Blue Jays 2006 Rewind: A Towering Roadblock

Looking in for the sign atop the rubber, Josh Towers stood a strike away from getting his year off on the right track.

It was the third game of spring training, and Towers had Phillies leadoff hitter Shane Victorino in a two-strike hole to start the game. Bengie Molina called for a curveball to put away the Flyin’ Hawaiian, and Towers delivered...an absolute cement mixer. The ball spun aimlessly over the top half of the plate but somehow found its way into Molina’s glove. Swing and a miss.

“I’m not going to get that lucky that often,” said the right-hander afterwards, an unfortunately prophetic quote for his upcoming season.

Towers would begin the 2006 season in the Blue Jays' rotation, the third straight year he would break camp as a starter. He signed a minor league deal with Toronto prior to 2003, and after joining the rotation in August, he won four of his final five starts. He started slow in ‘04 and got no better than bland (9-9, 5.11 ERA) but arrived to spring the following year with his spot safe when Toronto decided to move Miguel Batista into ninth inning duties. While the top of Toronto’s rotation fell off with injury or performance issues in ‘05, Towers stepped up to be an unsung workhorse, throwing a team-leading 208.2 innings and walking only 29 hitters across 33 starts.

So there was no hesitation in letting Towers step up again when Toronto left Dunedin a little thin in the rotation. Roy Halladay would get his usual game one assignment, but with A.J. Burnett and Ted Lilly injured, manager John Gibbons slotted Towers into the second spot behind his ace. Following the renditions of the national anthems by Blue Man Group to a sold-out crowd on Opening Day, Halladay was terrific, pitching into the eighth while his new battery-mate Molina’s fourth inning home run powered Toronto to a 6-3 victory.

The Blue Jays also honoured Tom Cheek, who had passed away the previous October. In the previous year’s opener in Tampa, a gravely ill Cheek sat in with Jerry Howarth and Warren Sawkiw for his final play-by-play appearance during the fourth inning. The Blue Jays scored three in the frame and beat the Devil Rays 5-2. With his dad being acknowledged before the game, Cheek’s son Jeff joined the radio broadcast for the fourth, another three-run inning, with Molina’s home run sailing over Cheek’s name on the Level of Excellence. (photo credit: Sportsnet)

Towers made his season debut the next night in front of a much smaller crowd, who roared early thanks to back-to-back home runs from new Jays Troy Glaus and Lyle Overbay. Towers retired the first eight Twins he faced but ran into trouble in the fourth. The Twins had used four hits to cut the lead to 4-2 and had two runners in scoring position with two away. An 0-1 pitch to Jason Kubel was hit right back at Towers and deflected off the pitcher towards shortstop Russ Adams. With no chance of getting Kubel or the runner at home, Adams instead pivoted cross-body and threw the ball past Glaus’ glove at third and into the home dugout to tie the score. When Shannon Stewart took Towers deep to lead off the fifth, Minnesota grabbed the lead and never looked back. As the Jays walked off the field in a 13-4 defeat, the dwindled crowd of 18,156 chanted ‘Go Leafs Go’ in support of their local 10th-place team who would miss the upcoming NHL playoffs. 

An injury to Gregg Zaun to start the season had opened the door ever-so-slightly for Jason Phillips, and the third catcher in camp did his best to get fully in. Up with two outs and the bases loaded in the sixth in the series finale, Phillips lined a first pitch over the glove of a leaping Nick Punto at short, kick-starting a four-run rally in an eventual 6-3 win. Phillips’ clutch hit and his work with starter Gustavo Chacin, who pitched into the seventh wearing a dab of his newly-released cologne, earned the catcher big marks with his skipper.

“Nobody knows,” Gibbons said in a mock-spooky voice when asked what would happen with Zaun’s impending return. “Maybe we could send Glaus down. He may have an option.”

Phillips watched from the bench as Toronto’s bullpen blew a 6-2 lead after a solid spot start from Scott Downs in the series opener with Tampa Bay. Phillips, not Glaus, would be sent down after to make room for Zaun, whose fifth inning home run the following afternoon put Toronto ahead in an 8-4 win. Starring for the Blue Jays was Brian Tallet, who earned a spot on the roster with a sparkling spring. In his second appearance, Tallet pitched out of a bases-loaded mess left by a season-debuting Lilly in the third and stayed on for two more scoreless innings to the delight of his catcher.

“I’m back there cracking up,” said Zaun. “The stirrups, I absolutely love ‘em. The chops are awesome...it’s just a tremendous look. He should’ve pitched yesterday on Flashback Friday.”

It was the first major league win for Tallet since his major league debut on September 16, 2002, when he shut out the Red Sox over six innings in the second game of a doubleheader. “My first hitter was Rickey Henderson, and I walked him on a 3-2. I remember thinking, ‘I just started my career by walking a guy with 1,000 stolen bases. Not too good.’...got a double play to get out of the inning. It was so surreal.” (photo credit: Yahoo Sports)

After a loss in the series finale, Toronto headed to Boston for the Red Sox’s home opener. Towers started and found trouble early in a four-run second inning. The Blue Jays lost and would also lose Towers’ next start in the final game of the six-game road trip in Chicago, one in which the starter only lasted six outs. Jermaine Dye and Jim Thome hit a pair of two-run blasts in the first inning on a soggy night at The Cell, a 6-4 White Sox win in an abbreviated five innings to drop the Blue Jays to 6-6.

“I need to figure out what is wrong and fix it,” lamented Towers.

Fortunately for the Blue Jays, the struggles hadn’t extended to their offence. After drying off, Toronto returned home for a two-game set with New York, and with over 48,000 inside Rogers Centre, the Blue Jays responded to an early deficit with three runs in each of the first two innings, highlighted by two-run longballs from Glaus and Alex Rios. The crowd cheered when New York starter Randy Johnson departed during the fourth and delighted even further when Gary Sheffield fumbled a one-handed catch. Glaus hit another home run in the eighth inning in the 10-5 win, giving him five and 13 RBI on the season, hitting cleanup behind Reed Johnson (.458 on the year), Rios (.395), and Vernon Wells (.389). Toronto was held to a run by Mike Mussina the next night but put up some crooked innings in wins to follow over the Red Sox. 

The opportunity for a series sweep lay in the hands of Towers and vanished seven batters into the game. Towers hit the leadoff hitter and gave up three runs on four hits in the first, the big blow coming on a David Ortiz opposite-field home run. The Blue Jays could not overcome the rough beginning in a 6-3 loss that dropped Towers to 0-4. He threw only 58 of 95 pitches for strikes, a worrying trend after Towers had been so good with his command in ‘05. In four starts, Towers had walked eight hitters, a number he reached on June 2 last year.

“He’s not missing by much,” said Gibbons, literal and maybe figurative glass half full of Bud. “I would say that what’s hurting him is a few too many mistakes...like keeping the ball up.”

When Towers’ turn came back up, the Blue Jays found themselves atop the AL East with a red-hot Shea Hillenbrand at the plate. Toronto’s designated hitter went 7-for-9 as the Blue Jays took two of three from the Orioles, and in the next game, Hillenbrand went deep twice for the first-place Blue Jays in a 7-2 win over the Yankees. Hillenbrand had started the year slowly, and you would hope the hits would turn Eeyore around because, yeah, he was not sounding great about his role on the team.

“I decided to just accept it and move on because the only person I'm hurting otherwise is myself,” Hillenbrand said about DHing before the opener in New York. “The team isn't going to care. For them, it's all about winning. How I feel isn't really that important in everything, and that's one of the things I've had to come to terms with.”

In first place with the slimmest of leads, the Blue Jays received, in the words of Gibbons, “the first kicking we’ve taken all year.” Trouble would find Towers early and often, chaos that had symbolized his month. With runners on the corners with one out in the first, Towers fielded a high chopper and turned to second base, only to be greeted by an already sliding-and-arriving Sheffield, who was running on the pitch.

“That's just typical for me of what's been going on," Towers said afterwards. “I don't even know why I looked at second base. I know that at 3-2 (count) with one out, he's running. I've got to look (the runner back to third) and take the out at first.”

What followed was also, sadly, typical for how the month had gone for Towers. The next hitter, Jason Giambi, went deep for a now three-run shot to put the Yankees in front 4-2. Another solo blast in the second widened the lead, but Toronto continued to find success against the Big Unit, tying the game with three runs off New York’s starter in the third. Then the train wreck started. Towers recorded only one more out, departing after an RBI double by Hideki Matsui that started the Yankees towards a 17-6 blowout. In the win, New York became the sixth team in American League history to score in every inning of a game. 

In his first five starts, Towers allowed the opposition to slash a first ballot-worthy .388/.450/.643 and finished the month with a 10.45 ERA. For Gibbons, his starting options were few. Recent call-ups Dustin McGowan and Shaun Marcum were part of the Yankees making history, and worse, Burnett was back on the injured list. On April 22, Burnett left after four innings of his second start, jumped on a plane, and flew to see Dr. James Andrews. A former fourth-round pick from UCLA would debut to replace Burnett, and as the season flipped to May with Toronto sitting at 12-11, Casey Janssen would start picking up starts in a way Towers couldn’t.