Blue Jays rebound with big win over Pirates to arrest miserable slide

PITTSBURGH – Those four games at Fenway Park this week may very well turn out be the four worst days the Toronto Blue Jays have this season.

A rough turn for the rotation meant a lot of extended outings for the bullpen, which led to a lot of long innings in the field. Some defensive miscues followed, compounding everyone’s time on their feet in the miserable weather, and that carried over into at-bats. Add an improved Boston Red Sox team eager to turn around last year’s 3-16 season series between the AL East rivals, and you get a damning four-game sweep.

“We just really fell into a little bit of a snowball effect … and kind of lost the time-of-possession, if you will, right there,” is how manager John Schneider put it. “This team and the way that we're built, we are very well suited to take care of the ball, have good at-bats, make good pitches. We've seen that this year. It just hasn't been happening.”

Hence, the Blue Jays made the “attentiveness” Schneider felt his team lacked a focal point in its pre-game meetings Friday and proceeded to deliver a far more up-to-standards effort in a 4-0 win over the Pittsburgh Pirates that ended a five-game losing streak.

Chris Bassitt was nails over seven shutout innings while Vladimir Guerrero Jr. opened the scoring with an RBI single in the first, Daulton Varsho added an RBI double in the fourth and George Springer ended a 17-game homer drought with a two-run shot.

But it was the Blue Jays’ detail work that ensured the game remained firmly in their grasp from start to finish, with Danny Jansen throwing out Ji Hwan Bae trying to steal third to snuff out a rally in the first, Jansen pouncing on a ball that squirted loose and relaying to Bassitt to get Rodolfo Castro at home in the second and Whit Merrifield throwing out Carlos Santana at third on a Castro single to end the fourth.

That’s an inning’s worth of outs on the bases in four frames, all based on being prepared for an opponent and executing against its tendencies.

“We expected them to be really aggressive versus me on the bases, trying to steal a lot, trying to move runners, it's just their style that they kind of have to play,” said Bassitt. “So it wasn't unexpected, it's just this is going to happen, let's make the plays. And we did.”

Those plays stood in stark contrast to the series against the Red Sox, who went 9-for-9 stealing in the four games and whose aggressiveness regularly changed the dynamic on the Blue Jays.

“With guys in motion so much it gets guys on the infield moving, a lot of balls that get through, they're getting to third base, you've got to play the infield in and those balls get through. All that stuff adds up,” said Schneider. “Any little thing in motion can really kind of change the course of an inning in the game.”

It did multiple times in the Blue Jays’ favour Friday before a PNC Park crowd of 24,810 boosted noticeably by Canadian fans, from the previous outs on the bases to their own opportunism.

As he so often has this season, Bo Bichette got things started in the first against Rich Hill, with a double to centre, and Guerrero promptly cashed him in by ripping a ground ball through the left side.

Merrifield’s two-out double in the fourth ended a run of nine straight set down by Hill and, after forcing a pickoff attempt, he easily stole third ahead of Varsho’s double that made it 2-0.

“A lot of times that's kind of frowned upon,” Merrifield said of stealing third with two out. “But when you've got a guy like Hill, he throws that curveball a lot, if you get to third base instead of second base, now he's more cognizant of not burying it in the dirt because a run can score, so he leaves it up and Varsho hits a double. That might not be the reason why (Hill left the curveball up), but it could be the reason.”

Then, after Santana was thrown out at third to end the fourth, Santiago Espinal led off the fifth with a five-pitch walk, Springer hammered an 0-2 curveball 423 feet to centre field to double the Blue Jays' lead.

It was his first home run since April 14 and came one at-bat after the slumping outfielder lined out on a 110.6 mph laser, the fourth-hardest ball he’s hit this year, to left field. In the 17 games between homers, he was just 10-for-64 with an OPS of .401, regularly making hard contact that didn’t find green.

“It feels good, obviously,” Springer said of getting rewarded for his hard contact. “This a results-oriented game and to not get the results that I would like for us isn't a good feeling. But at the end of the day, I know that I'm going out there and I'm playing hard every day and I'm hitting the ball hard and sometimes I just keep hitting it at somebody. But it is what it is. I keep trying to slow the game down, hit the ball hard and hopefully get some good luck.

Helped by the pivotal outs on the bases, Bassitt kept the Pirates, atop the NL Central but now losers of five straight, pinned down with his usual array of mix-and-match wizardry. Of his 105 pitches, 42 were sinkers, with six other pitches sprinkled in, ranging from 18 sweepers to six sliders. The average exit velocity against him was 79.3 mph.

Erik Swanson and Jordan Romano followed with a clean inning each to close the game out.

“I've been saying since Day 1 our A-game beats anyone else's A-game, and we threw out not our A-game in Boston, both on the mound and in the field,” said Schneider. “I thought we had chances to add on offensively, and we didn't. That almost started back in the last game at home against Seattle. When you're going through a rut like this, you can't just wait around for the one hit -- you hit a homer, you hit a two-run double and you go, 'OK, we're back.' You've got to keep going. You've got to keep grinding through it. And the at-bats that come before the big hit are almost more important than that. We've got to get back to doing that, being tough outs and things like that.”

On Friday night, they did, washing away the misery of a terrible series in Boston by looking a lot more like the team they expect to be.