Blue Jays cap off high-octane season series with win over Astros

TORONTO — Pity that the Toronto Blue Jays and Houston Astros are through with each other after six tension-filled, highly entertaining games over the past 10 days. The only way they meet again in 2022 is if it happens in October and if the past two weekends are the baseline, that would be a hella fun series.

"Playoff time," is how Astros manager Dusty Baker described the competition between the two clubs before Sunday’s 3-2 loss that gave the Blue Jays wins in four of the six clashes. "These guys have been playing that kind of ball the whole year because of the division they're in with the Yankees, Boston and the rest of them. Every game is like a playoff game. There's a good chance somebody is going to have come back through here to play playoff baseball.

“They've got a good team. They've got a very good bullpen. It's a matter of if they stay healthy and what’s going to happen over the next few months. They’ve got a really good team.”

So, too, of course, do the Astros, who have turned over much of the roster from the tainted World Series win of 2017 yet remain the pre-eminent force in the American League West, even with the Los Angeles Angels off to a strong start.

There was precious little margin in the two series against the Blue Jays — five of the six games were decided by one run and the cumulative score was 27-26 for the Astros — and there were high-drama endings throughout.

Sunday was no exception after Kyle Tucker’s one-out double off Jordan Romano led to a tremendous 10-pitch duel with Alex Bregman, who with the count 2-2 fouled off five consecutive fastballs before sending a sixth at 100.4 m.p.h. toward the right-field corner.

That’s where a streaking George Springer chased the drive down, sliding into the wall before alertly throwing the ball back in to ensure Tucker didn’t charge home after tagging to third.

Romano then struck out Jeremy Pena, who last Sunday ended the Canadian closer’s streak of 31 consecutive saves with a walk-off homer.

“I gave him a big hug after the game just to say thank you,” Romano said of Springer.

All of which made Kevin Gausman’s latest gem all the more impressive, as the ace right-hander suffocated the Astros over seven innings of two-run ball, riding a fastball sitting at 95.2 m.p.h. and topping out at 98, and a splitter that generated 14 swinging strikes.

More impressive is the way he continues to command his repertoire, as he’s up to 122 consecutive batters without a walk to begin the season, while Yordan Alvarez in the second was just the sixth plate appearance against Gausman to reach three balls this season. Alvarez eventually struck out on a full-count splitter, one of a season-best 10 on the day.

“A World Series team,” Gausman said of the Astros. “They've been in a lot of World Series over the last five years. A lot of talent over there, even their young guys are very talented. It almost felt like a post-season game with the amount of adrenaline you have every pitch. You know you've got to be really fine.

"For Romano to shut it down the way that he did against a guy that got him last time was really cool. And now we've got a big series (against the New York Yankees beginning Monday) coming up.”

Under normal circumstances, Gausman’s dominance should have made for a Blue Jays cakewalk but not with Framber Valdez inducing poor contact and having fielders in the right spots when the Blue Jays did barrel the ball up.

Valdez didn’t allow a hit until the sixth inning, when Bo Bichette reached out for a sinker a few inches out of the zone and poked it over the right-field wall for a two-run shot that opened a 2-1 lead.

Interestingly, Bichette’s drive was nearly identical to the one Chas McCormick hit in the top of the inning, his ball hitting off the top of the fence for a triple eventually cashed by an Aledmys Diaz base hit.

Both balls were struck off fastballs at a 33-degree launch angle, Bichette’s off the bat at 97.3 m.p.h., McCormick’s at 97.2, leading to an extra four feet of distance travelled at 343 feet.

The little difference mattered, even as the Astros tied things up in the top of the seventh, when Tucker tapped a ball up the third-base line to beat the shift, stole second and scored when Niko Goodrum snuck a bouncer through Bichette and Santiago Espinal up the middle.

The Blue Jays retook the lead in the bottom half when Espinal greeted reliever Phil Maton with a line-drive single that scored Matt Chapman. Fuelling the rally was a Pena error that put runners at first and second and ended Valdez’s outing.

All that set up the drama of the ninth.

Springer, who hit a pair of solo shots in Saturday’s 2-1 win, haunted his former team again as he reached on a fielder’s choice ahead of Bichette’s homer in the fifth and then made his latest spectacular catch in the ninth, earning a standing ovation from a crowd of 31,802.

The way Romano — pitching for the 13th time in 23 games — approached Bregman was noteworthy given it was the fourth time he was facing the Astros in the past 10 days, including Saturday. He threw four consecutive sliders to begin the at-bat, but then kept pumping heaters at the star third baseman, whom he got on a flyout to cap Saturday’s win.

“I was definitely thinking about how I threw Bregman yesterday, there's a little more chess match to it,” said Romano. “Especially in the playoffs, we're going to be facing a lot of these teams, I'm going to be pitching against them a lot, so it's a good experience for me. 

“In that spot, I was like, 'If I'm going to get beat, I'm going to get beat with my best stuff, my heater.' I just wanted my best against a really good hitter and seeing what happened there.”

What happened is it led to another one-run Blue Jays win, pushing their mark to 9-2 in such contests, the main reason why they’re 15-8 despite a run-differential of plus-one. Their May-June struggles with slim leads in 2021 is why they underperformed a plus-183 run-differential by eight victories.

“We've just been in them,” Bichette said of the difference in one-run games so far. “We played a lot of close games, a lot of really good teams in games that mattered last year down the stretch, and we won a lot of them. The confidence that we can do that, we've carried it over. Obviously, we're confident in ourselves to go out there and win every game. We've done a good job of that so far.”

They have and as a result, the daunting schedule they faced immediately coming out of spring training — 30 games in 31 days, including the current 20 in a row against Boston, Houston, the Yankees and Cleveland — can be a springboard rather than an anvil.