BOSTON — As Alex Verdugo stepped into the box for his first plate appearance Wednesday against Alek Manoah, the anticipation around Fenway Park built and built.
Surely you know the backstory by now. Last month, on the Baseball Isn’t Boring podcast, Verdugo made unprompted remarks about the Blue Jays right-hander in the context of a conversation about on-field celebrations, saying, “I think Alek Manoah goes about it the wrong way — 100 per cent I think he does. You can find videos, footage of him in triple-A going like this to hitters. Last year, telling Franchy (Cordero) and Bobby (Dalbec), ‘Go sit, (expletive)’ and (expletive) like that. And looking right at them. That (expletive) just pisses me off. It’s not the way it should be played.”
Verdugo was presumably referencing Manoah’s start against the Red Sox on July 23, in which he was fired up after this swinging strikeout of Cordero in the sixth inning:
And this looking one of Bobby Dalbec a few pitches later:
Of course, Manoah and Verdugo have history themselves — they both play in the AL East. And Verdugo had gotten the better of the matchup entering Wednesday, going 7-for-16 against Manoah with three extra-base hits.
That includes a June, 2022 homer at Rogers Centre — a month prior to Manoah’s strikeouts of Cordero and Dalbec — after which Verdugo took over 32 seconds rounding the bases while glaring into the Blue Jays dugout:
Verdugo’s already one of MLB’s slowest rounding the bases after leaving the yard, averaging 28.1 seconds when going home-to-home in 2022. But his trot after taking Manoah deep was the slowest of the 49 homers he’s hit in his career. It was the 13th-slowest home run trot of the 5,215 homers hit across MLB in 2022. A 99th percentile trot.
The final piece of Wednesday’s build-up was Verdugo saying Tuesday night that he regretted sharing his opinion on Manoah publicly rather than doing so in a private conversation. That didn’t necessarily defuse the tension between the two athletes. But it didn’t escalate it, either.
Which brings us to Verdugo stepping in for his first plate appearance in the bottom of the first inning Wednesday night. Manoah made him wait, running down the pitch clock all the way to two seconds, before delivering a 90-mph fastball down the heart of the plate that Verdugo fouled off. Next pitch, another heater — 91 this time — and another ball out of play. Now it was Verdugo’s turn to try to throw off his opponent’s rhythm by calling a timeout.
Was Manoah bothered by that? What do you think? He came right back at Verdugo with a third consecutive fastball, earning a swinging strikeout as he emotionlessly paced off the mound.
And that’s how these things usually go. A lot of pre-game build-up with little in-game payoff. Verdugo singled off a 1-2 Manoah slider his next time up and popped up an elevated fastball in their third and final meeting. There was little else in between those events. Both players went about their business as if they had bigger things to worry about.
Manoah and the Blue Jays certainly do. Namely, a fourth-consecutive loss Wednesday, 8-3, and the possibility of a four-game sweep to the Red Sox now on the table in Thursday’s series finale. Not to mention the untidy brand of baseball the Blue Jays have played through their first three games this season at Fenway.
“This is kind of a test of who we are,” Manoah said. “Baseball is not always going to be easy. It’s not always going to be five-game winning streaks. There’s going to be some tough times. And I believe in this team to be able to come back through this.”
Manoah’s night ended after only five innings, the fifth time in seven 2023 starts that he hasn’t completed six after doing so in 25 of 31 outings last season. He allowed five runs — two earned — on eight hits and a walk, striking out only three. Of course, it could have been a much different ballgame for the Blue Jays starter on a night his club urgently needed innings to be covered.
Manoah was cruising right along until the fourth, when Rafael Devers laced a 112.5-mph rocket off the inside of the big right-hander’s left knee. Manoah remained in the game after a brief delay, but clearly wasn’t himself against ensuing batters, bouncing a slider well in front of the plate that allowed Devers to reach third before allowing his first extra-base hit of the night off a hung changeup and botching a pickoff attempt at second.
Then, in the fifth, Santiago Espinal sailed a throw from third on a routine groundball, before Manoah left a fastball over the plate that Justin Turner drove for a double and yanked a slider that hit Jarren Duran with two outs. Two pitches later, a groundball through the left side scored a run. And three pitches after that, a groundball to first took an absurd bounce into Vladimir Guerrero Jr.’s right shoulder and rolled away as two more runs scored.
“I felt like I was throwing the ball well. Then got hit in the knee and didn’t want us to lose any momentum. Obviously, that didn’t happen. But I was just trying to do everything I can to keep the momentum on our side and keep these guys rolling,” Manoah said. “Even the pitch to [Devers] that he hit back at me. I thought it was a well-located changeup. He’s obviously a strong guy. He was able to reach out and hit it pretty well. But I feel like I did a good job of getting them on the ground.”
“I thought he was getting on a roll a little bit. Kind of typical Alek. He was making good pitches — we just didn’t help him defensively,” Schneider added. “You can’t make four errors and throw the ball around a little bit and expect to win.”
It was that kind of night. Anthony Bass took over for Manoah in the sixth and promptly allowed a double to Connor Wong before wearing a comebacker himself, this time a 109.6-mph Masataka Yoshida missile off the right hip as a run scored. Later, Yoshida ripped another liner against a Blue Jays reliever, this time plating a run with a 103.4-mph double against Trevor Richards.
And round and round they went. Bass retired only one. Richards walked three in his 37-pitch outing and earned one of his four outs on a 399-foot Triston Cases drive to deep centre that would have left five MLB ballparks.
“Pitching and defence,” Schneider said. “It’s something we pride ourselves on and it’s just been lacking a little bit getting deeper into games and not taking care of the ball.”
Along the way, the Blue Jays went 0-for-5 with runners in scoring position and stranded five. They put runners on the corners with none out in the fourth but failed to score either as Whit Merrifield struck out on four pitches and Espinal bounced a 2-1, inner-half fastball into a double play.
“We had a chance to, I think, put the game a little bit in a different spot in the fourth inning and didn’t capitalize with first and third, nobody out,” Schneider said. “But all those things, they’ll be corrected. Because it’s here in the clubhouse. I think right now, you look at it, the three games prior to this were one-run games and things could go either way. And I think tonight we just didn’t take care of the baseball.”
Vladimir Guerrero Jr., who crushed his sixth homer of the season 450-feet over the Green Monster in the third, and Matt Chapman reached base with two out in the eighth as the Blue Jays attempted to rally. But Daulton Varsho, who homered himself in the second, grounded out at the end of an eight-pitch battle with Kutter Crawford.
Moments later, playing through swirling wind and a steady rain in the eighth, Varsho whiffed on a lazy pop-up in shallow left before lobbing an errant throw to no one that skipped through the infield and allowed the runner to advance to second. It was Toronto’s fourth error of the night. Two batters later, Enrique Hernandez singled up the middle off Nate Pearson to cash Boston’s fourth unearned run.
“Physical errors happen, right? And I think that when you’re in a little bit of a funk, you grip the bat a little tighter. You grip the ball a little tighter. You want to make sure that it stops. And that’s the wrong way to go about it,” Schneider said. “But all the trust in the world in these guys, both on the mound and defensively. Right now, it’s just time to stop it right here and get out of it. We are, I think, one of the better teams in the league, both on the mound and in the field.”
“We have a really good veteran presence in that clubhouse,” Manoah echoed. “We’re not going to let this dictate the rest of our year. We know the way we’ve played the past couple of days hasn’t been who we are.”
