His fingers coated in Spider Tack or not, Gerrit Cole’s one of baseball’s best pitchers. The thought that his performance would suddenly crater upon MLB deciding to enforce its foreign substance ban was always absurd. Cole’s 2.71 ERA and 12.8 K/9 over 102 starts since the beginning of 2018 wasn’t a product of spin rate alone. It was velocity, location, command. It was four pitches he’d throw for strikes, each of them identical out of his hand before moving in different directions at different speeds. It was elite energy management that allowed him to pitch just as effectively — often moreso — in his seventh inning as in his first.
And what a roll he’d been on of late, entering Tuesday’s start against the Toronto Blue Jays having allowed a grand total of two runs over his prior four outings — all commanding New York Yankees victories — a span of 24.2 innings in which he struck out 39, walked four, and held the 96 hitters he faced to a .185/.219/.261 slash line. In a significant September game both teams needed to win, Cole was the immovable object in the way of the irresistible force that has been the Blue Jays, winners of five straight, and eight of nine coming in.
But the inherent contradiction in that paradox is that no object can be immovable if a force is irresistible and vice versa. In other words, under the zero-sum design of an MLB game, something had to give. And wouldn’t you know it, in the dying days of a season in which the Blue Jays have been one of MLB’s most improbably unsuccessful teams, Cole gave. And the Blue Jays kept the streak alive.
The Yankees ace allowed two runs on five hits and two walks before exiting Tuesday’s game in the fourth inning with left hamstring tightness, giving the Blue Jays a humongous break in a spot they desperately needed it, as MLB’s hottest team won again, 5-1, moving closer to a playoff position that not long ago seemed out of reach.
Marcus Semien hit his sixth home run in as many games, Alejandro Kirk kept demanding more playing time with two bombs in his second consecutive multi-hit effort, and a team many were shovelling dirt onto just 10 days ago sustained an astonishing run up the American League wild card standings.
That the Blue Jays did it without their off-season’s biggest haul, George Springer, atop the lineup — the star centre fielder is day-to-day with a contusion suffered fouling a ball off his already-mangled left knee — and with their off-season’s most unheralded catch, Steven Matz, on the mound, is yet another unlikely twist of baseball fate in a season full of them for a team that continually resists logical assessment.
Springer, signed to the biggest free agent contract in franchise history, will appear in a maximum of 81 games in his first season as a Blue Jay, and almost certainly less. His contributions have been immense when healthy, as evidenced by the .921 OPS and 1.6 fWAR he’s produced over only 241 plate appearances. But for the 31-year-old’s first of a contracted six seasons with Toronto to be marred by issues to his oblique, quad, and knee is an undeniably unfortunate — perhaps foreboding, depending on your perspective — outcome regardless of how impactful his bat remains.
Meanwhile, Matz — acquired for three edge-of-the-roster players in an unsung, late-January trade — has been a revelation. The left-hander led MLB in ERA last month, and, after a six-inning, one-run effort against a powerful, right-handed heavy Yankees lineup on Tuesday, has kept the good times rolling through Labour Day. Over his last seven starts, Matz boasts a 1.92 ERA with 31 strikeouts over 38.2 innings.
Tuesday, Matz had his sinker working up to left-handers and — more importantly — in to right-handers, which let him fade changeups at the bottom of the zone for swinging strikes and weak groundball contact. Some of those elevated sinkers served to produce flyball outs, as well, which can be a thin line to walk at Yankee Stadium, but one Matz was able to navigate. And a sneaky-good curveball he went to a dozen times helped keep hitters off balance, made that much more effective by a demonstrated ability to land it for strikes.
Now, replacing Springer in the leadoff spot Tuesday with Corey Dickerson was an interesting choice, one that gave the platoon outfielder with a 97 OPS+ a greater opportunity to come back up for a late-game plate appearance than MLB’s best hitter, Vladimir Guerrero Jr., or one of its hottest in Semien. Speaking to reporters in New York, Blue Jays manager Charlie Montoyo suggested he went with Dickerson atop his lineup to not disturb the rest of a batting order that had scored 37 runs over the prior four games.
Hey, there’s nothing wrong with an unconventional approach, particularly if it’s founded in sound logic. But there isn’t evidence to suggest batting order position has a meaningful impact on performance. Good hitters are good hitters, regardless of when they make their first trip to the plate. And you don’t need a copy of Baseball Prospectus’ 2006 annual to know Dickerson’s 3-for-6 track record against Cole meant nothing — and that’s without even considering that two of those hits were singles in a game played on Aug. 2, 2013, when Cole was not only a rookie but a completely different pitcher than he is today.
And so, Dickerson struck out on four high-90’s fastballs to open the ballgame. But Kirk took one of those heaters the other way in the second, rifling an elevated full-count pitch into the short porch in right for a solo shot. And it was Dickerson who came up with Toronto’s next hit off Cole in the third, lofting a changeup over DJ LeMahieu’s outstretched glove at second for a single.
Semien walked to put another runner on but the Blue Jays couldn’t capitalize, and the Yankees came back in the bottom half, as Anthony Rizzo drove in Andrew Valazquez’s lead-off single with a two-out single of his own.
But just as quickly as New York tied it, Toronto retook the lead. Teoscar Hernandez singled on the first pitch Cole threw in the fourth. And Kirk reached with a grounder that kicked off LeMahieu’s glove on the next, moving Hernandez to third. Lourdes Gurriel Jr. needed only to lift a fly ball to deep centre to cash Hernandez, trading an out for a run and a fresh lead.
That’s the moment Cole’s injury predicament became apparent. In the process of walking Jake Lamb, he balked and bounced a slider in the dirt, allowing Kirk to advance through second to third. Six pitches later, Reese McGuire cashed Kirk with a sacrifice fly to centre, and as Cole watched the run score he pointed into his dugout for a trainer. A few terse words later, he handed the ball to his manager, Aaron Boone.
That made life substantially easier for Blue Jays hitters, Semien in particular, who blasted his 38th homer of the year leading off the fifth. Amidst the biggest power campaign a middle infielder has ever had in a Blue Jays uniform, Semien has a great shot at becoming only the fifth second baseman in MLB history to hit 40 homers in a season.
Not to mention Kirk, who took Clay Holmes to the opposite field in the eighth, his fourth time putting a ball in play at 100 m.p.h. or harder on the night. The Blue Jays simply must find a way to get Kirk’s bat into the lineup as often as possible over the next several weeks, as he’s providing an offensive element the club has often lacked both from the catching position and at the bottom of its lineup.
Just 22 and less than a year into his MLB career, Kirk continues to demonstrate a low heart rate, advanced approach, and preternatural bat-to-ball ability that belies his lack of high-level experience. In other words, the bat plays. Just another in a long list of things simultaneously going right for a team blitzkrieging through September with all the world’s momentum and moxie. They say no object’s truly immovable, no force irresistible. But the Blue Jays keep breaking the rules.
