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Romero wound up surrendering only three hits – all singles – in an eight-and-two-thirds innings masterpiece in which he made two hard-to-get runs stand up for the win before 38,809 at Target Field.

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“I would say so,” Romero said when asked if he had his best fastball of the season.

“I threw I’d say 94 to 95 per cent fastballs. We attacked with it, we used some cutters and some curve balls when we needed them.”

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Jays starters, entering Friday’s game here, posted an 8.51 ERA in the previous five games. In addition, the Jays bullpen is – or has been – near the top of the American League in innings pitched.

“We’ve been wearing out our bullpen the first month and a bit more this month,” said Romero, who improved to 3-4 and dropped his ERA from 4.04 to 3.35.

“We’ve been talking as starters that we want to carry a chip around and go seven, eight, and nine innings now through this turn in the rotation.”

Mel Queen, the former Blue Jays coach who tutored a pair of Cy Young Award winners, died Friday at 69.

No cause of death was revealed, though retired Blue Jay pitcher and former Queen pupil Pat Hentgen said Queen had been dealing with an unspecified illness for a few months.

Hengten, the first Blue Jay to win the Cy Young Award, credits Queen with showing him how to throw a cut fastball.

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“I was one of a ton of guys who went through this organization — Chris Carpenter, Todd Stottlemyre, Woody Williams, David Wells, that’s just a few of us who Mel helped,” he said. “He was a great coach, a great communicator. I spent a lot of time fishing with him. . . . We lost a great friend.”

A native of San Luis Obispo, Calif., Queen spent most of his adult life in professional baseball as a player, scout, coach and executive. He joined that Jays staff as a pitching instructor in 1986 and spent a total of 21 seasons with the club.

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After spending 1965 as a minor league outfielder, Queen returned to the majors in 1966 as a pitcher. Over seven big league seasons, Queen earned a 20-14 record with his most successful season coming in 1967, when he went 14-8 with a 2.76 ERA in 24 starts.

Hentgen says reaching the majors as both a pitcher and a position player enhanced Queen’s on-field value as a coach.

“I remember hitters coming up to me and asking if it was okay to go to Mel and ask him about hitting,” he said. “He did it all. He had a way of making you feel comfortable. I think he cared more about you off the field than on it, that’s the way he was.”

Any repeat of the Jays’ recent slovenly performance against the National League simply dooms them from getting close to the Red Sox, Yankees and Rays. While those three teams in the past five seasons are, respectively, 36, 12 and 10 games over .500 against the NL, the Jays are eight games below .500. They can’t possibly spot those teams two, three or four games in the standing and still beat them.

As every fan knows, or should know, the AL annually gives the NL a haircut in inter-league play and it’s not close. In the past five years — and limit the arithmetic to the five years not to spare further embarrassment to the NL, but because that’s roughly the time frame Tampa Bay got good and became the Jays’ third hurdle — the AL is 163 games above .500 at 711-548. That’s a percentage of .565, or roughly a 92-win season. Remove the Jays’ putrid 41-49 mark and the other 13 AL teams have played .573 ball (670-499).

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Whatever the causes, when their inter-league road games begin in mid-June, the Jays also will need a deeper bench than their recent mostly invisible back-up corps. For games in NL parks, they will require pinch-hitters and back-up fielders to allow for double-switches, baseball’s equivalent of brain surgery.

Jays first baseman Adam Lind was scratched from the lineup Friday night after pre-game workouts left him with back soreness.

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“He felt soreness in his left side after running so we decided to scratch him,” Farrell said. “That’s after two good days of work (back in Toronto), so it’s not uncommon to feel sore after that. So he’s still day-to-day.”

Farrell said the club is not considering placing Lind on the disabled list yet.

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Infielder Jayson Nix is on track to return to the Jays roster in Detroit next week. Nix, out of the lineup for over a week after a leg injury suffered during a pivot on a double play, will spend the next three days with Class-A Dunedin. He is expected to return after that, batting any setbacks.

“After having a rough outing, I think it motivates you even more to come out and have a good outing for the team and rest the bullpen,” Romero said. “I felt strong. I felt really, really strong.”

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Romero — who was the opposing pitcher in Justin Verlander's no-hitter on May 7 — allowed four hits, struck out eight and walked three. He yelled into his glove after allowing a single to Delmon Young and getting pulled one out away from his second career shutout.

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Bautista hit his 12th home run in the eighth to make it 2-0. The slugger was 3-for-4 and has reached base in 29 of 30 games this season.

“What can you say about Bautista?” Toronto manager John Farrell said. “A one-run difference is a huge margin. An extra run keeps them away from the bunt and sacrifice and the small game.”

Toronto had no trouble getting on base against Twins starter Carl Pavano, but couldn't capitalize with runs. The Blue Jays stranded 10 runners through six innings and forced Pavano to exit after 5 1-3 innings and 115 pitches.

Mel Queen was a principal architect of the Toronto Blue Jays' farm system in the 1980s and 1990s. But one of his major achievements came in 2000, when the Jays coaxed him out of retirement to help revive the sagging career of a 23-year-old pitcher named Roy Halladay.

Queen, who died Friday at 69, met Halladay in Dunedin, Fla., where the Jays had sent their once-promising pitcher after his ERA had soared to 10.64 in the big leagues.

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"There's no one I made that drastic a change to and verbally abused the way I did Doc," Queen said after Halladay won his first Cy Young Award in 2003.

"There aren't many people that would have gone through what I put him through. I had to make him understand that he was very unintelligent about baseball. He had no idea about the game."

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"He was not only a great coach and passionate instructor; he was a great friend to me and everyone in the organization and he earned the utmost respect from the young men who had the pleasure of working with him."

“We felt all along if we got him back in the lineup by Monday that would still give us seven more days of activity rather than the two weeks on the DL. So, we’re day to day.”

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Despite the fact Rajai Davis has gone 7-for-12 in his past three games, Farrell says he’ll be keeping Davis in the No. 9 slot in the lineup and continue to have Yunel Escobar lead off and be followed by Corey Patterson.

“With the exception of Adam (Lind) not being in the lineup, I think we’re starting to get a little continuity and a little rhythm to the offensive side and I think that guys have settled into spots in the lineup,” Farrell said. “I think I’ll let it go that way for at least now.”

Most unheralded shortstop you played with or against:

John McDonald, Blue Jays: "This guy has been kind of a utility guy. I can just have a video of all his Web Gems. His range and the plays he makes are just truly unbelievable and I can just sit there and watch him over and over again. He makes plays at shortstop, he makes them down at second, he makes them at third. He's just a great glove."

But fascinatingly, Kazmir may not be the most valuable player the Mets dealt on that day. Jose Bautista also became an ex-Met on the day Victor Zambrano arrived in Queens. Based on wins above replacement (WAR), Bautista is well on his way to passing Kazmir. (That assumes Kazmir doesn't add any more value; he's actually lowered his career WAR the past two seasons.)

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Still just 23 as 2003 ended, he had a good chance, with a season or two of polish, of becoming valuable - if he stuck at a middle infield position, very valuable.

Then, the scourge of reasonable prospect development struck: the Baltimore Orioles took Bautista in the Rule V Draft in December 2003. Suddenly, Bautista needed to make the transition from Class A pitching to the Major Leagues. Not surprisingly, he didn't. He hit a respectable .273 in 12 plate appearances for the Orioles, but Baltimore put him on waivers that June 3. Tampa Bay picked him up, gave him another 15 plate appearances, then sold him to Kansas City 25 days later. A little over a month after that, with 26 more plate appearances in Kansas City, the Royals traded him to the Mets for catching prospect Justin Huber. And the Mets, that very same day (Kazmir Day), traded Bautista, Ty Wigginton and pitching prospect Matt Peterson to the Pirates for Kris Benson and Jeff Keppinger.

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Generally, I like to find a moral in these trade paths, but it is hard with this one. Every player in baseball history who profiled like Jose Bautista didn't go on to become a classically great slugger, except for Jose Bautista. Perhaps it is simply a reminder that for all we think we know about how baseball will turn out, it still gloriously has the ability to surprise us - not just on a per-game basis, but on a personal one as well.

Romero came out for the bottom of the 9th with a three-hit shutout, having thrown just 87 pitches, but walked Plouffe with his next four - the third leadoff walk he’d issued on the night. He rebounded to strike out Jason Kubel (on three pitches) and Justin Morneau, and John Farrell then came out to tell him he had one batter left. Delmon Young, who was 5-for-15 lifetime against Romero, represented the tying run, and notorious lefty-killer Michael Cuddyer was on deck having gone 0-for-3 but having required a nice defensive play to retire him each of those three times.

Young hit a ground ball just out of the reach of Aaron Hill into the hole for a single to bring Cuddyer to the plate with the winning run, and even though Romero still had the shutout alive, Farrell came and got him, bringing in Frank Francisco, who struck out Cuddyer to save the game.

At the time, the live blog and the Twitter were chock full of people letting Farrell have it, and I wasn’t sure what I thought the right move was (though I knew I wasn’t as upset as so many seemed to be). I wound up convincing myself as The JaysTalk got going that I didn’t have a problem with Romero being lifted when he was.

Granted, he’d only thrown 101 pitches, but he’d been given an opportunity to get the final out and had instead allowed the tying run to reach base. A noted lefty-killer, who is far weaker against right-handed pitching, was coming to the plate. When it comes down to it, it’s not about Ricky Romero getting a shutout, or even a complete game; it’s about the Blue Jays getting a win, and going to Francisco at that point gave them the best chance to do so.

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I’m still trying to figure out what happened with Yunel Escobar in the 8th, by the way. With runners at first and third and one out, he bunted but Edwin Encarnacion never budged from third base. Somebody missed a sign, and judging from Escobar’s sheer fury upon getting back to the dugout after being retired, Yunel really didn’t seem to think it was him.

The Blue Jays owed Halladay $3.15 million for the 2001 and '02 seasons. Privately, the organization wanted to fix him just enough to be able to trade him. The Toronto G.M., Gord Ash, telephoned one of the organization's pitching instructors, Mel Queen, in the spring of '01. "You've got to fix Halladay," Ash said.

Queen was the Blue Jays' pitching coach from 1996 through '99. He had watched Halladay throw in his first big league camp and called him Iron Mike because his slow, over-the-top delivery looked as measured as those old metal pitching machines.

"O.K., where's he at?" Queen said.

"Dunedin."

"Good. Send him to Knoxville, and put him on the DL. I can't fix him if he's pitching in games."

That's how Halladay wound up sitting in the Smokies' manager's office. Queen, then 59, sat across from him and lit in: "Look at you! You're stupid! You're an idiot with no baseball intelligence and no guts! You're a pussy!"

Halladay, following instructions, kept his mouth shut. Queen kept insulting him. "I don't think I ever talked to anybody I hated worse than I talked to him, and I liked him," Queen said. "It was unbelievable how bad it was. He should have knocked my head off and walked out."

Queen finally cooled down.

"Now," he told Halladay, "you can walk out of here if you want. You have a guaranteed contract worth millions. You can walk right out of here, and you're not going to pitch in the big leagues ever again. But if you want to pitch in the big leagues again, you will do everything I tell you without question."

"O.K.," Halladay said. "I'm ready."

"Good. Let's start. How are you doing, Doc?"

"I'm good."

"What?! That's why you're so stupid! You're in Dunedin with a 10 ERA, and you're telling me you're good? No! You're not good!"

Queen paused.

"O.K., now we're going to start."

Queen had a technical term for this kind of belittlement: vigorous leveling. It was a technique he had borrowed from Bobby Mattick, a legendary Blue Jays instructor.

Queen brought Halladay to the bullpen for a throwing session, except he began so rudimentarily that he refused to let Halladay use a baseball. Queen lowered Halladay's release point and speeded up his delivery, all without a ball in the pitcher's hand.

Halladay threw phantom pitches for 20 minutes. The next day they did the same thing. At the end of that session Queen let him actually throw a ball. The coach showed him two grips for a fastball: one that caused the ball to run away from a righthanded hitter and another that sent it away from a lefthander. "Aim for the middle of the plate," Queen said.

What happened was amazing. The improvement was immediate.

"It was one day," Halladay says. "The first day it was good. And the next couple of days it just got more comfortable and more consistent. It just made it so much easier to move the ball."

In 2001 Halladay pitched five times for Tennessee and twice for Triple A Syracuse with dominating results before the Blue Jays brought him back to the big leagues. He went 5--3 with a 3.16 ERA. He was a completely different pitcher, with superlative sink, late movement and command.

MGD24 wrote:Thanks again!

youngLion wrote:

MGD24 wrote:Thanks again!

No problem, I enjoy doing it.

I don't know if anyone noticed this, but according to that last article from SI, Mel Queen called Roy Halladay a pussy. That's funny.