ANAHEIM, Calif. – What makes the ongoing struggles of Jose Berrios so enigmatic is the flashes of the dominant guy he’s been, and that his stuff suggests he can still be, are still there.
Take his three-pitch strikeout of Shohei Ohtani in the first inning Saturday night, for instance, when he went slurve middle down, sinker middle away and slurve middle down again, inducing a rare ugly swing from one of the best hitters on the planet. He made Hunter Renfroe look even worse on another three-pitch K in the second, leveraging a mesmerizing slurve the Los Angeles Angels offered at nine times, missing six of them. His changeup was similarly ruthless, with four whiffs on six swings.
Yet time and again, the Toronto Blue Jays right-hander makes a small handful of mistakes that cause his outings to unravel. On his second pitch of the game, for example, he threw a 92.6-m.p.h. four-seamer that bled over the heart of the plate and was fortunate that Taylor Ward sent it only to the warning track for a long out. A centre-cut cookie heater to Anthony Rendon became a leadoff single in the second. A 92.6-m.p.h sinker that bled into the heart of the plate was hammered over the wall in left-centre by Luis Rengifo to open the fifth.
Those mistakes magnify the times when credit goes to the hitter for touching green on a good pitch, the way Ohtani did in looping a down-and-away, strike-to-ball changeup for a double in the fourth ahead of Renfroe doing the same thing to a similarly located slurve later in the frame.
All of which left the Blue Jays with more to worry about than just what finished as a 9-5 loss to the Angels on Saturday night. Staked to a 4-0 lead on two-run homers by Bo Bichette and Matt Chapman in the third inning, Berrios couldn’t hold the lead through the fifth after his eight-run, seven-strikeout, 5.2-inning head-scratcher in Kansas City earlier this week.
For all his tinkering with his windup, focus on release points and pitching lanes, “it just really comes down to executing,” manager John Schneider said before the game, and inexplicably the 28-year-old with a long track record of doing it suddenly is not. Pivotal in the manager’s eyes is “how he’s deploying his pitches. Last year, it was trying to go up in the zone a little bit too much as opposed to letting his sinker and breaking ball work. It just comes down to how he’s using those two pitchers in particular, whether it’s inside or outside.”
Against the Angels, Berrios peppered the very bottom of the zone with his slurve and change while working middle up with his four-seamer and sinker.
It worked the first time through, when he allowed only an unearned run on a Rengifo groundout after a Gio Urshela bouncer up the middle kicked off Bichette’s glove for a single and two-base error. Even in a two-run fourth, Berrios’ approach still worked even as he got baseballed on the Ohtani and Renfroe doubles, although Mike Trout’s leadoff walk put him in position to take damage.
Then in the fifth, after George Springer’s first homer of the season put the Blue Jays up 5-3, Berrios allowed the Rengifo homer, made a throwing error on a Matt Thaiss comebacker and then surrendered a Ward single that ended his night.
Adam Cimber took over, fell behind Trout 3-1 and then threw him a happy-zone biscuit that went 427 feet to right-centre, putting the Angels ahead 7-5 before an elated crowd of 44,534.
The Blue Jays likely cost themselves a run in the seventh when Bichette was caught stealing ahead of a Chapman double that was stranded, and Renfroe put the game away in the bottom of the eighth with a two-run homer off Anthony Bass that made it 9-5
The loss left the Blue Jays 5-4 on this 10-game road trip to open the season, with Yusei Kikuchi starting against lefty Reid Detmers in Sunday’s rubber match.
