TORONTO — Justin Smoak was blinking in the harsh light of the television cameras. He’d just walked off the Tampa Bay Rays, 9-8, lobbing a solo shot 368 feet over the wall in right to cap a seven-run inning, tying a club record for the largest ninth-inning comeback in Toronto Blue Jays history.
He bowed his head to avoid the light, looked up through his eyebrows at the assembled media waiting to speak with him, and opened his scrum with a statement.
“What a hit K-Mo got, huh?”
That would be the two-out duck snort Kendrys Morales lofted into shallow centre field just two pitches before Smoak ended it — a 77-m.p.h. flare that carried a six per cent hit probability. Rays closer Sergio Romo was so certain he’d completed his save that he pointed at his catcher and slapped his glove in celebration as the ball sailed towards to the outfield.
But Romo, Morales, and the rest of us could only watch as the ball dropped perfectly in the middle of four sprinting Rays, onto the exact patch of turf where none of them could reach it. It was the kind of fortune you often need if you’re going to overcome a six-run deficit in the ninth. The kind of absurd twist of fate that makes baseball such a crazy game.
Smoak talked about that outrageous ninth inning for a minute and a half before still-flabbergasted reporters ran out of questions and let him escape the lights. Waiting for him on the periphery of the scrum? Morales. Smoak wrapped his arm around the big designated hitter’s shoulders.
“Hey, man,” he said. “What a single.”
[relatedlinks]
Dwight Smith Jr. was trying to do anything he could to get on base. Leading off the bottom of the ninth, his team stuck six, he merely wanted to create a spark.
“You’re trying to keep the game going and let it be possible to make a run. Or even just bring some momentum into the next day if we don’t win,” Smith said. “So, I was just trying to get on base at all costs. I never want to get out in the last inning. I take pride in that.”
Rays reliever Jamie Schultz didn’t make it easy. He started Smith with three tough fastballs right on the edges of the strike zone. But Smith was patient and calls went his way, which allowed him to work the count to 3-1. That’s when he got his pitch to hit and laced it to right-centre.
Smith watched as Rays centre-fielder Mallex Smith misplayed the ball trying to corral it off the wall. Smith took an aggressive turn around second and raced into third standing up. The official scorer gave him a double. But he was never stopping at second base.
“Oh, yeah — I for sure was going three all the way,” Smith said. “Just to get there for the guy behind me to have an RBI opportunity. And maybe we could start rallying.”
Jonathan Davis was trying to help the Blue Jays keep rallying. Rowdy Tellez had cashed Smith with a double up the left-field line, and now Davis was pinch-hitting against Schultz, fouling off pitch after pitch after pitch, looking to find his way on base.
Just look at this plate appearance:
“Never give up — that was the mentality, man,” Davis said. “It’s tough coming off the bench. But I went up there like, ‘All right — I’m getting after it.’”
Davis is a patient hitter. He posted a 12.6 per cent walk rate last season at double-A, and a 13.5 per cent rate the year before. He likes to work the count. And although it would appear that was his approach against Schultz, he was actually trying to do anything but.
“One thing that I’ve learned with coming off the bench to hit is to be aggressive. So, I went up to the plate, like, ‘If he throws me a strike, I’m swinging,’” Davis said. “The biggest thing you want to do is at least give yourself a chance to get a hit.”
A half-dozen foul balls later, and with the 10th pitch of the plate appearance, Schultz tried to locate a fastball away but misfired, grazing Davis on the abdomen.
“I honestly wish I didn’t get hit,” Davis said later, laughing. “So I could get the walk.”
Danny Jansen was the fifth consecutive Buffalo Bison to bat in the inning. After Reese McGuire was called out on strikes, watching an outside pitch that’s probably ruled a ball if its thrown to a veteran, Jansen stepped in and fell behind 0-2 swinging through a fastball and a slider.
“I just went into battle mode,” he said. “And he threw a slider that was kind of right into my barrel.”
Jansen crushed that slider exactly 400-feet into the left-field seats, cashing Tellez and Davis, two players he spent the majority of the season making long, late-night bus rides with between minor-league cities. Jansen hit a dozen homers with the Bisons this season — Davis had seen it before.
“Of course it’s Jansen coming up big,” Davis said. “That was an awesome feeling. I was going around the bases like I had hit the home run. I had my hand up, like, ‘Yo, let’s go!’”
When the Blue Jays called up nearly their entire 40-man roster for September — crowding the clubhouse with young, developing players — this is exactly the kind of moment they wanted them exposed to. Crucial, tense, do-or-die plate appearances. A major-league game on the line.
The first six batters of the inning played a combined 492 games together at triple-A this season. But they’d never experienced anything like this.
“Yeah, it was the Toronto Bisons,” Jansen said. “Everybody just came together and battled. I’m still thinking about it. All of the guys are still thinking about it, talking about it. It’s just a crazy game. It happened so fast, so quick. That’s why you don’t give at-bats away. Bad counts, no matter what time it is, what inning it is — all that stuff.”
[snippet id=3305549]
Lourdes Gurriel Jr. was worried it might go foul. He’d gone after the very next pitch Romo threw after Morales’ miraculous single and gotten just enough barrel on an inner-half slider to lift it down the line in left. He hit it so high that the ball hung up in the air for an agonizingly long 6.3 seconds, sailing toward the wall as Gurriel hopped up and down between home plate and first, trying to will it to hug the right side of the foul pole.
It did. And the game was tied.
“I think before the last out is made,” Gurriel said, “you’re still always in the game.”
Pacing up and down the dugout, feeding off the giddy energy of his teammates, Smith — the man who started it all — kept thinking in his head, “This is about to happen, this is about to happen.”
“A lot of people were saying it on the bench. Like, ‘We’re about to win this game.’ People were even saying it after Jansen hit his homer. We were really believing it,” Smith said. “And then the next pitch, Smoak hits it out. It happened so fast. I’ve never seen anything like that.”
Jansen was rifling through his stuff.
Between the Blue Jays dugout and clubhouse, there is a small landing area where the catchers keep their equipment bags. A batting tee is set up in front of a net in case any hitters want to take some warmup swings. And a small television is stationed nearby, tuned to the game, so that anyone who’s back there can keep an eye on the proceedings.
After Gurriel tied the game, Ken Giles was summoned to the mound in the bullpen to warm up for the 10th. Jansen was going to catch him, but he hadn’t anticipated the game going beyond the ninth inning, so he had to race back to that landing area to retrieve gear from his bag. As he dug through his equipment, he took a glance at the TV, saw Smoak take a huge cut at a first-pitch Romo slider, and realized there wouldn’t be another inning after all.
“He hit that home run — and I just went crazy,” Jansen said. “I heard everybody go nuts in the dugout and I turned around and just sprinted down there.”
The dogpile at the plate was pandemonium. There’s no other way to describe it. More than 25 Blue Jays, bounding up and down, hooting and hollering, jumping all over Smoak as his feet touched home.
“It’s something that you really can’t even describe,” Davis said. “I would compare it to, not necessarily getting married, but it’s that feeling. It’s a crazy feeling. It’s just pure joy. A crazy joy.”
[snippet id=3966765]
Luke Maile was in charge of the music. And after a seven-run ninth, a fifth win in their last six, one of the craziest comebacks in franchise history — the usual victory songs wouldn’t do.
“When you walk it off like that,” Maile said, “you’ve got to put on something loud.”
Maile fished his phone out of his locker and dialed up a Skrillex playlist. Someone killed all the lights. Maile turned it up so loud conversation was impossible. The Blue Jays clubhouse was suddenly a rave, as “Scary Monsters and Nice Sprites” filled the room.
Blue Jays manager John Gibbons exited the clubhouse, still charged up from the win, and made his way across the large service area that rings Rogers Centre to climb atop a podium and talk to the media. He announced his presence — “Yeah, baby!” — as he entered the room. Once he sat down, he gave the assembled a bemused look, leaning back and running his hand through his hair. Someone asked him what just happened.
“I don’t even know,” he said, shaking his head. “You know, baseball’s a crazy game.”
[relatedlinks]
