The Canadian Press
TORONTO—Advantage Texas Rangers.
The underdog AL West champions, no strangers to being written off, spoiled the Blue Jays’ long-awaited return to the post-season yesterday afternoon by beating Toronto ace David Price en route to a 5-3 win.
Rangers’ manager Jeff Banister sent Cole Hamels, his marquee man, to the mound this afternoon to face Marcus Stroman in Game 2.
There’s a ways to go in the best-of-five series but Texas is smiling while Canada has its fingers crossed.
“I care a ton,” said a disappointed Price.
“I want to go out there and pitch well for my teammates and pitch well for this country, and I didn’t do that today.”
A sell-out crowd of 49,834, waving rally towels, lived and died with every pitch under the roof at the Rogers Centre, which last saw playoff action in 1993 when the Jays won a second-straight World Series.
Russell Martin, the Jays’ Canadian catcher, called the atmosphere “awesome.”
“The fans were great. Good energy, from start to finish,” he noted.
“The only thing that wasn’t good was the result.”
Rougned Odor and Robinson Chirinos homered and combined to score four of the Rangers’ runs as the bottom of the Texas order took its toll on Price, who was pitching on 11 days rest.
Price, who left after seven innings, gave up five earned runs on five hits with five strikeouts and two walks.
He threw 90 pitches, 59 for strikes, in taking the loss.
“That’s baseball. If you don’t like it, pitch better,” Price said, quoting a slogan that hangs in his locker.
“That’s something I always say.
“I definitely don’t like the result of what happened today, but there’s a lot of things that were in my control today and I didn’t control those things,” he remarked.
Price, who did not hit a batter as a Jay during the regular season, hit Odor twice in five innings—a Toronto playoff record.
Both times the Texas second baseman came home to score.
Odor, a 21-year-old from Venezuela, is the second-youngest player to score three runs in a post-season game, according to ESPN Stats.
Only Andruw Jones (in the 1996 World Series) was younger.
For all his regular-season exploits, Price now has lost six-straight in the playoffs since a win over Boston back in 2008.
“It’s been about seven years so I want that monkey off my back,” Price stressed.
“I expect to have better results out there on the field,” he added.
“I didn’t throw the ball the way that I’m capable of today [but] I’ll be ready to go whenever it’s my turn again.”
The Rangers never trailed, scoring twice in the third and fifth before adding a single run in the seventh.
Toronto, limited to single runs in the fourth, fifth, and sixth, outhit Texas 6-5 but only was 2-for-9 with runners in scoring position.
Jays’ manager John Gibbons called it one of those games.
“He [Price] didn’t give up many hits,” he noted.
“The key ones were the two home runs—the two-runner by Chirinos and then Odor getting him later, that was really the difference in the game.”
Texas only won two of six games against Toronto during the regular season and Yovani Gallardo was on the mound for both.
He started strong yesterday, retiring the first nine Jays he faced before exiting after five innings with a 4-2 lead.
Texas manager Jeff Bannister, whose Rangers seemed to come into the series with a chip on their shoulder given the attention on the Jays, pointed to his team’s resolve in the wake of the win
“We’ve got a very confident group of guys,” he remarked.
“We’ve got a group of guys that they absolutely love playing together and they’ve been up against it all year long since spring training.
“So it’s not anything that we haven’t faced already about what is said on the outside about our ball club,” Banister added.
“We know that we’re a ball club that’s not a perfect ball club, but we’ve got a group of guys that play extremely well together.”
Both teams lost key players during the game, with Jays’ MVP candidate Josh Donaldson and right-fielder Jose Bautista and Texas third baseman Adrian Beltre leaving early with injuries.
Toronto said Donaldson, dinged in the head by Odor’s knee in breaking up a double play, had cleared the concussion protocol.
“I think he got a little light-headed, [felt] something wasn’t right,” said Gibbons.
“But he did pass the test so that’s a good sign.”
Bautista, meanwhile, was diagnosed with a hamstring cramp and is not expected to miss any more action.
But the Jays announced this morning that both Donaldson and Bautista would be in the starting lineup for today’s game.
An MRI showed a lower back strain for Beltre, with no immediate word on his availability.
Bautista homered deep to left-centre off reliever Keone Kela to open the bottom of the sixth, cutting the Texas lead to 4-3 and lifting hopes.
The Jays’ slugger paused to admire his first-ever post-season blast, then trotted around the bases.
One hitter later, Edwin Encarnacion almost repeated the feat but his blast went just foul.
Odor’s line-drive homer to right in the seventh made it 5-3—shushing the crowd after Bautista’s homer.
Hard-throwing Sam Dyson got the save for Texas, hitting 98 m.p.h. in the ninth.
Encarnacion opened with a single but the Jays came up short.
“The thing we’ve got going for us is I think we have been resilient all year,” said Gibbons.
“One thing I know about us is we always seem to respond.”
“I still like our team,” said Martin. “We fought hard all year.
“I don’t know how many series that we lost the first game and still came out and won the series,” he noted.
“It’s good to have that in the back of your mind.”
“It’s one game,” said Bautista. “We’ve still got to go out there [Friday] and keep winning games, and we have to go to Texas anyway and win there.
“So it doesn’t change anything about our approach.”
Houston beat Kansas City 5-2 in the opener of their ALDS last night.
