Toronto Blue Jays catcher Dioner Navarro tags out New York Yankees right fielder Chris Young at home plate preventing a scoring run in the ninth inning.FRED LUM/The Globe and Mail
Roberto Osuna and Aaron Sanchez, at age 20 and 23 respectively, have done an admirable job of bolstering the back end of the Toronto Blue Jays bullpen for much of the season.
Recently, some cracks have begun to form in the tandem's armour, and the Blue Jays have begun to show some vulnerability in the eighth and ninth inning of close baseball games. The timing for such a concern could not be worse, with the team involved in the heavy slogging of a playoff chase. With so much at stake, the Blue Jays don't have time to pussyfoot around.
And on Tuesday, before locking horns once again against the New York Yankees in the Battle of the East at Rogers Centre, the team made a subtle change to the bullpen pecking order.
Osuna is still the closer but, for the time being anyway, the job of the eighth-inning setup man will no longer be the sole domain of Sanchez.
While Sanchez will still pitch in the eighth, he will also be called on to work in the seventh and maybe even the sixth inning, depending on the circumstances.
With solid veteran relievers such as Mark Lowe and Brett Cecil available as alternative set-up men, Toronto manager John Gibbons needs to do what it takes to put the Blue Jays over the top with less than two weeks remaining in the regular season schedule.
"We've talked to Sanchez – be ready at any time," Gibbons said. "We'll get him back on track."
In a rollicking, emotionally draining affair played out before another sellout gathering topping 47,000 at Rogers Centre, it was the Yankees who finally prevailed, walking away with a 6-4 victory.
Greg Bird proved the hero, knocking a three-run home run off Lowe in the top of the 10th inning to silence the audience when emotions were close to snapping in this roller coaster affair.
New York held a 3-2 lead heading into the ninth inning thanks to a Carlos Beltran home run off Toronto reliever Liam Hendriks in the eighth, but it wouldn't hold. Dioner Navarro hit a solo home run in the bottom of the ninth for the Blue Jays when he took New York closer Andrew Miller over the wall in left to tie things up. Josh Donaldson then would strike out with the bases loaded to miss out on a glorious opportunity to win it for Toronto. It was a similar fate that befell Edwin Encarnacion in the bottom of the eighth, striking out with the sacks full against Yankee reliever Dellin Betances.
During Toronto's 4-2 win in Monday's opener against the Yankees, Sanchez entered the game in the eighth inning with Toronto leading 4-0 and immediately issued a five-pitch walk to Didi Gregorius.
When Dustin Ackley then stroked a single, Gibbons's hook materialized quickly and Sanchez was yanked.
The Blue Jays would only surrender a run in the inning and go on win, but the outing for Sanchez continued a disturbing trend of late. He has now allowed four runs off nine hits over just 2 1/3-innings pitched in his past four games, good for an unseemly 15.43 earned run average.
His effectiveness against left-handed batters has also waned, with lefties hitting at a .286 clip on the year compared with a .173 average for right-handers.
While Osuna's rookie campaign has been impressive, he, too, has shown signs of slowing down. In Monday's game, Osuna surrendered a two-out home run in the ninth, the fourth homer he has allowed in his past seven outings, and fifth since the beginning of August.
Over the first four months of the season, Osuna only served up two round-trippers.
It would only be natural that both youngsters are starting to feel a pinch from competing when the stakes have never been higher, but pitching coach Pete Walker disagrees.
"You know what, I don't," he said. "And in talking to them they're anxious to get back out there. They're both pretty mild-mannered and they've handled it tremendously well this far. If everybody thought they were just going to cruise through it, I think they were making a mistake."
While Monday's game was smoking hot from the opening pitch, Tuesday's was more of a slow simmering affair where the intensity would grow to fever pitch.
The Yankees would go up 2-0 in the first inning, but the Blue Jays fought back on a Kevin Pillar home run in the third and a run-scoring single by Justin Smoak in the fourth.
The Yankees wasted a glorious opportunity to go ahead in a wild seventh, during which Jose Bautista threw out Gregorius at third base from right field on a play that the Yankee base runner was originally judged safe.
Toronto challenged the call and it was overturned. Replays clearly showed that Donaldson made a gorgeous spin-around tag on the play at third base, thrusting his glove in front of Gregorius's foot as it was about to come in contact with the bag.
The Yankees would load the bases in the frame, but reliever Hendriks would come in to record a huge strikeout of Alex Rodriguez to end the uprising.
Hendriks would not be so fortunate in the eighth against Beltran, who hammered his 17th of the season to right field.
Bautista kept it a one-run game in the ninth, gunning down his second base runner of the game – Chris Young at the plate – on just a great throw from right.