In Game 2 against the Mariners, Jordan Romano got beat on a good day. As he said, that’s baseball. It’s a cruel sport we can dissect six ways to Sunday but still doesn’t have to be rational and doesn’t have to make sense. (By ArdenZwelling)
TORONTO — It is the privilege and bane of MLB closers that, when the most meaningful moments and fate-changing postseason events occur, they’re the ones with the ball in their hand. They begin the chain of events that are remembered forever. They wear the glory or the heartbreak.
But for the guys who throw those balls or try to hit them with sticks or chase them around a field, there’s little reason to. It doesn’t help. It’s baseball. The game’s cruel. It’s irrational. It doesn’t make sense. We dissect these events down through endless layers of substrata like it’s a science. But it’s not. It’s closer to art, which isn’t the right word. Performance, execution, action — something like to that. Just a kid from Markham like Romano throwing a baseball as hard as he can.
“That's the hardest part,” Romano said. “But that’s the way baseball is. That's what we signed up for, you know? It’s that kind of game.” Quick sidebar — despite the three hits, Bass didn’t pitch poorly. Suarez doubled against a 96-m.p.h. Bass fastball right up in his kitchen. He hit a lazy fly ball — 79-m.p.h. exit velocity — with a four per cent hit probability. Tapia had 101 feet to run thanks to the shift he was playing in and covered only 96 of them before the ball fell in.
This is what he does. Quietly, Romano’s been one of the game’s best closers over the last two seasons, pitching to a 2.13 ERA that ranks sixth among 138 qualified relievers. The only full-time closer with a lower ERA is Emmanuel Clase . Romano’s is lower than Edwin Diaz , lower than Ryan Pressly , and lower than Liam Hendriks . Reliever ERA may not be everything. But in the results business of closing ballgames, it sort of is.
And of course he was. Romano had thrown 13 pitches to that point, 10 of them sliders. Pretty good bet. But Crawford still missed it with his barrel, lifting a weak, lazy, 70-m.p.h. pop up into the Bermuda triangle beyond second base. You’ve no doubt seen what happened next: Three sliders, three swinging strikes, Suarez down with authority. But the scouting report against Raleigh said fastball was the pitch, so Romano threw him four straight. The first three were OK. The last one missed out and over the plate, as the Mariners folk hero drove it into the gap for a double.
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