Nathan Lukes Makes Blue Jays’ 7-5 Mess Useful
Toronto’s 11-inning win in Philadelphia was less a baseball game than a broken vending machine that finally gave out snacks.
Saturday’s 7-5 Blue Jays win over the Phillies makes almost no sense in written form.
This is how we know it was authentic.
Toronto scored early, got ambushed in the sixth, tied the game in the eighth, traded sacrifice flies in the 10th, then let Nathan Lukes hit the big red escape button in the 11th.
If this were a board game, the instructions would be missing and one of the pieces would be a boiled potato.
The Jays won with 10 hits.
The Phillies lost with 9.
Nobody made an error, which feels inaccurate emotionally, but the official record says 0 for each side, so apparently my living room was the only place committing mistakes.
Both teams left 9 on base.
A tidy number.
A terrible hobby.
The sixth inning became a trapdoor
For five innings, Philadelphia had 0 runs.
The Jays had grabbed one in the first on a Vladimir Guerrero Jr. homer off Aaron Nola and another in the third on Guerrero’s sharp single off Nola that scored Myles Straw.
Nice little 2-0 lead.
Nothing ornate.
Just enough to make a fan sit slightly upright and think, foolishly, perhaps this chair has lumbar support.
Then the bottom of the sixth happened.
Trea Turner homered off Max Scherzer to left center.
Bryce Harper homered off Scherzer to right center.
That alone was enough noise to make the furniture blink.
Then Spencer Miles took over, and Philadelphia kept rummaging around in the drawer.
Brandon Marsh hit a sacrifice fly to Nathan Lukes in right, scoring Luis Arraez.
Justin Crawford tripled to center fielder Brett Bateman, scoring Bryson Stott.
Philadelphia scored 4 in the inning.
Toronto’s 2-0 lead became a 4-2 deficit, which is less a plot twist than a Blue Jays subscription service.
Scherzer finished with 5.1 innings, 2 earned runs, and 4 strikeouts. Miles went 0.2 innings with 2 earned runs.
The game had officially put on a novelty hat.
The comeback used office supplies
The Blue Jays did not respond with thunder.
They responded like a small business completing forms in triplicate.
In the eighth, Andrés Giménez doubled off José Alvarado to center fielder Justin Crawford.
Guerrero scored.
George Springer scored.
Tie game, 4-4.
Giménez went 2-for-4 with 3 RBI, which made him less a middle infielder and more a municipal emergency service.
Guerrero went 2-for-4 with a homer and 2 RBI, so the front half of the comeback was basically Vlad building a table and Giménez finding the missing screws under the rug.
There were other box-score oddities, because of course there were.
Springer scored while carrying a line of 0 at-bats, 0 hits, and 0 RBI.
That is not a batting line.
That is a cameo in a locked-room mystery.
Jesús Sánchez went 1-for-3 after being activated from the 10-day injured list on July 31.
Ernie Clement went 2-for-5.
Brandon Valenzuela went 0-for-4 and still became very important later, because extra innings enjoy introducing characters in Act Eleven.
Extra innings wore a fake mustache
The 10th inning arrived and immediately started touching things.
In the top half, Giménez hit a sacrifice fly off Chase Shugart to right fielder Bryan De La Cruz.
Brett Bateman scored.
This was funny because Bateman went 0-for-6, and yet there he was, stomping on home plate in a road extra-inning game like the universe had mailed him a coupon.
A day earlier in the transaction log, Toronto selected Bateman’s contract from Buffalo.
Now he was scoring in the 10th in Philadelphia.
That is not a roster move.
That is teleportation with paperwork.
But the lead did not last.
In the bottom of the 10th, Luis Arraez hit a sacrifice fly off Louis Varland to center fielder Bateman, and Trea Turner scored.
Varland still finished with 2.0 innings, 0 earned runs, and 1 strikeout.
Baseball accounting remains undefeated and mildly rude.
So the score was 5-5.
The game, having already borrowed our afternoon and most of our coping skills, demanded an 11th inning.
Lukes finally ended the meeting
The top of the 11th was the release valve.
Chase Shugart was on the mound. Brandon Valenzuela was on base. Nathan Lukes came up and homered to right center.
Toronto led 7-5.
Lukes finished 3-for-6 with homer number 6 and 2 RBI.
He had also been the right fielder on Marsh’s sixth-inning sacrifice fly, because this game insisted on making every detail return later like a suspicious character in a stage play.
The bullpen deserves a small paper crown too.
Matt Waldron gave 1.0 inning with 0 earned runs after being claimed off waivers from the San Diego Padres on August 5 and activated on August 7.
Braydon Fisher gave 1.0 inning with 0 earned runs and 1 strikeout after being activated from the restricted list on July 31.
Lazaro Estrada gave 1.0 inning with 0 earned runs and 1 strikeout.
The total pitching line showed 7 strikeouts and 4 earned runs.
The Jays are now 56-62, .475, last ten 7-3, streak W2, division rank 5.
Still not glamorous.
Still very much a team living out of a duffel bag full of fresh name tags.
But they have won 2 of 2 against the Phillies, and Saturday’s win was ridiculous in the useful way.
Sunday brings Shane Bieber against Jesús Luzardo.
May the next one require fewer trapdoors and exactly the same amount of Nathan Lukes.
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