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Blue Jays prove they have ‘more than big bats’
- Updated: October 5, 2016
TORONTO — The Blue Jays’ fourth batter of the evening, Jose Bautista, led off the bottom of the second inning by slamming a home run to left that was so majestic that it looked as though it might scrape the girders of the open Rogers Centre roof.
The final Toronto hitter to step to the plate in the American League Wild Card Game on Tuesday night, Edwin Encarnacion, hit the ball even harder. His no-doubt three-run shot in the bottom of the 11th landed in the second level in left, gave his team a 5-2 win over the Orioles and sent the Blue Jays on to face the Rangers in the AL Division Series beginning Thursday (4:30 p.m. ET/TBS in United States, Sportsnet (English) and RDS (French) in Canada).
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Those two long balls only reinforced the notion that the Blue Jays are the kind of club that wins by simply pounding its opponents into submission. And it’s true that the starting lineup in this make-or-break game lined up six hitters in a row who had at least 20 homers in the regular season.
That line of thinking, though, lies somewhere between overly simplistic and just plain wrong.
The reality is that if not for Toronto’s good pitching, terrific defense and heads-up baserunning, it could have been the Orioles celebrating and spraying champagne.
And that bodes well for the Blue Jays during the rest of the postseason, when one-dimensional teams can be vulnerable. Look at Baltimore. The O’s led the big leagues in homers by a wide margin this season. But outside of one pitch to Mark Trumbo, Toronto’s pitchers were able to keep the Orioles’ hitters in the yard. And now they’re going home for the offseason.
When Baltimore did have a chance to manufacture some runs, the Blue Jays came up with timely plays on defense.
The O’s had a runner on second with one out in the fourth when third baseman …
