Blue Jays takeaways: Reliever Brad Hand still has some problems to sort out as Cleveland touches him up in the 10th
Brad Hand #BradHand
The view from Deep Left Field on the Blue Jays’ 5-2 loss to Cleveland at Rogers Centre on Monday:
After Robbie Ray gutted his way through six innings, the Blue Jays brought two of their shiny new relievers out of the bullpen to put up a couple of zeroes before handing things over to closer Jordan Romano in the ninth.
Adam Cimber, who has been a revelation since being acquired from Miami at the end of June, threw a scoreless seventh inning. He has allowed just one run in 12 1/3 innings as a Blue Jay. Joakim Soria, picked up from Arizona at Friday’s trade deadline, made his Jays debut in the eighth and needed just 15 pitches to polish off the Guardians-to-be in order. Romano worked a shutout ninth.
But the Cleveland bullpen put up the same three zeroes that the home side did, so the call went to another one of the Jays’ new acquisitions, Brad Hand, for the 10th.
Hand led the majors in saves last season and had 21 for Washington this year when the Jays picked him up Thursday for young catcher Riley Adams. The lefty was expendable because the Nationals cleaned house at the deadline, but his tenure in D.C. ended with a rough patch.
He posted a 1.52 ERA with a tremendous opponent’s OPS of just .483 over 22 appearances from May 22-July 20 but allowed seven runs over 2 2/3 innings in his next three outings.
Hand pieced together two solid outings in a row, his finale with Washington and his Blue Jays’ debut Friday night, but the former Cleveland closer got rocked by his old team Monday.
In the first extra innings game in Toronto using the “free runner on second” rule, Hand’s first pitch went through catcher Alejandro Kirk to the backstop to move the runner up to third. His next pitch was hammered through the drawn-in infield for a go-ahead RBI single by Amed Rosario. Jose Ramirez followed, and Cleveland’s best hitter slammed a 94 mile per hour fastball 408 feet off the foul pole in left to blow the game open.
The good thing is that with Romano, Cimber, Soria, Tim Mayza and Trevor Richards all pitching well, the Jays can afford to let Hand work his way out of his struggles in lower-leverage situations. If he can, a team that had only one strong relief option for a while earlier in the season could have six down the stretch.
Ray scuffled through the first three frames Monday afternoon, running into the most trouble in the third inning.
“I haven’t faced this team this year … but they definitely made me work today,” Ray said. “They didn’t chase, they didn’t swing and miss a whole lot, but we grinded through six today. They made me battle for it, and props to them for doing that.”
In the third, the left-hander walked cleanup hitter Franmil Reyes on four pitches to load the bases with one out, then gave up back-to-back RBI singles to former Blue Jays farmhand Harold Ramirez and Oscar Mercado.
From that point on, though, Ray locked it in. He got Owen Miller on a soft liner to second base to end the inning, stranding runners at second and third, and didn’t give up another hit the rest of the way, retiring 10 of the final 11 hitters he faced.
Ray didn’t think that he got a second wind, but “I think I just kind of felt like I was hitting my spots a little bit better (after the third). I think my command started to turn around, I was hitting the edges. Slider came around, got a little more sharp. Definitely felt like everything started to sharpen up a little bit.”
It’s always a good test to see what a pitcher can do when he doesn’t have his best stuff, and by holding Cleveland to just two runs, Ray showed once again how much of a difference-maker he has become in the Jays’ rotation.
Mike Wilner is a Toronto-based baseball columnist for the Star and host of the baseball podcast “Deep Left Field.” Follow him on Twitter: @wilnerness
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