Opinion | Jays’ near-perfect homestand doesn’t end well. And an innocent iPad pays a price

When Chris Bassitt stomped into the dugout, he grabbed an iPad to scrutinize the evidence, then smashed the device. Gave it a couple of two-handed whomps, which fairly summarized his 38-pitch first inning.

An inning where he should have been off the mound after 17 pitches with three straight strikeouts at the top of the Seattle batting order.

But a seventh pitch to Jarred Kelenic (cutter at the corner) was called a ball. Ditto next hitter up — a ninth-pitch slider to Cal Raleigh, likewise biting the corner, likewise called a ball — and there were two runners on with two out.

Bassitt then hit Teoscar Hernández, which set the table for Taylor Trammell’s grand slam in his first at-bat of the season, and in a flash a 4-0 lead for the Mariners.

It’s a mug’s game, second-guessing strikes and balls. Which is why Bassitt wanted no part of dumping on home plate umpire Mark Carlson after Seattle had counter-rallied, following the Blue Jays’ earlier rally, in a 10-8 extra-inning loss by Toronto at the Rogers Centre on Sunday afternoon.

“I’m not going to talk about the first,” Bassitt said tersely, when asked about that adversely umped opening frame. “You know what happened. It is what it is. Umpiring’s hard.”

Well, mug-me.

That was some rather shabby misjudgment by the man behind the plate. It drove up Bassitt’s pitch count, dropped the Jays into an instant deep hole and impacted the shape of the game. Although it wasn’t why the Jays ultimately lost to close out a six-game homestand where they went 5-1, a six-game win streak overall halted. It was a very bad day for a bullpen, which has been lights out over the past fortnight but took this one on the chin.

Manager John Schneider had to two-step around his take on the affair. Because who wants to get slapped with a league fine for criticizing umpires, especially when there’s nothing to be gained? Though he understood Bassitt’s frustration and likely shared it: “Chris has a pretty good ability to keep things in perspective. Everyone has bad days, whether you’re a starter or — yeah, I’ll leave it at that. It’s unfortunate that Chris’s pitch count and score got to where it was in the first inning.”

In any event, after his totally justifiable hissy fit in the dugout, Bassitt had regained his cool coming back on the bump and persevered through the fifth inning, surrendering just one more hit while recording seven strikeouts. And Bassitt’s teammates had his back: slicing the lead in half in the bottom of the first, then going up 5-3 on a three-run moon shot by Bo Bichette in the second. Bichette was all over a changeup from Seattle starter Marco Gonzales. At 460 feet over the centre-field wall, it was Bichette’s second-longest career dinger and, with a 113-m.p.h. exit velocity, his fourth-hardest-hit ball ever.

Bichette didn’t even bother to look where it was going as he started his home run trot: “I knew it was out, from the feel. When you hit it like that, you just know.”

It was the sixth jack of the season for Bichette, who entered the game ranked fifth in the majors in hits.

Seattle put another run on the board — opposite-field homer by ex-Jay Hernández (who’d been having a miserable return to the Rogers Centre, striking out seven times across Friday and Saturday) in the sixth — before Raleigh went yard off reliever Yimi García in the eighth and plated Kelenic, who’d reached on an error by Santiago Espinal. That cut the Jays’ lead to 8-7.

The Mariners tied it in the ninth when pinch-runner Jose Caballero came around to score. Despite Matt Chapman doubling for the second time to lead off the ninth — he’d also singled and driven in a pair, and leads the majors with 15 doubles — Toronto couldn’t push another run across. So, it was on to extra innings.

In the 10th, Raleigh turned on a slider from Zach Pop that also scored Eugenio Suárez. For Raleigh (nicknamed the Big Dumper, on account of his large caboose) it was his second home run of the day and third of the series. George Springer singled in the bottom of the inning, but that was it for the Jays.

Raleigh has pop in his bat, but he started the day hitting just .220. Thus Schneider disputed the suggestion that Raleigh was a Jays killer.

“Not very tough to pitch to when you locate your pitches,” the skipper snorted. “He’s obviously got damage potential. And he’s got a lot of strikeout potential, too. When you execute your pitches, you usually get the job done.”

Which is as close as Schneider had ever come, in my memory, to ragging on one of his pitchers.

The bullpen had tossed 15 scoreless innings during this homestand prior to Sunday and hadn’t even allowed a hit, while walking two and striking out 26. Schneider elected to summon Pop, holding back fireballer Nate Pearson to use if the Jays had tied it in the 10th.

“Everyone’s going to have a bad day,” Schneider said, which was the phrase du jour. “Today we missed spots. And probably some pitch selection that could have been a little bit different. But I thought Anthony (Bass) did a fine job. The error hurt there on the ground ball to second, but Yimi did his thing. It just comes down to executing pitches and they’ve been on such a roll. It’s not going to be perfect every single day and today was an example of that.”

Schneider chose to emphasize the settle-it-down quality of Bassitt’s start: “That’s just the pro that he is. He was frustrated after that first, but he was bearing down getting through five. It sucks for him that the pitch count got where it did. Probably unnecessarily, as well as the score.”

Another tacit dig at Carlson.

Bassitt was sanguine about his aggravating afternoon: “I thought everything was great. Even the first inning I thought was great. My stuff was where I wanted it to be. It just didn’t go our way.” Once calmed down, his mindset was: “All right, I’ve got to get through five. I’ve got to save the bullpen, start putting up zeros.”

In the bigger picture, as the Jays departed for Boston, they could take heart from a darn good month of baseball: 18-10 on the season.

“We fight like crazy,” said Bassitt. “The group that we have, we trust each other and there’s really no give-up at any point. Obviously today was not great, but we have a lot to be happy about.

“Where we are now, how we’ve bonded, how hard we work. I think a lot of great things are to come in the future.”

Rosie DiManno is a Toronto-based columnist covering sports and current affairs for the Star. Follow her on Twitter: @rdimanno

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