An inherent part of the experience inside baseball’s last dive bar is that even routine fly balls can turn into an adventure and Jesus Sanchez sure went on a wild ride out in left at Tropicana Field on Wednesday night.
A Junior Caminero drive to the left-field corner in the first twisted up the outfielder, an eighth-percentile defender in Outs Above Average, as he ran to his left before lunging to his right, missing the ball, which bounced over the wall for a ground-rule double. The bizarreness of his route prompted the Tampa Bay Rays to ask for a crew-chief review, assuming the ball had hit the C-Ring catwalk above, which would have made the hit a home run, but the call stood.
No matter, as Yandy Diaz, batting with two outs in the frame because the ball wasn’t caught, crushed a Max Scherzer slider over the wall in left-centre to open the scoring.
Then in the fourth, after an Alejandro Kirk solo shot in the top of the inning halved the Rays lead, Richie Palacios looped a ball into short left with the bases loaded and one out. Sanchez charged in, seemed to lose it and was looking at shortstop Andres Gimenez when it dropped in to his right, allowing two runs to score.
Jesús Sánchez missed a fly ball and handed the Rays two runs. Max Scherzer was LIVID. ????pic.twitter.com/WUyzQL5o03
Scherzer, who had walked a pair around a single to create the jam, couldn’t stop the damage there, as Taylor Walls and Chandler Simpson each dropped a run-scoring bunt before Caminero’s RBI groundout capped a preventable five-run outburst.
All of which made the subsequent Toronto Blue Jays rally against Drew Rasmussen and eventual 7-6 loss so frustrating. Five runs off the all-star righty plus another off the bullpen should be enough to beat the American League East leaders more often than not, but not when poor defence makes an already tall task even tougher.
“Good teams take advantage of mistakes and that’s what they did today, played to their game and manufactured a couple of runs,” said manager John Schneider.
“You can always play the what-if game, OK, if this happens, you like your chances, Max going up against the bottom of their order with two outs, (but) you never know what’s going to happen in that at-bat, right? So missed opportunity, sure, just because you want to play clean, you want to play tight and just put your best foot forward and be in position to win. But give them credit for taking advantage of mistakes.”
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The Blue Jays scored four times in the fifth after falling behind 7-1, getting RBI singles from Charles McAdoo, Kirk and Kazuma Okamoto along with a Nathan Lukes sacrifice fly before McAdoo’s RBI double off Kevin Kelly in the sixth.
Some hard-hit balls later in the game didn’t fall, including one by pinch-hitter George Springer and another by Kirk off Bryan Baker in the ninth, as the Blue Jays (62-66) fell one game back of the Minnesota Twins (63-65) for the American League’s third wild-card spot.
They can still take the series versus the Rays (76-50) when Shane Bieber starts versus Ian Seymour in Wednesday afternoon’s finale, but dating back to 2024, they’ve lost nine of their last 11 games at the Trop, as always their house of horrors.
“For me, I’d rather execute the pitch better than sit here and go down the rabbit hole of this is Tampa, this is a weird park, yadda, yadda, yadda,” said Scherzer, tagged with an ugly pitching line of seven earned runs in four innings on five hits and three walks. “I’d rather sit here and say, be better. I’d rather look at myself and say, be better, so that’s how I look at things.”
Sanchez left the clubhouse without speaking to reporters, so his perspective on what happened on the plays in left field isn’t known. But his minus-6 rating in Outs Above Average – a metric that measures plays made relative to defensive peers – is among the worst in baseball, with only eight outfielders rating lower.
Balls to his right, with a minus-4 rating, are his most troublesome area and he went too far right only for the ball to land to his left in the first, while going too far left with the ball to his right in the fourth.
The defensive issues aren’t a surprise to the Blue Jays, but there are times when they prioritize offence over defence and against Rasmussen, Sanchez makes sense given that among hitters with more than 25 plate appearances against right-handed pitchers, he leads the team with an OPS of .802, even after striking out twice before being hit for in the sixth. He’s also third in homers versus righties with eight, behind Okamoto’s 19 and Springer’s 10, although the trade-offs defensively come with that.
And with Springer typically at DH, but Kirk there Wednesday to keep his bat in the lineup, Sanchez needs to play the field, which at the Trop with its light-tarp roof, adds to the potential for chaos.
“The first one was weird, looked like it went over the catwalk a little bit,” said Schneider. “If you take your eye off the ball here, it’s tough to have to regather it or where you are. Kind of looked like he took his eye off it on the first one and it’s tough to find it after that. The second one, I haven’t talked to him yet about it, but weird play coming in. I’m sure it’s a play he would have liked to have made and you’re sitting there two outs with Walls up in a 2-1 game, so you take your chances. But it looked like, again, kind of didn’t see it, or saw it and then didn’t see it, but yeah, you’ve got to check with him on what he saw and it kind of unravelled from there.”
Having loaded the bases with none out in the fourth, Scherzer rallied to strike out Ryan Vilade and looked to have a second out on the fateful Palacios ball. In running through the inning afterwards, he noted being able “to get a strikeout in a big situation and then obviously a missed play and mistakes.”
“But I’m not going to sit here and point fingers and talk about those things,” he continued. “I look at myself and I take accountability for my mistakes. Two walks, that’s not acceptable. Go back to the first, hanging slider, that’s not acceptable, so I’m a team guy, I don’t sit here and point fingers and talk about other people’s mistakes. I talk about my mistakes and I’m accountable when I stand here in front of myself and answer the mistakes that I made. I’m accountable for those.”
The plays in the outfield are on Sanchez and his troubled night is reflective of the risk-reward when run-creation gets prioritized over run prevention, the vagaries of the Trop further complicating the equation.
