TORONTO – The brink comes at you quickly in the post-season and one afternoon into their return to October, the Toronto Blue Jays suddenly find themselves staring down a two-and-out.
That it would come to this, their fate dependent on a Game 2 rebound Saturday, behind starter Kevin Gausman, shouldn’t be surprising for a team that spent the 2022 season doing things the hard way. Alek Manoah stumbled in the first in an otherwise solid outing and with Luis Castillo sitting 98.6 with both his four- and two-seam fastballs, the Seattle Mariners were able to make that early three-spot stand up in a 4-0 win.
To force a decisive third game Sunday, the Blue Jays will need to recover against old friend Robbie Ray, who won the American League Cy Young Award for them last year before signing a $115-million, five-year deal with Seattle. That he’ll face Gausman, who took $110 million over five from the Blue Jays a day earlier, will only add to the intrigue, given that one replaced the other, a full-circle moment for the off-season work that helped get both teams here.
Still, that the Blue Jays are at this point after a strong finish to the season earned them the top wild-card spot and the right to host the series, drawing a charged-up crowd announced at 47,402, will be jarring for a group that expected better.
Manoah, the right choice for Game 1, perhaps came out a bit too hot and put himself in an early jam by hitting Julio Rodriguez on the hand with his fourth pitch of the game, an 0-2 four-seamer. A soft grounder to first by Ty France advanced the electric Rodriguez to second and he scored easily when Eugenio Suarez followed with a double to right on a four-seamer left up over the plate. Cal Raleigh then battled the count full and pounded a sinker over the wall in right to make it 3-0.
That hushed a crowd whipped up by a stirring pre-game show that included a night-club-like light show, a highlight video, player intros and a ceremonial first pitch by 2016 wild-card, walk-off hero Edwin Encarnacion, who climbed the mound and fired a strike from the rubber.
Castillo then kept their energy down by coming out hot, with seven of the 11 pitches in a three-up, three-down first coming in at 99 m.p.h. or higher, including two at 100-plus. With that kind of stuff, nearly two m.p.h. above his season average, GM Jerry Dipoto’s prized deadline addition recently extended for $108-million over five years was going to be tough sledding no matter what, but made rallying all the more difficult.
The Blue Jays really had only one left-handed hitter — Raimel Tapia — to line up against Castillo while the Mariners used switch hitters Raleigh and Carlos Santana along with lefties Jarred Kelenic, Adam Frazier and J.P. Crawford against Manoah.
The disparity in platoon flexibility between the rosters is something Dipoto noted ahead of the series, saying “our ability to run right-hand pitching out there and to balance the lineup with left-hand bats is going to be the key to us competing in this series and hopefully coming out on the other side.”
Left-handed hitters did most of the damage against Manoah during the season, batting .237/.313/.367 against him with 11 homers compared to .159/.211/.249 and five homers for righties. To counter the disadvantage, he worked on a front hip two-seamer that would back onto the plate and lefties hit just .215 and slugged .252 against the pitch, but he threw four of them to Raleigh in the first and on the final one, the seventh pitch of the at-bat, the catcher sent it 362 feet to right for a two-run homer that made it 3-0.
The Blue Jays built rallies in the third, on two-out singles by George Springer and Bo Bichette before Vladimir Guerrero Jr. flew out to centre, and the fifth, when Whit Merrifield and Springer singled ahead of a Bichette groundout, but Castillo didn’t relent over 7.1 shutout innings.
Still, they didn’t wilt before him and Ray will need to be just as overpowering to contain an offence that still put up seven total hits and made life difficult for one of the game’s dominant arms.
Given how many times the Blue Jays have shaken off difficult losses and emerged from trying stretches this season — including a four-game sweep in Seattle July 7-10 that led to Charlie Montoyo’s firing as manager and Mariners skip Scott Servais saying it “was pivotal for our season moving in the right direction” — it would be foolish to count against another bounce-back.
That they get to play another day is the result of the expanded playoffs resulting from the collective bargaining agreement negotiated to end the owners’ lockout of players. The wild-card format of the past was a one-game, win-or-go-home-affair that made for spectacular theatre but a hard-to-swallow way to resolve a season.
Asked before the series which format he prefers, interim Blue Jays manager John Schneider said, “definitely the three.”
“Baseball is tough and over the course of 162, anything can happen on any given night,” he continued. “And to have it in a one game vacuum is a little bit weird. So it goes right into what we’ve been saying all year, you’re trying to win a series. And I think the overall depth of your team, the talent of your team, it’s a lot easier to show that over the course of a three-game series as opposed to a one. It makes decisions a little bit more consistent. It makes play a little bit more slow, if you will, as opposed to playing with your hair on fire in one game. So the three-game series is pretty good.”
Especially now that the Blue Jays are on the precipice instead of over it, with a chance to pull themselves back from the edge.
