April 7, 2013: Will Middlebrooks hits 3 home runs as Red Sox blank Blue Jays

The first five Boston batters in the game all got hits and all scored, giving the Red Sox a 5-0 lead before the team made its first out.

Red Sox starter Jon Lester already had all the run support he needed, and third baseman Will Middlebrooks was on his way to a career highlight day.

It was a Sunday afternoon at Toronto’s Rogers Centre, the sixth game of the 2013 season and final game of Boston’s season-opening road trip. The Red Sox had taken two out of three from the Yankees in New York and split the first two games of a weekend series in Toronto. The Blue Jays had yet to go on the road and were 2-3 at home against the Cleveland Indians and Boston.

Jays manager John Gibbons was starting his sixth season at the helm in Toronto; he had led the team from 2004 into 2008, when he was fired in midseason. After the 2012 season, he was hired as Blue Jays’ manager again, taking over from John Farrell, who had led the team in 2011 and 2012 but been hired by the Red Sox after that team’s last-place finish under Bobby Valentine in 2012. So the weekend pitted Gibbons in his second incarnation as skipper against Farrell, who was himself returning to Boston, where he had been pitching coach from 2007 to 2010.

R.A. Dickey started for Gibbons. Knuckleballer Dickey had won the National League Cy Young Award in 2012, with a record for the New York Mets of 20-6 (2.73), but a December 2012 trade brought him to Toronto. Dickey broke into the big leagues as a reliever in 2001 with the Texas Rangers, then became a successful starter with the Mets in his mid-30s after developing a knuckler. Now 38 years old, Dickey had been Toronto’s Opening Day starter on April 2, losing 4-1 to the Cleveland Indians.1

Dickey had a really rough first inning. Leading off, center fielder Jacoby Ellsbury lined a double into left-center, a ball hit so hard that even though it ticked off the glove of shortstop Jose Reyes, it went all the way to the wall.2 Right fielder Shane Victorino singled into center, Ellsbury going to third. Dustin Pedroia grounded a single between first and second base, Ellsbury scoring the first run of the game and Victorino going to second.

On the seventh pitch he saw, DH Mike Napoli doubled in both Victorino and Pedroia with a drive into the left-field corner.3 Swinging at the first pitch, Middlebrooks homered down the right-field line to make it 5-0 – after 19 pitches, and there was still nobody out.

“Boos cascaded down,” reported the Toronto Star.4 Two deep outfield flies and a strikeout ended the top of the first.

Middlebrooks had signed with the Red Sox out of high school in 2007. His major-league debut year had been 2012, and he hit .288 in 75 games, with 15 homers and 54 RBIs, despite a hit-by-pitch fractured right wrist ending his season prematurely on August 10. He’d started 2013 hitting a leadoff homer in the ninth on Friday night April 5, providing an insurance run in the 6-4 Red Sox victory.

Staked to a 5-0 lead, Lester took the mound for his second start of the season. He had won the Opening Day game on April 1 at Yankee Stadium, an 8-2 win for the Red Sox with Lester working the first five innings and giving up two runs. Lester was in his eighth year with Boston. He’d been 65-32 from 2008 to 2011 but had an offyear in 2012 (9-14, with a 4.82 ERA).

Lester made it look easy in the first, with two infield groundouts sandwiched around a three-pitch strikeout of right fielder Rajai Davis. Eight pitches in all, and Lester’s inning was done.

Red Sox shortstop Jose Iglesias led off the second with an infield single but Dickey retired the next three batters, striking out two of them. Lester gave up singles to J.P. Arencibia and Maicer Izturis but no one got past second base.

In the third, a one-out double to left field by Middlebrooks led to a sixth Red Sox run when it was followed by a passed ball and a sacrifice fly to deep right by first baseman Daniel Nava. Reyes singled in Toronto’s half but was forced at second, and it was another scoreless inning for Lester.

Boston added a seventh run in its half of the fourth on a double by Iglesias and a single by Ellsbury. A walk and a double steal followed but no further scoring. Lester hit a batter in the bottom of the fourth but never saw a ball hit out of the infield.

In the fifth Middlebrooks led off, hitting a homer on a full count into the second deck in left-center for an 8-0 lead.5 It gave Middlebrooks his second two-homer game of his career; on May 7, 2012, in just his fourth major-league game, he had hit two against the Kansas City Royals.

Dickey set down the next two batters, but after a walk to Jackie Bradley Jr., Gibbons called in a reliever – Dave Bush, who got the third out and allowed nothing but a single by Pedroia in the sixth. Lester retired the side in the bottom of the sixth.

Middlebrooks led off the seventh inning and homered again – his third of the game – to deep left-center.6 Nava was up next and he homered, too, the ball bouncing off the top of the center-field wall and then going out. The score was now 10-0, Red Sox. Bush then got three outs. Lester allowed nothing in the bottom half but a fruitless single.

Bush was back on the mound in the eighth inning. For the third time in the game, a Boston batter led off with a home run – this time, it was Ellsbury, who hit one into the second deck down the line in right field. The first out followed, but Pedroia walked and Napoli homered to left center, making it 13-0, the fourth home run off Bush and Boston’s sixth of the game.

There was no more scoring in the game. The Red Sox had enough, and the Blue Jays never did score.

Clayton Mortensen worked the final two innings for Boston, allowing a single in the eighth and another in the ninth.

The win went to Lester, who in seven innings struck out six without walking a batter. He allowed six hits – all singles. He was 2-0, headed for wins in his first six decisions of 2013.7 Dickey, of course, bore the defeat.8

The 13-0 win turned out to be the biggest shutout victory of the year for Boston.9 The three home runs by Middlebrooks were the only time in 2013 that a Red Sox player hit three in one game. He had four RBIs in the game, as did Napoli.

By season’s end, Middlebrooks had 17 homers and 49 RBIs but hit for only a disappointing .227 batting average.10 He was the team’s anchor at the hot corner, the Red Sox third baseman, appearing in 94 games as the team made its way to its third World Series championship in a 10-year stretch.

In 2011 the Red Sox had lost every one of their first seven road games. In 2012 they had lost five of the first six. With this win, the Red Sox wrapped up the first six games of the season with a 4-2 record and headed to Boston for the Fenway Park home opener on April 8.

“We had two good series,” Lester said after the shutout in Toronto, “and that’s big for us. For us to go home where we’re at, it beats the hell out of the alternative that we’ve been in the last two years.”11

Acknowledgments

This article was fact-checked by Kevin Larkin and copy-edited by Len Levin.

Sources

In addition to the sources cited in the Notes, the author consulted Baseball-Reference.com and Retrosheet.org. Thanks to Adrian Fung for providing access to Toronto newspaper coverage of this game.

https://www.baseball-reference.com/boxes/TOR/TOR201304070.shtml

https://www.retrosheet.org/boxesetc/2013/B04070TOR2013.htm

Notes

1 Dickey’s second book had just been published the week before the season began. Throwing Strikes: My Quest for Truth and the Perfect Knuckleball, published by Penguin on March 26.

2 Robert McLeod, “‘We Laid an Egg,’” Globe and Mail (Toronto), April 8, 2013: S3.

3 McLeod. David Ortiz, who went on to lead Boston in DH appearances in 2013 and play a central role in the Red Sox drive to the World Series championship, was sidelined while rehabilitating a 2012 Achilles tendon injury; he did not make his 2013 debut until April 20.

4 The sentence continued: “… and this is a fan base primed to love the dickens out of Dickey, given half a chance. … It got ugly in a hurry.” Rosie DiManno, “Knuckler Declines to Dance,” Toronto Star, April 8, 2013: S1. The author suggested that “[T]he lusty raspberry artists should have saved some of their leather-lunged caterwauling for later because there was a lotta hideous still to come. …”

5 After the game, Lester offered some hyperbole: “He had about 2,000 feet of homers.” Ian Harrison (Associated Press), “Middlebrooks Swats Three HRs for Boston,” Las Vegas Review-Journal, April 8, 2003: 7C.

6 The three home runs in one game matched the Red Sox record; Middlebrooks was the 26th Red Sox to do so. The immediately preceding one was Dustin Pedroia in Colorado on June 24, 2010. Middlebrooks’ eighth-inning drive was caught on the warning track in left field. Adding in his April 5 home run, he had four for the season, more than eight other entire major-league ballclubs had at the time. The Red Sox had hit six home runs in just this one game. According to the daily Red Sox Notes, distributed to media before the next game, it was the 26th time in club history the team had hit six in a game.

7 With a season-end record of 15-8, Lester led the 2013 Red Sox in wins, with a 3.75 ERA.

8 The winner of the 2012 American League Cy Young Award was also hammered on April 7, Tampa Bay’s David Price losing by the same 13-0 score in a game against Cleveland. Price gave up three-run homers to Mark Reynolds and Lonnie Chisenhall. After Dickey’s loss, he simply said, “Throughout the course of the season, you’re going to have a clunker or two.” Harrison. Dickey finished the 2013 season with a 14-13 record and a 4.21 ERA.

9 It was not Boston’s biggest margin of victory in 2013. That was the 20-4 win over the Detroit Tigers on September 4 when the Red Sox hit eight home runs, including one each by Middlebrooks and Napoli. The Red Sox were also shut out 13-0 at home on April 23 in a rain-shortened seven-inning game against Oakland.

10 Middlebrooks played in 10 postseason games in 2013, with just one run batted in, in Game One of the Division Series (hitting .160 in the postseason). He played his position well enough but for a ninth-inning error that led to St. Louis winning Game Three of the World Series.

11 Peter Abraham, “Sox Overpower Jays,” Boston Globe, April 8, 2013: C1, C5.