Toronto Blue Jays catcher Alejandro Kirk watches the flight of his ball as he hits a grand-slam home run against the Tampa Bay Rays in the first inning at Rogers Centre on Sunday. Kirk finished with two home runs and six RBI.Dan Hamilton/Reuters
Just after hitting his first home run on Sunday afternoon, Alejandro Kirk allowed himself to admire it a bit. Just for a second. No bats were flipped, but the Blue Jays catcher did linger.
To be fair to him, it was a grand slam. You’re not going to hit too many of those in your career in an almost-must-win game.
After his second home run, Kirk didn’t want to rub it in too much. Not just as he hit it at least. He celebrated during his jog around the bases. He highed all the fives in the dugout.
Then, at the insistence of his teammates, he popped onto the top step for a moment. This happened as a Tampa pitcher was in the middle of dealing to the next batter, Addison Barger. The sudden outbreak of a standing ovation discombobulated both of them. The pitch was about two feet outside and Barger thought about swinging at it.
By the time he came up again in the ninth inning, with the game all but certainly won, Kirk received M-V-P chants. He struck out. The crowd gave him another standing ovation as he walked back to the bench.
ICYMI: Blue Jays clinch division crown after 13-4 win over Rays
Other Jays, a very few, have had better days on bigger occasions. Joe Carter leaps to mind. But none have had such a sustained love-in. Three-plus hours of being crushed on by 40,000 people.
By the time he came out to talk to the crowd in the post-game, the fans were frenzied. Kirk doesn’t have much English, so manager John Schneider mostly spoke for him. Nobody cared. This man talks the international language of winning.
There were a lot of Jays heroes in Toronto’s remarkable 13-4 win on Sunday to seal the division. That earned them home-field advantage throughout the American League portion of the post-season.
Reliever Mason Fluharty gets a gold star for keeping things shipshape when starter Kevin Gausman had gone pear-shaped. George Springer gets one for a metronomic three-for-four day at the plate. Barger gets one for a seventh-inning homer to dead centre that started a five-run deluge.
By the end of that frame, you were starting to feel sorry for the Rays. Their last game in a disappointing campaign was like tripping up the stage at your graduation, and then being told that you shouldn’t be there because you’d flunked out anyway.
Alejandro Kirk’s first-inning grand slam gets the Toronto Blue Jays crowd out of their seats and into the game.Dan Hamilton/Reuters
But the absolute, undeniable star of the afternoon was Kirk. Two home runs at crucial moments and a double off the wall. You almost believed that a triple was possible, though it’s hard to imagine how. Is Kirk your favourite pro athlete yet? I don’t want to tell you what to do, but he should be.
Every big leaguer is unlikely in his or her own way. They’ve had to climb over tens of thousands of peers to get where they’ve gotten. They were all one childhood injury, missed showcase or teenage dip away from coming close, but not getting there. Each and every one of them is exceptional. But not like Kirk.
Nobody in sport is as unlikely as he is. He was discovered at a showcase in Tijuana when he was 17 years old. The Jays gave him a signing bonus of US$7,500. The guy he hit the first-inning grand slam off on Sunday, Ian Seymour, got more than 160 times that amount when he was drafted.
Some pros just have the look. Kirk has the opposite of that look. He’s the proof that anyone can surprise you.
This isn’t the classic sports story of a player overcoming doubt at every stage. Once he’d been discovered, nobody doubted Kirk’s quality. Some people have the legs of a ballerina. Kirk has the hands of one. No one in the game is more graceful while holding a bat or a ball.
He made his major-league debut aged 21. He’s been a Jays regular, though often platooned, ever since.
Kirk’s magic is that you see him and you think, “Him?”
Not too many “Him?”s left in top-tier sport, and I’m talking from about the age of 14 up. Everybody’s fighting to get up the earliest, go to bed the latest, and ingest an elephantine amount of protein in between. They’re all either transforming their bodies, or defying their age. The best of them get about two years in their late 20s when they’re not doing one or the other.
Kirk only transforms one thing – balls going one way at speed to balls going the opposite way at an even greater rate of velocity.
In his hands, the baseball bat looks like a two-by-four, but one made of styrofoam. His swing is so languid, it looks like he’s doing it underwater. This is not new news, but his growing sense of occasion is.
Like a lot of his teammates, September wasn’t Kirk’s greatest month. In six games headed into the weekend, he hadn’t managed a single hit.
Alejandro Kirk is congratulated by his Toronto Blue Jays teammates in the dugout after hitting a grand slam in Toronto’s 13-4 division-clinching victory.Dan Hamilton/Reuters
But then it was squeaky bum time and someone had to do something, so Kirk did it. He hit the homer that gave the Jays breathing room on Saturday. Then he hit the two that saved the division. Without him, the Jays are losing 4-1 in the top of the third inning on Sunday and who knows how this ends up?
With him, they are at their leisure, waiting on the Yankees and Red Sox to beat the tar out of each other in the wild-card series.
They say that home-field doesn’t matter that much any more. They say that rest is bad for a team. Gets them off their game.
Were I the Jays, I would say, ‘Sure, but maybe we should try it that way, since the other way hasn’t worked out so great for us recently.’
At points in the last 30-odd years, Toronto has looked as good as it looks right now. But it hasn’t looked luckier. I’ll take good luck over good form any day.
In a 162-game season, everybody really does get the credit (or the blame, as the case may be). This victory has dozens of fathers. But when it came time to seal the deal, one smallish man stood up tall.
I’ll say it now – wherever Alejandro Kirk ends up going over the next couple, three, four weeks, that’s exactly as far as the rest of the Jays will get.