SEATTLE — Anthony Santander has a photographic memory. Especially when it comes to his home runs.
Ask him to recall the first of two career homers he hit off Seattle Mariners’ right-hander George Kirby and a grin flashes across Santander’s face.
“It was a battle,” Santander said.
Back in June 2022, when Santander was playing for the Baltimore Orioles, he faced Kirby during the right-hander’s rookie season. Santander immediately went down 0-2 in the count and then engaged in an epic duel with Kirby.
He fouled off eight of the next nine pitches, with neither him nor Kirby refusing to budge. Finally, though, the switch-hitter wore out his opponent on the 12th pitch of the at-bat.
“He left me a cookie right in the middle and I hit it out,” said Santander of his near 400-foot home run that left his bat at 110 m.p.h.
Santander tagged Kirby again the following season for another two-run blast and over his career is 6-for-15 (.400) against the right-hander. He’s got the most career at-bats of any Blue Jays’ hitter against Kirby — and that wealth of experience may prove useful as the club faces its biggest challenge yet this season.
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Kirby will take the mound at T-Mobile Park on Wednesday evening with the Seattle Mariners holding a commanding 2-0 lead over the Blue Jays in the American League Championship Series. The right-hander finished the regular season on a roll and has brought that into the playoffs, limiting the Detroit Tigers to three runs over 10 innings with 14 strikeouts across his two starts in the AL Division Series.
“He goes after the hitters,” said Santander. “You have to be ready to attack.”
The Blue Jays didn’t face Kirby at all this year, but scored a combined eight runs when they faced him twice in 2024.
“Similar to all their pitchers, he’s got good stuff, good fastball, can locate it up and down,” said Blue Jays manager John Schneider. “It’s a staff that kind of runs into each other in terms of their profile, in terms of their stuff. So, he’s going to come after you.”
Kirby’s primary weapons are a four-seamer, sinker and slider. Against right-handed hitters he’ll deploy his 96.2-m.p.h. sinker and slider more often, while he tends to rely more on his four-seamer and slider versus lefties.
However, he’s also shown a penchant to totally mix things up like he did during Friday’s decisive Game 5 against the Tigers, when he threw his slider 50 per cent of the time.
“His slider is a tough pitch. He’s really tough on righties, being able to throw an elite four-seam and also an elite sinker,” said Blue Jays infielder Isiah Kiner-Falefa, who has one hit in 10 career at-bats against Kirby. “That’s what a lot of their pitchers do — they have special four-seams.”
The Blue Jays faced 36 four-seamers in Game 1 and 38 in Game 2 and mustered just four total hits off the pitch. That’s an adjustment the club will need to make against Kirby and other Mariners pitchers in order to get back into this series.
Kirby also fills up the zone and his 5.5 per cent walk rate sits in the 89th percentile of MLB hurlers.
“I never seen a pitcher get so mad whenever they walk somebody,” said Kiner-Falefa. “I’ve seen him walk someone before and he really loses it. Like that’s when he really, really gets mad. So, yeah, he attacks and my opinion is he is one of the best in the league.”
Another adjustment worth watching is how the Blue Jays and their contact-reliant style counterpunch against Seattle’s intentional focus on first-pitch strikes.
“That is what we talk about a lot as an organization is winning that 0-0 pitch,” said Mariners manager Dan Wilson. “With the hope being that even if it’s a team that doesn’t strikeout as much, you’re hoping to get weaker contact. When you’re ahead in the count, you’re going to get weaker contact.
“I think our guys have done an outstanding job of getting ahead and doing that.”
It’s not just that the Mariners are filling up the zone randomly. Schneider noted that they’re staying in “safe areas,” and the Blue Jays will need to be deliberate and aware of that.
Santander, who missed Game 2 with a sore back but is feeling better and is expected to be in the lineup on Wednesday, agreed and added that the Blue Jays must adhere to a team approach of being ready to make good contact early in the counts.
If that happens, he may have a chance to add more home run deposits to his memory bank.
