MINNEAPOLIS — We’ve known for some time now that Toronto Blue Jays’ plan for September was going to be about development and assessing who could help the club return to contention in 2025. As the calendar flipped to the first day of the season’s final month, manager John Schneider pretty much highlighted that notion with a neon marker.
There were no veterans in the lineup for Sunday’s series finale against the Minnesota Twins. George Springer was given the day off along with Vladimir Guerrero Jr., Alejandro Kirk and Daulton Varsho.
That left five rookies in a starting nine that had combined for a total of just 779 games at the major league level. For added perspective, consider that Ernie Clement and his 255 MLB games accounted for 32.7 per cent of that total figure.
Let that sink in for a second. Clement, who’s in his fourth big-league season, was the big dog in the lineup on Sunday.
The Baby Blue Jays did put together a scrappy team effort but ended up falling, 4-3, to the Twins in front of 32,774 at Target Field. Royce Lewis clubbed a three-run home run in the eighth inning off Blue Jays reliever Chad Green to complete a come-from-behind win for the home side.
While the Blue Jays’ offence was relatively quiet compared to the season-high 15 runs they scored on Saturday night, the game wasn’t without excitement. Chief among that was Leo Jimenez’s brilliant catch that will go down among the best defensive plays of the club’s season.
In the fourth inning, the Blue Jays second baseman gave chase to a Max Kepler fly ball in foul territory. Jimenez tracked it down and caught the ball before crashing through the netting along the right-field stands.
Adding to the brilliance was that Blue Jays right fielder Addison Barger grabbed the ball from a sprawled-out Jimenez and fired it home to stop Twins baserunner Auston Martin from scoring. Now, that sequence was quickly nullified when umpires ruled that the ball was out of play because Jimenez was beyond the wall but, nonetheless, it was an alert read by Barger.
As to be expected when you field a lineup this young, there was also a costly learning experience. In the seventh inning, Brooks Lee produced a slow grounder to Blue Jays third baseman Luis De Los Santos, who fielded it cleanly but couldn’t execute on a throw to second base that ended up sailing into right field.
That squandered the opportunity for an inning-ending 5-4-3 double play that would have preserved the Blue Jays’ 1-0 lead. Instead, the next batter, Carlos Santana, tied the game with a ground out.
The Blue Jays took the lead in the eighth inning when Jimenez was hit by a pitch from Twins reliever Griffin Jax with the bases loaded. Joey Loperfido added another run with a groundout to shortstop that pushed the score to 3-1.
However, in the bottom of the frame, Green couldn’t hold the lead. He allowed consecutive singles to Ryan Jeffers and Martin before surrendering the home run to Lewis on a 2-2 slider in the middle of the zone.
That erased what was a solid game from the Blue Jays’ bullpen, which did an admirable job picking up for starter Yarriel Rodriguez, who was removed after three scoreless innings and 57 pitches.
