TORONTO — Yes, we’d all sign up for 162 of the tense, absorbing, high-octane games the Toronto Blue Jays and Houston Astros have been playing against one another of late, six of them over the last week-and-a-half alone. Brilliant pitching; electric defence; the occasional offensive outburst. Only a run’s difference between them over 54 riveting innings. What a series that could be come October.
But one guy who’s happy to get away from the Astros for a while is Tim Mayza. The left-handed reliever’s last four appearances haven’t only been against Houston — they’ve been against the same pocket of its batting order.
He faced Yordan Alvarez — he of the 173 wRC+ — in each of them. He saw Michael Brantley — owner of MLB’s lowest whiff rate since 2018 — in three. Alex Bregman — .970 career OPS vs. left-handed pitching — in two. And Chas McCormick, who Mayza started two of those four outings against, knew him better than anyone. They go back to Millersville University and spent MLB’s lockout working out together in Westchester, Penn., where Mayza threw live batting practices against McCormick repeatedly.
“Entering those games, I’m like, ‘He knows what I’ve got; he knows what I’m going to try to do,’” Mayza says. “No secrets here.”
It’s one thing if you’re a starter with a deep repertoire. It’s another when you’re a two-pitch reliever who throws his fastball over 80 per cent of the time. Mayza isn’t trying to fool anyone. If he’s going to get the same hitters out repeatedly his stuff simply has to be that effective.
Good thing it is. Mayza didn’t allow a run over those four appearances, allowing only two singles, a double, and a walk, while recording 13 high-leverage outs. He got his old college buddy to ground out twice. He got Brantley to do the same before catching him looking at a sinker on the outside corner. He started Alvarez with the exact same pitch — heater in — all four times. No wonder the Astros slugger was ready for it on Sunday, ripping it into left at 105 m.p.h. where Raimel Tapia barely had to move. Sometimes it helps to get lucky, too.
“That last one might have been one too many. He hit that pretty hard,” Mayza admits. “Alvarez is typically pretty patient. So, him going after the first one was a bit of a shock. For the most part, he seems willing to give you that first pitch. It just goes to show that there are times to get a little creative and then there are times to just trust what you see and have confidence in your stuff.”
Blue Jays manager Charlie Montoyo can’t help but have confidence in his late-game weapons like Mayza. Really, what choice does he have? Opening the season with a grueling, uncompromising, 30-games-in-31-days stretch, the Blue Jays have almost exclusively played quality teams and almost exclusively played them in tight games. By FanGraphs leverage index, Toronto’s bullpen has faced the third-highest leverage of any in baseball. Eight of Mayza’s 10 appearances this season have come with a margin of two runs or fewer. And 14 of Toronto’s first 23 games ended that way, too.
“We’re embracing it. We’re welcoming those challenges,” Mayza says. “We’re prepared for the one-run game every night. We have to be.”
So, even though the Astros are gone for the rest of the regular season, they naturally gave way to, oh, only the New York Yankees, who arrived in Toronto with a full complement of vaccinated players having won nine straight. And, also naturally, Monday’s game entered the fifth inning tied, 2-2, as Montoyo turned to his bullpen after starter Ross Stripling made his two scheduled trips through New York’s lineup.
But it can’t be Mayza and Jordan Romano — who leads all MLB relievers in leverage faced — every night. And certainly not on this one, as both were unavailable after pitching on back-to-back days. That meant Montoyo needed the five outs from five batters David Phelps gave him behind Stripling; needed the four outs from four batters Trevor Richards gave him next; needed the three outs from three batters Adam Cimber got in the eighth.
And needed Yimi Garcia to keep things deadlocked in the top of the ninth. But the right-hander gave up a leadoff single to Giancarlo Stanton with two strikes before pinch-runner Tim Locastro swiped second. Two hard-earned outs later, Garcia left a first-pitch curveball up for Gleyber Torres, who’d already launched a two-run shot off Stripling in the fourth and was happy to do the rest of the offensive lifting for his team, shooting the pitch into right-centre to cash Locastro from second.
And that was all she wrote. Another tough team, another one-run contest. But this time a loss, 3-2, dropping the Blue Jays to 9-3 in one-run games. Toronto’s offence couldn’t sequence its hits against Jordan Montgomery and four Yankee relievers, batting 1-for-8 with runners in scoring position and leaving six on base. And Toronto’s bullpen, asked to carry so much of the load for this team through the first 15 per cent of the season, could only do so much.
Would it have been different with Mayza and Romano available? Perhaps. But they won’t always be available. And Toronto’s relievers collectively can’t be asked to keep pitching with such little margin for error. They’re going to give up runs. And Romano’s early season usage — he’s on pace to throw 83 innings — is unsustainable. Toronto’s offence needs to start clicking, needs to start providing heftier leads. Or, in Monday’s case, providing a lead at all.
Is the Blue Jays offence going to carry its .173 batting average with runners in scoring position through a six-month season? Extraordinarily unlikely. Not only because of how volatile performance in those situations can be, but because Toronto entered Monday’s game with an MLB-worst .185 batting average on balls in play with runners in scoring position, not to mention its eight-highest hard-hit rate. Those are strong indicators that this club’s luck ought to turn, that positive regression is on the way. But until it hits, Montoyo will be forced to keep layering more and more bricks on the bullpen’s back. And hope it doesn’t give out.
The good news is Mayza’s been as dependable as relievers come, despite essentially throwing only one pitch. Of course, Mayza isn’t going out there intending to throw his fastball at the 81.7-per-cent rate that he is — at least not directly. His goal is to live on the plate, work ahead, and put hitters away quick. The easiest path to that result just so happens to be through his heater — a 93-94 two-seamer that runs and dives and gets on hitters quick. It also gets them hacking, which is the goal.
Mayza entered Monday with sterling quality of contact numbers, including a 90th percentile barrel rate and 95th percentile hard-hit rate. And while expected statistics are a little funky this season — thanks to a shortened spring, universal humidors, and potentially the balls themselves, MLB’s current offensive environment is significantly depressed from the one those expected numbers are based on — it’s hard to deny the .323 xSLG and .268 xwOBA he’s allowed.
In other, more approachable words, Mayza avoids damage. He pitches to contact. He’s extremely challenging to square up. The nearly 34 inches of drop and more than 17 inches of break on his sinker — both well above league average — move balls off barrels towards the less sturdy and reinforced areas of the bat where soft contact is created. Out towards the end; in on the hands; up or down on the rounded edges. And Mayza can manipulate the action on his heater to feature a little more run when he elevates in the zone, and a little more sink when he’s working down — depends what he needs.
That’s why 19 of the 26 balls put in play against him this season have carried exit velocities south of 95 m.p.h. And why 16 of them have been on the ground. It’s a great recipe for outs, particularly when pitching in front of a defence that shifts as aggressively as Toronto’s. Three-fourth’s of Mayza’s plate appearances against right-handed hitters have featured a shift and Toronto’s game plans are tailored to that positioning, trying to encourage hitters with propensities to hit balls in certain directions to continue doing just that.
Mayza also isn’t walking anyone, which helps. He’s issued only one free pass to the 35 batters he’s faced this season and has thrown 68 per cent of his pitches for strikes. That lone walk? Alvarez, of course. The third time Mayza faced him. He got ahead, 0-1, then missed with a series of sinkers inside. Couldn’t quite land them where he wanted. No bother. He merely dotted one for a first-pitch strike to Yuli Gurriel — .822 OPS against lefties, no biggie — before getting him to ground out weakly to short.
“That’s the point of emphasis,” Mayza says. “Our goal, our philosophy as a bullpen in general, is we want to be busy in the strike zone, we want to get ahead of you and, when we get a shot, we want to put you away as quickly as possible.”
It’s a pretty good way to sum up the work Phelps, Richards, and Cimber did Monday. Phelps threw first-pitch strikes to four of his five batters and retired his final three on four pitches. Richards threw first-pitch strikes to three of his four and didn’t see a three-ball count. Cimber didn’t throw a ball until his third and final hitter, and wrapped an inning’s work with only 10 pitches.
Garcia, meanwhile, fell behind the first three batters he faced, throwing more pitches to them than Phelps and Cimber did in their entire outings. And the fourth proved to be the difference in yet another razor-thin-margined game. That doesn’t take away from the fact Toronto’s bullpen has been exceptional, especially considering how little room for error it’s had to work with. Can it keep this up? We’ll see. But until Toronto starts cashing some runners from second and third, it might have to.
“Great job again — with no room for error. We mapped it out great, everybody did their job, and we were in the game until the end,” Montoyo said of his bullpen. “It just seems like in the first month right now every game is close — and we haven’t really gotten going offensively. But I believe we will. When that’s going to happen, I don’t know. But hopefully a couple of guys get hot — and you know how we say hitting’s contagious. So, hopefully that will get everybody going.”
