TORONTO – Facing baseball’s hottest team, a Tampa Bay Rays squad off to a modern-era-record-tying start, Jose Berrios found command of his fastball and over five dominant innings, perhaps rediscovered himself in the process. The right-hander effectively controlled the zone with his four-seamer, cleverly utilized the run on his sinker, locked up righties with his slurve and kept lefties off-balance with his changeup. It was optimal Berrios.
The only problem Friday related not to his stuff, the execution, or the results, but rather the status of his left knee, which absorbed a 111.8 m.p.h. comebacker to end the fifth and ended his night prematurely. A contusion isn’t expected to prevent him from making his next start and that he didn’t get the chance to go deeper was the only down point on an otherwise buoying night for the Toronto Blue Jays, who ended the Rays’ 13-game winning streak with a 6-3 victory.
Berrios took control from the outset with a three-up, three-down first that included two strikeouts, the second capped by consecutive whiffs on challenge fastballs to Randy Arozarena.
“We wanted to turn that page and I came here with my aggressive mood, and obviously had a confidence in myself and from the bullpen,” said Berrios. “I was feeling like we had to be aggressive, we had to be positive and we brought that to the first inning and I think we set the tone.”
That he did from the mound and in the bottom of the first George Springer did the same at the plate, sending Drew Rasmussen’s second pitch, a 95.5 m.p.h. fastball, 440 feet to left-centre to open the scoring with his 53rd career leadoff homer, tying Craig Biggio for third-most all-time.
A Bo Bichette RBI double in the second was his 500th career hit – which, in 407 games, made him the fastest player to reach the milestone in franchise history, ahead of Vernon Wells and Shannon Stewart in 432 games – and after a Luke Raley RBI single in the fourth, the Blue Jays broke the game open in the fifth.
Bichette started the rally with his fourth of five hits on the night, Vladimir Guerrero Jr. followed with a base hit and Daulton Varsho, who in the third robbed Diaz of extra bases with a leaping catch into the left-centre field wall, walked to loaded bases. Rasmussen rallied to strike out Matt Chapman but Rays manager Kevin Cash decided to pull him for Colin Poche to face fellow lefty Brandon Belt, prompting John Schneider to respond by pinch-hitting Alejandro Kirk.
Poche walked Kirk on four pitches and then Santiago Espinal on five pitches to force home a pair of runs, and then when he appeared to have escaped further trouble when Danny Jansen hit a grounder to short, Brandon Lowe whiffed on Wander Franco’s relay, two more runs scored and the Blue Jays were up 6-1.
At that point the 20-0 start by the 1884 St. Louis Maroons, whom Cash joked that he didn’t “want to say anything bad” because he didn’t know anything about them, was safe.
“We wanted to stop that (streak),” said Berrios, “and we did.”
The primary challenge for the Rays on Friday, though, was Berrios, who came into the game with an 85th percentile whiff rate, a 64th percentile strikeout rate and an 11.17 ERA in spite of that.
The issue, as it was so often last year, was the way his fastballs were getting pounded, with 10 of the 14 hits he’d allowed in his first two starts coming on heaters.
Problematic, Schneider said, was “not so much up and down, but horizontally, where are they? If his sinker is really running, great, start it off and get it on the plate as opposed to on-to-on. … It's really harnessing that sinker, whether it's back door to a righty or front hip to a lefty, you've got to make sure it's in the right part horizontally in the zone.”
Berrios was more four-seamer early but textbook use of his two-seamer came in the fourth, when with a full count, he started one down and away to Randy Arozarena and watched it run back onto the corner for a called third strike.
It was also smart sequencing, after Arozarena saw three four-seamers during the first-inning strikeout, which Schneider felt was critical.
“It was nice to see that little bit of fire from him,” the manager said of Berrios. “It was nothing out of the ordinary from what we were going to try to do against Randy, but the execution part of it and the conviction in which he did it was what I liked about it.”
Bichette echoed the sentiment: "You could tell you had some fire out there.”
The Rays whiffed on four four-seamers in 15 swings, with seven foul balls and four balls in play, two outs and two singles.
The damage on Berrios’ fastball has been “kind of weird,” said Schneider, who added “it's been a conversation amongst many people for a while. Just living on the edges of the plate a little bit more is what he needs to do.”
That he did, while also utilizing a changeup he’s worked to throw a tick slower in search of more movement. He threw 15 on Friday, getting four whiffs on six swings, with two balls in play, one a Brandon Lowe single.
The Diaz comebacker, which Berrios calmly found after it bounced into his knee, pounced on and threw to first for the inning-ending out before limping off, came on a sinker that produced four balls in play, each an out.
“It's nothing really, really bad,” Berrios said of his knee. “Just a little bit of soreness.”
Helping to soothe that is pitching to his capabilities while earning his first win of the season.
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