Blue Jays' Granderson reverses negative trends with mammoth day

TORONTO — Curtis Granderson came into Sunday with 1848 big-league games under his belt, which doesn’t leave a tonne of room for firsts. In MLB contest number 1849 he found one, though, driving in six runs in a game for the first time.

“The cool thing about this game is that every time you do stuff out on the field something can happen that’s never happened before,” he said after a 13-3 bludgeoning of the Baltimore Orioles. “Sure enough that ended up happening today for me.”

Whatever you think about RBI, that’s a pretty solid achievement, and it made Granderson the engine of the dominant win. The big day was especially important for the veteran outfielder given his little-publicized recent woes.

“Grandy has been scuffling a bit, there’s no doubt,” manager John Gibbons said. “A couple of days ago I was sitting next to DeMarlo [Hale] at the beginning of the game and I said ‘You what we need today is somebody, just one guy to have a monster type game’. Because you see that every now and then and it carries you a little bit. That’s what he did today.”

Since a big April, Granderson has struggled mightily. That slump has fallen under the radar because he doesn’t play every day, his overall numbers are buoyed by his start, and he probably benefits a little bit from a “good guy bias” that shields him from criticism a touch. All of that said, his rolling OPS tells the story of a guy who’s been slipping in recent weeks.

From May 1 on, Granderson has hit a paltry .152/.280/.273 in 100 trips to the plate, which is ugly for a bat-first player — or anyone for that matter.

If Sunday is any indication, though, those worries could be in his rearview mirror. Granderson showed off just about anything you could ask from a hitter in his 4-for-5 day — and got a little love from the baseball gods to boot. In the first inning, he led off with a walk that involved him taking some very close pitches from Alex Cobb. It looked like this:

In his next at-bat, he got the aforementioned visit from Lady luck. Granderson got under a Cobb splinter and popped it up into left field only to see it somehow fall in to score the Blue Jays’ first two runs of the day. Statcast gave it a five percent hit probability.

There’s no doubt whatsoever that Trey Mancini flubbed the read and didn’t come in a hard enough, but a hit’s a hit and it seemed to set Granderson on his way.

In his next at-bat he needed no luck whatsoever. Cobb — on his last legs — attacked the veteran with three consecutive splitters below the zone that he took to make the count 3-0. Then the right-hander put a fastball up in the zone, figuring that the normally-patient Granderson would let it sail by.

The prediction wasn’t entirely incorrect. The ball did do some sailing, but instead of traveling over the plate peacefully it set a course for the right-field seats at 102.3 mph. It was only the third time this season Granderson had swung 3-0, but he picked his spot perfectly.

“Early on in my career I didn’t like to hit 3-0,” he said in something of an understatement considering he didn’t swing once in 104 chances with that count in the first five years of his career. “But as I’ve gotten more opportunities to do it and learn that I still have to stay within myself, I still have to get a pitch to hit, I still have to put a good swing on it, I think I’ve put myself in a situation where I can trust that I can do it.”

The 37-year-old’s next hit again showed off a different kind of prowess as he had to go get a changeup in the lower-outside quadrant of the zone from Pedro Araujo. Once again, he proved up to the challenge reaching for the pitch and pulling it into the right-field gap.

At that point Granderson had secured his personal record and for all intents and purposes the Blue Jays had secured the win. Even so, his last hit of the day is worth noting as well because it came on yet another different type of pitch in another novel location. This time Mike Wright Jr. figured he could get the slugger with a back-foot slider, the bane of many a good left-handed hitter.

Wright didn’t get it quite as far inside as he wanted and Granderson had little difficulty with it, poking it into centre for a seemingly superfluous addition to his monster day.

Now, one good game is never going to prove a player is out of a slump, much in the same way that one sweep of the Baltimore Orioles doesn’t say anything definitive about a baseball team. However, were such a game to exist, it would be this one where Granderson hit everything from elevated heat to all manner of low offspeed pitches.

The Blue Jays elder statesman may not be definitively back on the right track, but it would be foolish not to feel a little better about him today than you did yesterday.

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