Jeff Hoffman Collapse Sinks Blue Jays in Ninth
Toronto had enough offence, enough pitching, and enough of a game to win. Then the ninth inning took the whole thing apart.
There are losses that arrive politely.
They shake your hand. They explain themselves. They leave behind a box score that makes sense.
Then there was Saturday.
The Blue Jays lost 6-5 to the Baltimore Orioles in a game that had already done most of the work required to become a small, useful road win. Toronto had 11 hits. Vladimir Guerrero Jr. had four of them. Trey Yesavage gave them 5.0 innings with one earned run and four strikeouts.
The Jays scored twice in the fourth, twice in the eighth, and once in the ninth.
Baltimore scored once in the third, then five times in the bottom of the ninth.
That is not a game story.
That is a door closing on your fingers.
The ninth did not unravel. It unspooled.
The bottom of the ninth is where the whole thing went grey.
Jeff Hoffman was on the mound when Leody Taveras tripled on a line drive to right fielder Nathan Lukes. Coby Mayo scored.
Then Jackson Holliday singled to right. Taveras scored.
Then Gunnar Henderson walked. Holliday scored, while Colton Cowser went to third and Taylor Ward went to second.
That was already enough damage for a person to start staring at the wall.
Then Connor Seabold entered, and the inning kept walking forward.
Adley Rutschman walked. Cowser scored. Ward went to third. Henderson went to second.
Then Pete Alonso singled on a ground ball to center fielder Daulton Varsho. Ward scored.
Game over.
The Jays had spent eight and a half innings gathering enough to survive, and Baltimore spent the bottom of the ninth feeding it into a shredder.
Hoffman’s final line is the kind that sits in the box score like a wet coat: 0.1 innings, five earned runs, one strikeout.
Seabold’s line says 0.0 innings, no earned runs, no strikeouts.
The inning says enough on its own.
The part before that was actually livable
This is what makes the loss miserable instead of merely bad.
There was a perfectly reasonable win hiding inside it.
Baltimore scored first in the bottom of the third, when Gunnar Henderson singled off Yesavage and Jeremiah Jackson scored.
Toronto answered in the fourth.
Jesús Sánchez doubled off Brandon Young to center field, scoring Guerrero. Then Ernie Clement singled to center, scoring Sánchez.
That was clean. That was baseball behaving like a sport instead of a plumbing emergency.
The middle innings settled. Louis Varland finished with 1.0 inning, no earned runs, and one strikeout. Yesavage gave the Jays length. Yariel Rodríguez had 1.0 inning, no earned runs, and one strikeout. Tyler Rogers worked 1.0 inning with no earned runs.
It was not a masterpiece.
It did not need to be.
The Blue Jays are not in a position to demand elegance. They are 29-30, with a .492 winning percentage, third in the division, and 7-3 over their last ten.
Useful is welcome here.
Functional is a gift basket.
For most of Saturday, the pitching was functional enough.
Then the final inning made the rest feel like an old receipt.
Guerrero kept knocking, and the house still fell down
Guerrero finished 4-for-5.
That should be a headline from a better evening.
Instead it becomes another sad little exhibit.
He scored on Sánchez’s double in the fourth. He scored again in the eighth when Kazuma Okamoto doubled off Keegan Akin on a sharp line drive to left, bringing home Nathan Lukes and Guerrero.
In the ninth, Guerrero doubled off Albert Suárez on a line drive to right. Lukes scored on the play, with Colton Cowser charged with a fielding error.
Four hits from Guerrero. Two RBI from Okamoto. Clement went 2-for-4 with an RBI. Sánchez had a hit and an RBI.
Toronto had 11 hits and left eight on base.
That is enough detail to explain both the hope and the regret.
The offence did not disappear. It did not spend the whole night tapping weakly at the glass. It built a game that could be won.
And then it had to watch the bullpen hand the ending to Baltimore.
There is a special cruelty in wasting a Guerrero night like this.
Not because one player is owed a win.
Because when the best hitter in the room gives you four hits, you would like the rest of the evening to have the decency to stand upright.
Sunday arrives anyway
The ledger still says the Blue Jays have won 2 of 3 against the Orioles in this recent stretch.
That is real.
Thursday was 2-1. Friday was 6-5. Saturday was the other 6-5, the one with the bruise.
Now Sunday brings Baltimore again, with Spencer Miles listed for Toronto and Kyle Bradish listed for the Orioles.
There is no long pause for mourning. Baseball does not offer bereavement leave for blown late innings.
The Jays have 239 runs in 59 games, 4.05 runs per game, a .244 batting average, a .690 OPS, and 55 home runs.
They are close enough to be interesting and flawed enough to be exhausting.
Saturday was both.
It had the Guerrero hits. It had the Okamoto double. It had Yesavage doing the hard, useful work.
Then it had the ninth.
Around here, the ninth always gets the last word.
React