TORONTO – In his last start against the Tampa Bay Rays, Alek Manoah was masterful.
The rookie right-hander carried a no-hitter into the sixth inning, ended up with 10 strikeouts over seven shutout innings and was brilliantly unpredictable, mixing his four-seamer, sinker and slider in equal proportion with a few changeups sprinkled in. He had them guessing all night.
One week later, the challenge for Manoah in Friday’s return engagement was to deliver similar quality when he’s so fresh in his opponent’s minds. While there might be temptation to introduce a new wrinkle, Toronto Blue Jays manager Charlie Montoyo preached “not to change anything.”
“That’s how pitchers could get in trouble, when they start thinking, oh, they know what I got, they know how I attacked them,” he explained. “Why change? That’s a reason we have a game-plan. He’s encouraged not to change anything.”
Well, Manoah didn’t replicate his dominance in what finished as a 7-1 loss and it was tough to make sense of his 3.2 incongruent innings of grind. Lacking the same fastball command that allowed him to so fully leverage his slider the last time out, he still overwhelmed the Rays but ended up surrendering three runs, two earned, on three hits, three walks and two hit-batters.
That he still struck out nine speaks to how nasty his stuff was despite it all, and the Rays bled him just enough to run up his pitch count and get into the soft underbelly of the Blue Jays bullpen.
Once there, they pushed the game out of reach with the help of a mental miscue by Teoscar Hernandez in the sixth. Combined with a Cavan Biggio error in the fourth and a couple of strikes lost by Reese McGuire’s receiving, it was a messy game that was less than the sum of its parts.
“He gave up, what, three hits? And then he hit (Jim-Man) Choi. But he battled,” said Montoyo. “He impressed me even though his line was not that great.”
Neither was Manoah’s fastball command, particularly arm-side, an area he plans to focus on over the looming all-star break.
An errant fastball started the Rays rally in the third, as Mike Zunino got hit to open the frame. Light-hitting Brett Phillips followed with a double off a sloppy slider and after sandwiching a Choi walk between two strikeouts, Austin Meadows looped a sinker into centre to cash in two runs and erase a 1-0 Blue Jays lead.
“Going back and watching the tape, the hands sometimes were breaking a little bit late,” Manoah said of his fastball command troubles. “Glove arm was kind of leading me in the wrong direction, was kind of spinning off of some things and that was leading to those arm-side misses. So just continue to work on keeping my shoulders level, getting a clean break out of the hands and just staying through the ball.”
The next inning, a Biggio error on a Zunino smash followed Tyler Walls’ one-out double and after Brandon Lowe walked to load the bases with two out, Manoah ripped off a slider that caught Choi’s back foot and push across an unearned run.
Two pitches earlier McGuire, set up inside, had to swipe at a fastball that was in the zone up and away, but called a ball by home-plate umpire Vic Carapazza. That would have made the count 0-2 instead of 1-1 and changed the at-bat. An inning earlier, McGuire dropped his glove trying to catch what should have been a called third strike on Joey Wendle, but Manoah recovered to get him swinging two pitches later.
Odd all around.
“Just competing, man, trying to go out there and give the team a chance,” Manoah said of what he took from the outing. “Today kind of taxed the bullpen a ton going into the rest of the weekend, which I’m extremely upset about. Any time you give that offence one run or two runs or whatever the case is, they can always make an impact.”
Choi was Manoah’s last batter and letting him face the hard-hitting lefty was an interesting call with southpaw Tayler Saucedo ready in the bullpen. Montoyo stuck with his starter in part because he trusted him, but in part because he was picking his poison with the Rays bench.
“Saucedo wasn’t going to face Choi, he was going to face (Yandy) Diaz or (Randy) Arozarena,” explained Montoyo. “Manoah was pitching well. He just didn’t make the pitch on that one. But he kept making big pitch after big pitch. It’s not like you’re bringing a lefty to face a lefty. Not against the Rays.”
Saucedo quickly escaped that jam and delivered another clean frame, but things soon unravelled. Anthony Castro surrendered a two-run single in the sixth – set up when Hernandez wasn’t ready to throw after catching Brandon Lowe’s fly ball, allowing Zunino and Phillips to tag into second and third.
In the seventh, Taylor Walls’ two-run double off Jacob Barnes pushed things further out of reach.
“I would call it a mental mistake,” Montoyo said of the Hernandez play. “We have to play clean games to beat these guys – they’re one of the best teams in baseball – and we didn’t do that.”
The Blue Jays will have two more chances to clean things up and gain some ground on the Rays before the all-star break.
