautista and Encarnacion followed with sacrifice flies.
Then came a Donaldson leadoff single in the ninth, and after a Bautista strikeout, Encarnacion smashing the first pitch from Ramos to dead centre, proclaiming afterwards that there’s no pain in his shoulder.
"I know everything is going to come together," he said. "I know I’m going to be playing every day, I know I’m going to get it, I know I’m going to help this team win a lot of games."
For the Blue Jays, it’s a start in the kind of low-scoring game that up until now had consistently slipped away from them.