The Blue Jays-Rangers blood feud gets the extraordinary ending it deserves

The Blue Jays are headed to the ALCS for the second consecutive year. (USA Today)

A medium-hit ground ball to the left side is about as mundane a play as baseball offers, and yet therein lies the beauty of the game. Earlier this year, it precipitated the biggest swing taken on a field this season – and with a fist no less – and Sunday night, when the Toronto Blue Jays and Texas Rangers continued their yearlong blood feud, it ended a season. When these two play, even the ordinary births the extraordinary.

This particular play took about eight seconds to unfold, ticks of the clock jam-packed with history and magnitude and action. Russell Martin two-hopped a ball into the shortstop hole, and Elvis Andrus gloved it and flipped it to Rougned Odor, and Odor, the Rangers’ 22-year-old second baseman and author of the May cold-cocking, yanked the throw that could’ve gotten Texas an inning-ending double play, and it got away from first baseman Mitch Moreland, who gathered himself too late to nab the mad-dashing Josh Donaldson from sliding his left hand across home plate safely. It was chaotic and frenzied and everything this Blue Jays-Rangers rivalry embodies.

And, yes, the Blue Jays and Rangers are rivals, as unlikely as Ken Bone is a celebrity, because their games ooze with meaning. Even if Sunday’s put to bed a lopsided American League division series, which the Blue Jays swept in three games with a rousing 7-6 victory in the 10th inning in front of a giddy 49,555 at Rogers Centre, there was something ultimately fulfilling about it – proof, perhaps, that baseball can generate feuds that don’t subsist purely on geography or divisional alignment.

The Blue Jays and Rangers legitimately dislike one another, going back to even before Jose Bautista’s bat flip last season. That dumped an ocean’s worth of lighter fluid on a campfire’s worth of enmity and turned it into the inferno that didn’t materialize with fisticuffs in October but a one-sided beating of another variety. The Blue Jays didn’t just dispose of the AL’s best regular-season team. They ambushed it.

The end of Game 3 stunned the Rangers, none more than Odor. For more than a half-hour after the game, as his teammates showered and changed into their street clothes and hugged one another, he sat in a room in the back of the clubhouse, still in his full uniform. A procession of teammates and coaches and executives came through the room to comfort Odor, even though each knew he was inconsolable. His punch to Bautista’s jaw after a similar double-play ground ball in May grew almost as legendary in Texas as Bautista chucking his bat last year in an ALDS comeback against the Rangers was to Canadians. This was more like a punch to the gut.

“I just tried to make the play and pulled the ball a little bit,” Odor said. “That’s it.”

It wasn’t exactly that simple. The ball kicked away from Moreland. And Donaldson had the presence of mind to jet home from third. And the throw of Moreland, a closer in college, one of the best defensive first basemen in the game, skipped in front of catcher Jonathan Lucroy. And as Donaldson reached for home plate in a slide a la Eric Hosmer’s that helped win the World Series last year, there was no play to be made, no stop to the Blue Jays advancing to the ALCS for the second consecutive season and the Rangers trying to figure out where theirs went sideways.

“I tried to get to it before he scored,” Moreland said. “It didn’t happen.”

“I just couldn’t believe the season ended right there,” said Matt Bush, the Rangers reliever who hit Bautista in the Odor-roundhouse game and pitched brilliantly but took the loss in Game 3. “That’s all I could think of.”

“We always find a weird way to lose the game,” Rangers star Adrian Beltre said. “It’s a tough one.”

Tough as it was for Texas, the Blue Jays radiated jubilation. It wasn’t just the bubbly and the beer. All season they tried to find their 2015 groove, and never did they sustain it for a long enough period of time to look like a legitimate October threat. Then they won the wild-card game against Baltimore and took three more against Texas and asserted themselves as a power-hitting, clean-fielding, starting pitching-rich heavy that should prove a tough out for whomever they face in the ALCS.

Take Donaldson, the reigning AL MVP. Less than a month ago, he needed an MRI on his ailing right hip. He continued to play through it and now is hitting .538 this postseason, with three hits coming in the clincher, including a leadoff double in the 10th that set up the game-winning run.

“I want to say I’m not physically restricted,” Donaldson said.

“Just lie,” Martin said.

“When you have 50,000 fans screaming, it kind of numbs the pain a little bit,” Donaldson said. “It gives you that little extra jolt of adrenaline. So I’m going to leave it at that.”

Whatever the extent of his injury, Donaldson booked home the moment he saw the ball bounce to the right of Moreland. It was a gamble, sure, but an educated one. However good Moreland’s arm, his left-handedness hindered him. Whereas a right-handed first baseman could have reached down and grabbed the ball, Moreland needed to run around it and reset his feet, and by that time, Donaldson already was more than halfway down the third-base line.

“It was a reflection of his personality,” Blue Jays president Mark Shapiro said. “For great players to be great, they can’t be afraid to fail. That was a play that he made without fear.”

The only fear, it turned out, came from the challenge Rangers manager Jeff Banister offered on the play. He wanted umpires to check for an illegal slide by Edwin Encarnacion into second base. In the first week of the season, the Blue Jays lost a game after replay determined Bautista had grabbed the foot of Rays second baseman Logan Forsythe on an attempted double play.

After 30 seconds of moshing and celebrating, the Blue Jays hit the pause button as two umpires donned headsets to communicate with replay officials in New York. Martin went up to Encarnacion and said: “Please tell me you had a good slide. If you don’t have a good slide, this isn’t good. We are not cool right now if you did not have a good slide.”

Things were cool. Encarnacion went hard but fair into second base and didn’t impede Odor. It was simply a bad throw, the kind that lingers.

“This is something,” Odor said, “I’m not gonna forget.”

Neither, for that matter, will the Toronto Blue Jays. Even with the bumps and bruises and pains of a full season there as daily reminders of how they fought literally and figuratively to be here, they feel like themselves, like the team they believed they could be, even as David Price left for Boston and the impending free agency of Encarnacion and Bautista lent this season even more urgency. They’re back in the ALCS, four games from their first World Series in nearly a quarter-century.

The party continued in the Blue Jays’ clubhouse until past 1 a.m., at which point Bautista and a cadre of teammates exited the stadium, hopped into a black SUV and hit the night. This was the sort of night they envisioned back in spring training, and to go through the Rangers to get there wasn’t merely good. It felt pretty extraordinary.