Blue Jays' embarrassing Game 4 puts Royals on the cusp of the World Series
TORONTO – The final indignity jogged in from the bullpen at 7:32 p.m. Cliff Pennington is an infielder, not a pitcher. He was being asked to play one because the rest of the Toronto Blue Jays pitchers' had so spectacularly bungled Game 4 of the American League Championship Series. And the saddest part, the biggest knee to the groin on a day like Tuesday, was when the position player looked better than his teammates paid to pitch.
Never before in baseball's postseason had a position player thrown from the mound in a game, though, to be fair, few games devolved into the sort of blowout featured at Rogers Centre on Tuesday. Whatever carryover the Blue Jays hoped to take from a Game 3 victory disappeared within 10 minutes, and the next 3½ hours only added to the slaughter. Just eight games in playoff history carried a greater margin of victory than the Kansas City Royals' 14-2 whitewashing of the Blue Jays in front of a 49,501-person crowd that moaned and groaned as Kansas City put itself on the cusp of its second consecutive World Series.
Thirty years ago, the Royals stared at the same 3-to-1 deficit the Blue Jays now face – win the final three games of the ALCS, including the last two on the road – and conquered it. While this Toronto team is well capable of stringing together such a run, the sour taste of Game 4 was as palpable to the Blue Jays as was a victory so saccharine for Kansas City.
"It was ugly today," Blue Jays manager John Gibbons said. "No doubt about that. That's all I can say."
"It's Kansas City Royals baseball," Royals first baseman Eric Hosmer said. "It's what we do."
The contrast between the two teams manifested itself from the beginning of the game, when Kansas City jumped on Blue Jays knuckleballer R.A. Dickey for four first-inning runs. The Royals offense that a day earlier rapped 15 hits in an 11-8 loss peppered Dickey with a jab (Alcides Escobar bunt single), a haymaker (Ben Zobrist home run) and other assorted shots he couldn't weather. When a knuckleball is bad, it's not just bad. It's catastrophic.
Though the ball danced its standard dance, Dickey never could tame it. An erratic knuckleball is perhaps the worst pitch in baseball. However oxymoronic a slow fastball sounds, at least pitchers can command it. A bad knuckleball lingers like hot garbage, fetid and ripe and ready to be taken out, which outfielder Alex Rios obliged in the second inning. If the first inning tranquilized the crowd, a home run from Rios – a longtime Blue Jay whose return has been greeted with constant animus – added a taser shot for good measure.
"It was nice," Rios said. "Yeah. It was nice."
He said it almost sheepishly, unwilling to acknowledge the significance of the moment personally. Before Game 4, Royals manager Ned Yost approached Rios and told him: "You're going to have a great game today." Now the Midas of the playoffs – from Escobar's .600-plus on-base percentage in the leadoff spot this postseason to yanking starter Chris Young at just the right time, after 4⅔ innings – Yost on Tuesday wrote out the same lineup he always does and watched the bottom three of Salvador Perez, Alex Gordon and Rios score six runs.
"There's no dead spots in that lineup," Yost said. "The offensive sequence continues to flow from one to nine, and that's big. That's big. You don't get to a point where you're saying, 'Oh, man, we're at the bottom of the order,' where the offensive rally will stop. These guys all have the ability to keep a rally going."
Kansas City never relented, not after Dickey was yanked with two outs in the second inning, his shortest start in more than seven years, not after Liam Hendriks managed to quiet their lineup for 4⅓ innings, certainly not when the rest of the Blue Jays' relief corps arrived and played log on the fire lit long before them.
LaTroy Hawkins didn't record an out and gave up three runs. The Royals pummeled Ryan Tepera for four runs. The two that Mark Lowe allowed came after Pennington arrived from the bullpen to a solid ovation. The Royals reduced Rogers Centre to cheering for a sideshow.
When the 31-year-old Pennington threw his first pitch and the stadium radar gun registered 90 mph, it marked the highlight of the day for Toronto. Which, considering the circumstances – it being the playoffs and all – felt like the most Pyrrhic of victories. Pennington managed to break the bat of the first hitter, Paulo Orlando, and the ball still found the turf in right field.
"It was getting so ugly," Gibbons said. "You try to have a little pride anyway. I hate to use position players. Maybe we made history."
Not the sort about which they'll brag anytime soon. For a team with a 22-year playoff drought before this season, the Blue Jays' most ignominious moments tend to be small potatoes. Never were they annually dreadful like the Royals, who after that 1985 ALCS went nearly three decades without a postseason and sprinkled in 100-loss seasons for goofs. Mediocrity has its perils, certainly, but little compares to having a bullpen so thin and ragged that a position player needs to enter the game to salvage what's left of a game lost long before.
Pennington, for his part, tried to play good soldier. He had pitched at Texas A&M, run his fastball up to the mid-90s, thrown on the side figuring a day like this might come. Just not in a situation like this, where games like this decide a pennant that Kansas City can cinch Wednesday at 4 p.m. ET.
"We've got a good chance to get back to the big dance," Hosmer said. "But you've got to realize the ballclub we're playing over there. It's a team that can explode at any time."
In a good way, he meant, though Game 4 illustrated a far different kind of conflagration. The Blue Jays went kaboom, from starter to relievers to Cliff Pennington, and it was so ugly their manager said it twice. He didn't want to leave any doubt.
