It's hard to imagine a worse day at the ballpark.
Your best player goes on the Injured List, you get swept in a six-hour doubleheader via back-to-back gut punches that included the ejection of a starting pitcher, and then you have to head to the airport.
Such was the life of the Toronto Blue Jays on their first Sunday in Buffalo, in what might serve as a season-defining day for baseball's nomads of 2020.
It started 90 minutes before the first pitch when manager Charlie Montoyo surprised reporters by telling them red-hot shortstop Bo Bichette, who is second in the American League in batting at .361, was going for an MRI on a sore right knee that he apparently hurt stretching here Saturday night.
The Blue Jays lost the opener, 3-2, as Brandon Lowe's ninth-inning home run capped the game suspended by Saturday's monsoon. Between games, they announced Bichette is going on the Injured List. He's going to be out at least 10 days but the news got even worse later Sunday night.
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Sportsnet said Bichette is going for a second opinion on a knee sprain and the Toronto Sun said the team fears he could be out a month. That would just about be season over for any playoff hopes for the Blue Jays.
In the nightcap, the Jays were an out away from victory until right fielder Teoscar Hernandez booted a ball in the top of the seventh to allow the Rays to tie the game. Willy Adames gave the visitors a 7-5 victory with a two-run homer in the eighth.
Bichette apparently suffered the injury while stretching and did not come out of Saturday's game.
But in spite of what happened on the field, the biggest loss was the Bichette news off it.
He was 9 for 16 in the first four Sahlen games and homered in the first three. With an extra-base hit and an RBI in seven straight games until Saturday, Bichette was the first shortstop to accomplish that feat since RBIs became an official stat in 1920.
Montoyo called him "a star in the making" Friday night. What a crippling loss.
"I don't really have a timeline," Montoyo said glumly. "It just wasn't good news for everybody when we heard it today. ... We lost at this point one of the best players in baseball the way he was swinging the bat. Somebody is going to have to pick up the slack. That's how it goes in baseball."
This is a tough sport for sure. But Sunday was really hard to fathom. The Blue Jays are 7-11, a record that could easily be reversed due to several killer losses, and are 1-4 in extra innings.
They just make enough bad pitches and have enough mental lapses in the field and on the bases to lose at crunch time. There's no margin for that kind of error in a 60-game schedule.
"It's definitely tough," said outfielder Anthony Alford, whose two-run homer in the fifth looked to be the big blow in the nightcap. "Early in the season you know you have 5 1/2 more months to go. Given the circumstances, every game counts right now."
And that's why pitcher Matt Shoemaker was particularly frustrated. He wanted to throw the whole seven-inning nightcap to save the bullpen and faced the minimum nine batters in the first three innings. But he thought he had an inning-ending strikeout to Yoshi Tsutsugo in the fourth, didn't get the call and then gave up a three-run homer.
Shoemaker howled going into the dugout and again on the bench. Plate umpire Vic Carapazza, a noted rabbit-ear among the men in blue, tossed him and Shoemaker bolted from the dugout in protest.
"I started playing baseball when I was 5. Never been tossed out of a game once," Shoemaker said. "This is the first time and I'm still shocked by that. I didn't use one word of profanity, didn't personally attack him and I still got tossed. I think it didn't help that there weren't any fans in the stands because he could probably hear everything I was saying. Even then, I was saying stuff like, 'That can't happen.'"
Actually, that's kind of appropriate for what happened to the Jays on Sunday. It was a sour way to end the first homestand in Buffalo. All the trepidation of coming here was pushed aside by the rave reviews the renovations to the ballpark have earned. But Toronto went just 2-3, with each loss in the game's final at-bat. The aesthetics on the field weren't good.
This team is young, probably too young. Montoyo came right out and said before they hit town this was development in the big leagues. That generally doesn't lead to success.
"We are so incredibly close to being an unbelievable team," Shoemaker insisted in some of his final words before hitting the plane to Baltimore. "We've got to do a lot of the little things better. You've just got to attack every day. Go out there tomorrow with the mindset we're going to play well and we're going to win."
