Last night, in the 7th inning, The Jays had the tying run on base, with two outs, with Adam Lind scheduled to bat. Yankees manager Joe Girardi, not being a complete idiot, brought in lefty reliever Matt Thornton.
Buck and Pat quickly inform us that Adam is 1 for 11 (with 8 strikeouts) against Thornton.
The camera pans to the Jays dugout, in anticipation of John Gibbons counter move. Gibbons sits.
We wait, we see Brad Glenn with a bat in his hand. Cool. Tough spot for a guy getting his first MLB at bat, but that's why we called him up. If not Glenn, then Steven Tolleson would bat. Right? Right?
Well, no, Lind bats. Pretty hard to believe.
After the game, we are told that Tolleson is dealing with some vision problems. He's had dry eyes and blurring vision for the past few days, so maybe not the best choice to pinch hit. The immediate question in my mind is why hasn't he been put on the DL? I mean, he might not need 14 days but, he's Steve Tolleson, we can survive without him for a few days. But, ok, he wasn't available.
That doesn't explain why Brad Glenn wasn't brought in. I mean we sent out Kevin Pillar because he wasn't happy that he was pinch hit for the night before. Not that he made a huge display of his anger. I didn't see it during the game. But, of course, the Blue Jays have never seen a player show a temper before (subtle sarcasm, did you notice it), so we had to make an example of him.
Actually, we've have guys throwing much larger temper tantrums on a daily bases. But this one, we can't abide, because......well because Pillar is the 25th man and if you are going to prove you run the team, it's easiest to use the 25th man as your example.
I'm really not one to complain when someone shows a bit of a temper, I figure I would have wanted to bat there, and it isn't like he showed up Gibby in front of all the fans. It wasn't shown on TV and I'd bet less than 50 people in the stands noticed it. But, ok we send him out. And up comes Glenn.
I figured that a contributing factor for calling up Glenn was that he has played some first base in the minors and with Edwin Encarnacion being run over the day before and Lind still limping, someone else that owned a first baseman's glove might me a good thing to have.
Apparently I was wrong.
Shi Davidi asked Gibby about the lack of a pinch hitter for Lind and:
"(Glenn) is not a first baseman. I guess he could play over there, I guess I could, too," said Gibbons. "It might have been a chance for Tolleson, we could have put Tolleson over there, but the last couple of days, something has happened to his eyes, he's having trouble seeing. He's been going to the eye doctor trying to figure it out, he can't play, we found that out (Wednesday), it kind of hamstrung us a little bit. If Lindy's in the game, the way the team is set up right now, unless he's DHing he's going to have to hit against some lefties."
Yes, frig, anyone can play first. But, Gibbons doesn't trust Glenn to catch balls thrown to him by the other infielders, for 2 innings.
Even if Glenn couldn't play first. Josh Thole was sitting on the bench, we've used him at first before. Glenn could have hit and Thole could have played first.
A day later and it still pisses me off.