TORONTO – Amid the varied slate of scenarios and contingencies the Toronto Blue Jays worked through as Game 162 approached, Kevin Gausman kept things simple for himself – just be ready to pitch.
The ace right-hander will do just that in a high-stakes regular-season finale that decides who claims the American League East, a first-round bye and home-field advantage on the AL side of the post-season bracket, as the Toronto Blue Jays, 5-1 winners over the Tampa Bay Rays, and the New York Yankees, 6-1 victors over the Baltimore Orioles, each held serve Saturday afternoon.
You want drama? Here it is.
“It blows my mind that you play so many games and it still comes down to the last one,” said Gausman. “Nothing new to me, I’ve been in this situation before. In 2016, with the Orioles, it was us and the Jays playing for home-field advantage (in the wild-card game). In 2021 with the Giants, we won 107 games but going into the last game of the season, we didn’t know if we were going to be a wild card or win the division. Logan Webb threw a complete-game shutout and we won the division. In 2023 here, I went to bed thinking I was going to start the last game of the season, the Mariners lost, woke up and Wes Parsons started the game. So, I’ve been in this spot many times before. You take it in stride.”
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Watch Blue Jays vs. Rays on Sportsnet
The Toronto Blue Jays will look to clinch the AL East with a win over the Tampa Bay Rays on Sunday. Catch the action on Sportsnet or Sportsnet+, starting at 3 p.m. ET / noon PT.
Put simply, a win or a Yankees loss Sunday gives the Blue Jays their first AL East title since 2015, as though the rivals are tied atop the division, Toronto holds the tiebreaker.
So, it’s all in their own hands.
Getting them there was a third straight win, this one powered by five shutout innings from rookie Trey Yesavage and a three-run second inning highlighted by Ernie Clement’s two-run double and Andres Gimenez’s RBI single. Clement helped create another run in the fifth when he signed, stole second and scored on Nathan Lukes’ two-out RBI single, while Alejandro Kirk’s solo shot leading off the seventh padded the advantage.
Crucially Justin Bruihl, the lefty specialist who’s risen to the occasion a few times during a season spent mostly at triple-A Buffalo with a handful of big-league stints, delivered a wipe-out inning of relief in the seventh to keep the game under wraps.
And after another strong inning of work from Tommy Nance in the eighth, Seranthony Dominguez, with Jeff Hoffman down after closing out back-to-back games, handled the ninth before a raucous crowd of 42,624.
The outing for Yesavage, his third since completing his remarkable rise from low-A to September games of consequence in the big-leagues, was especially encouraging as the Blue Jays consider how to best line up their pitching for the post-season, wild-card bye or not.
Facing a Rays team he bullied in his debut a mere 11 days earlier, Yesavage was again in total command, his fastball sitting 95.3 m.p.h. and up to 96.9 m.p.h., while getting 14 whiffs on 47 swings, seven of them on his slider.
Perhaps most impressive is the way he picked up his defence in the third inning, when Gimenez bobbled a potential double-play grounder from Yandy Diaz that should have ended the inning. Yesavage responded by striking out Brandon Lowe, walked Junior Caminero to load the bases and then K’d Jonathan Aranda, preserving the 3-0 lead.
The three extra batters likely cost him another inning of work, but the Rays didn’t threaten meaningfully again, with a clever double-play in the fifth, when Lukes caught Boby Seymour’s drive to right and threw to third where a tagging Chandler Simpson overslid the bag at third and was caught by an alert Addison Barger, erasing a potential threat.
Yesavage allowed five hits and two walks with five strikeouts, in an outing manager John Schneider would be “interesting to see how a team that just saw him a week and a half ago makes adjustments, if they do, and then what he does counteracting that.”
Rays manager Kevin Cash said the league’s lack of familiarity with Yesavage could become an advantage in October as last week, “not having some of that lived experience in the batter’s box, facing that guy, that first time through the order, every one of our hitters were coming back and they were all referencing the challenge of a release point that’s very unique. They compared it to like a Felix Bautista in Baltimore, so high, and you just don’t see that very often. Then you add on he’s got really good stuff with a split that can alter your timing. I can see how that could definitely help Toronto.”
