It felt as though he had been waiting for the question all spring.
Ross Stripling finished his final start of the pre-season, having allowing a run on four hits over 5 2/3 innings in Sunday’s tie with Detroit, and in his Zoom availability with the media Kaitlyn McGrath of The Athletic started a question with “I wanted to ask you about George Springer …” She went on to ask about how Springer has fit in with the Blue Jays, since he and Stripling knew each other from working out at the same place in Texas, where they both live.
“Definitely thought this was going to be an Astros question,” answered Stripling. “We went all spring without it.”
Stripling, of course, was referring to the fact that he was on that 2017 Los Angeles Dodgers team that was robbed of a World Series win by the trash-can-banging cheaters in Houston.
He pitched three times during that seven-game Fall Classic, one that was incredibly dramatic and intense at the time and is so terribly cheapened in hindsight, throwing two shutout innings out of the bullpen.
So intense was the Series that Stripling even forgot that he pitched in the craziest game of the whole thing, Houston’s 13-12 walkoff, 10-inning win in Game 5.
“I don’t think I pitched in that game,” said Stripling, forgetting that he got the final two outs of the eighth inning. “I was just sitting back in the bullpen watching it all unfold.”
The rest of his memories are pretty solid, though.
“It’s the loudest I’ve ever heard a stadium, by far. It was absolutely insane, just the back and forth of that game.”
And while Blue Jays fans will always believe (correctly) that the Jays’ 15-14 win over the Phillies in Game 4 of the 1993 World Series — in which the Jays were up 3-0, down 6-3, up 7-6, down 12-7 and then scored six runs in the eighth to take the lead for good — was the wildest World Series game ever, that Dodgers-Asterisks Game 5 is right up there.
The Dodgers took an early 4-0 lead, Houston tied it in the fourth and each team scored three times in the fifth. L.A. took the lead back with a run in the seventh, but Houston answered with four in the bottom half and the Dodgers sent it to extras with a three-run rally in the ninth, capped by a two-strike, two-out RBI single by Chris Taylor.
“That World Series obviously is tainted in a way now that stinks,” said Stripling, “but if you take that stuff away, that’s got to be one of the top five World Series games ever as far as just the craziness of it, the talent that was on the field, the back and forth.“
Alex Bregman singled home Derek Fisher (!) in the 10th to give the ’Stros a three-games-to-two lead. They wound up winning in seven.
Springer was named World Series MVP.
The cheating scandal broke in late 2019, but Stripling didn’t see his gym buddy much that winter.
“I wasn’t really around him a ton that off-season, so we didn’t have a lot of face-to-face communication once all that stuff broke,” said Stripling. “Now obviously we kinda knew that stuff was going on in 2017.” He punctuated that final sentence with a “whatever” that was equal parts sarcastic and dismissive.
Once Springer signed with the Jays over the winter, there was air to be cleared.
“I texted George when he signed,” explained Stripling, “and said, ‘Dude, love to have you’ and just opened up the conversation about that. That was a private conversation between me and George and certainly nothing that we want to share out in the open, but it was a good, productive conversation and we put it behind us. Now we’re teammates, and we’re Blue Jays and we’re looking to win games here. It’s behind us, for sure, but definitely needed to touch on it, needed to be brought up, put behind us and now we’re good.”
Though he wouldn’t say it definitively, it appeared Stripling may have had more of an issue when he took the mound on Sunday and saw A.J. Hinch in the visiting dugout. Hinch, the Astros’ manager during the cheating scandal, served his one-season suspension and was immediately snapped up by the Tigers to be their skipper. Alex Cora, the bench coach on that Astros’ team, was rehired to manage the Red Sox shortly after his suspension was up, as well.
“You know what man, I’m gonna kinda punt that one,” said Stripling, when I asked if he thought their new jobs meant that Hinch and Cora got away with cheating. “I think if you were to ask around most people, they probably would guess that was a quick turnaround for those guys to come back and get massive roles in baseball again, but they served their punishment that was handed down, and there’s front-office and ownership and people out there that trusted them to give them big positions in baseball again and to right any wrongs that they did before and all that. So if you choose to look at it that way, then they served their sentence and now they’re back to helping baseball players get better and winning baseball games, so I’ll look at it that way.”
Does he really look at it that way, though? Seems rather doubtful.
“As far as what I think,” he continued, “I don’t know, yeah, I’ll punt it.”
The Blue Jays will be in Houston for three games starting May 7.
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