ST. LOUIS – The double-A New Hampshire Fisher Cats were an out away from a combined no-hitter against the Bowie Baysox on May 10, 2007, when reliever Tracy Thorpe and catcher John Schneider couldn’t agree on how to put Oscar Salazar away.
“I called slider away to a righty who chases sliders, he shook me, called it again, shook me, called it again, shook me,” recalled the Toronto Blue Jays manager. “I said, ‘OK,’ he threw a heater, double off the wall, no-hitter gone. Not that I remember it at all.”
The incident is one reason Schneider likes when catchers carry enough conviction in a game plan to visit the mound and tell a pitcher to throw whatever sign he puts down. At the same time, a pitcher needs to trust in what he’s throwing, which is what makes the back-and-forth between batterymates so layered.
“When a pitcher is convicted in what he’s throwing, it’s usually a better version of that pitch, too,” said Schneider. “A convicted pitch that may be the wrong pitch sometimes is better than an unconvicted pitch that is the right pitch. It’s a fine line.”
The line is even finer when a pitcher has eight different offerings and is still building rapport with a new catcher, which in combination with the pitch clock is why Chris Bassitt opted to call his own game through PitchCom in his Toronto Blue Jays debut Sunday afternoon.
Between a dip in his velocity across the board and a pivotal misplay behind him, it didn’t go well, and the way the buttons were pushed wasn’t likely to have made much of a difference as the right-hander surrendered four home runs in a 9-4 drubbing from the St. Louis Cardinals.
In total, Bassitt allowed nine runs on 10 hits and gave up balls hit at 99.8 m.p.h. or higher on six different offerings, an outcome that left him “at a loss for words a little bit” because he’d “never had a game” in which such a wide variety of pitches were hit hard.
“We’ll go over all of it,” Bassitt said of his process in the coming days. “Release heights, all that stuff, see if I was tipping, any aspect of it. We have a lot of people working that stuff, so we’ll figure out what happened. And sometimes you’ve just got to say they were a really good team and they beat the heck out of me today.”
The Cardinals did that while employing a more aggressive approach than usual, as he was ambushed right from the first pitch when Brendan Donovan turned on an 89.4 m.p.h. fastball and sent it over the wall in left. One pitch later, Alec Burleson launched a 91.1 m.p.h. four-seamer to left and after a two-out Willson Contreras single, Nolan Gorman yanked a first-pitch curveball over the centre-field wall for a 4-0 lead.
After the Blue Jays rallied with a three-spot in the second on a Matt Chapman RBI double, Whit Merrifield sacrifice fly and Jansen run-scoring single, Bassitt took more damage in the third after a miscue in the outfield.
Burleson opened the inning with a pop-up that had a hit probability of one percent but was misread in a spotless blue sky by Daulton Varsho for a double. One batter later, Nolan Arenado singled him home and Gorman then hammered his second homer of the day, this one on an 88.7 m.p.h. cutter.
The Cardinals added three more runs in the fourth before Bassitt’s day was up and the Blue Jays bats, save for a Merrifield RBI single in the sixth, were held at bay from there before 45,525 at Busch Stadium.
“They were aggressive early in the count for sure. I think he was just too much in the middle of the plate,” said Schneider. “That becomes contagious once you get rolling a little bit. But they’re a good team and a lot of pitches in the middle of plate. They didn’t miss them.”
Bassitt’s uniquely large pitch mix can make calling his games especially complicated and the 34-year-old’s deliberate and analytical approach to pitching only adds to the challenge. In an ideal world, he’d prefer to have the catcher do the heavy lifting but with only 15 seconds between pitches, or 20 with runners on, there isn’t enough time to cycle through signs.
Punching his offering into the keypad on his glove just before toeing the rubber, he didn’t feel there was any disruption to his rhythm in calling his own game, saying “I think it was pretty good.”
Jansen felt similarly and didn’t find himself in the unusual position of having to shake off his pitcher.
“We had a game plan from the get-go and in between innings we were talking about how we want to attack guys so we’re on the same page,” said Jansen. “The communication was great throughout. If anything, I need to do a better job of perhaps leaving my glove up in the zone. We’ll watch it back and see.”
Part of what they’ll see is a Cardinals team that scored 22 runs while taking two of three from the Blue Jays to open the season, the 11th most runs out of the gate in franchise history, while their 41 hits were tied for the second most through the first three games.
“It’s obviously a good offence over there,” said Jansen. “The whole series, but especially today, it just seemed like they didn’t really miss. They were clearly coming out and being aggressive. Sometimes you’ve got to tip your cap to them.”
