TORONTO — With one of the biggest, loudest innings of baseball we’ve seen this season in Toronto, the Blue Jays put all of their devils to bed.
Addison Barger’s cold streak? Snapped. Jeff Hoffman’s Tuesday meltdown? That’s old news again. The Blue Jays, flirting with an ugly night in a stretch that’s had a few too many, just hit their season with another lightning bolt.
Wednesday’s 9-8 win over the Twins at Rogers Centre just kept demanding Barger have a moment. Barger didn’t take the first few offers, no matter how many times the game begged it of him and how many runners he saw standing on those bases, but Barger has always been capable of splitting a game wide open in a single second. It finally came with a line-drive double off the right-field wall in the bottom of the eighth, a ball hit so hard it barely bent as it fell.
By the time George Springer rounded third and found himself sprawled in the dirt beyond home plate as the game’s winning run, he exploded with emotion, howling into the air with both fists pumping in front of him. The crowd felt it, too, carrying its roar right into the next at-bat, chanting and wanting more.
Then came Hoffman, the man who’d allowed four runs just 24 hours ago and turned a win into a loss. This is the life of a closer, though. All night and all morning, Hoffman’s name sat in all the wrong headlines, but the lights cut off and his song played again just after 10:00 p.m. ET. A few minutes later, Hoffman was back where he belonged and back where he’s been 29 times this season, celebrating a save for one of the best teams in the American League.
