Blue Jays' season quickly on brink but new format keeps dream alive

TORONTO — The brink comes at you quickly in the post-season and one afternoon into their return to October, the Toronto Blue Jays suddenly find themselves staring down a two-and-out.

That it would come to this, their fate dependent on a Game 2 rebound Saturday afternoon behind starter Kevin Gausman, shouldn’t be surprising for a team that spent the 2022 season doing things the hard way. Alek Manoah stumbled in the first inning of an otherwise strong outing and with Luis Castillo sitting 98.6 m.p.h. with both his four- and two-seam fastballs, the Seattle Mariners were able to make an early three-spot stand-up in a 4-0 win.

To force a decisive third game Sunday, the Blue Jays will need to recover against old friend Robbie Ray, who won the American League Cy Young Award for them last year before signing a $115-million, five-year deal with Seattle. That he’ll face Gausman, who took $110 million over five from the Blue Jays, will only add to the intrigue, given that one replaced the other, a full-circle moment for the off-season work that helped both teams reach this point.

“I’ve never pitched in an elimination game before. But I started the last game of the season in ‘16 (with the Baltimore Orioles) and we needed to win that game,” said Gausman, who allowed two runs in 7.1 innings of a 5-2 win over the New York Yankees to clinch a wild-card berth. “I’ve pitched a lot of meaningful games in my career… just going to go out there and pitch to my strengths.”

Still, that the Blue Jays are at this point after a strong finish to the season earned them the top wild-card spot and the right to host the series, drawing a charged-up crowd announced at 47,402, will be jarring for a group that expected better, although there’s little time to dwell on it now.

“Just continue to compete,” Bo Bichette said of the mindset for Saturday. “We have no other choice. Go out there and compete as best as we can and see what we can do. There's another challenge ahead of us tomorrow and we'll face it head on and do the best we can.”

Manoah, the right choice for Game 1, perhaps came out a bit too hot and put himself in an early jam by hitting Julio Rodriguez on the hand with his fourth pitch of the game, an 0-2 four-seamer.

A soft grounder to first by Ty France advanced the electric Rodriguez to second and he scored easily when Eugenio Suarez followed with a double to right on a four-seamer left up over the plate.

Cal Raleigh then battled the count full and pounded a sinker over the wall in right to make it 3-0.

“I don't know if he was a little bit fired up, but had some velo and just a couple of bad pitches,” said interim manager John Schneider. “It was a good job by him and uncharacteristic first inning, for sure.”

The Raleigh homer hushed a crowd whipped up by a stirring pre-game show that included a night-club-like light show, a highlight video, player intros and a ceremonial first pitch by 2016 wild-card, walk-off hero Edwin Encarnacion, who climbed the mound and fired a strike from the rubber.

Castillo then kept their energy down by coming out hot, with seven of his 11 pitches in a three-up, three-down first coming in at 99 m.p.h. or higher, including two at 100-plus. With that kind of stuff, nearly two m.p.h. above his season average, GM Jerry Dipoto’s prized deadline addition recently extended for $108-million over five years was going to be tough sledding no matter what, but made rallying all the more difficult.

“He has a sinker pounding out your hands at 99 to 100 and then he has the four-seam that he'll throw up and away, it doesn't have that dive, it's got more of a true carry,” said Whit Merrifield, who had one of the six hits against Castillo. “You’re having to make a decision on what that 100-mile-an-hour pitch is going to do, and that's what makes it tough. Credit to him. He did a good job of keeping that four-seam away and keeping that two-seam in on your hands all game. Didn't give us much to work with, didn't make a whole lot of mistakes.”

The Blue Jays really had only one left-handed hitter — Raimel Tapia — to line up against Castillo while the Mariners used switch hitters Raleigh and Carlos Santana along with lefties Jarred Kelenic, Adam Frazier and J.P. Crawford against Manoah.

The disparity in platoon flexibility between the rosters is something Dipoto noted ahead of the series, saying “our ability to run right-hand pitching out there and to balance the lineup with left-hand bats is going to be the key to us competing in this series and hopefully coming out on the other side.”

Left-handed hitters did most of the damage against Manoah during the season, batting .237/.313/.367 against him with 11 homers compared to .159/.211/.249 and five homers for righties. To counter the disadvantage, he worked on a front hip two-seamer that would back onto the plate and lefties hit just .215 and slugged .252 against the pitch, but he threw four of them to Raleigh in the first and on the final one, the seventh pitch of the at-bat, the catcher sent it 362 feet to right, an early dagger.

Manoah retired 12 of his next 14 batters faced before the Mariners scratched out a fourth run in the fifth when he again hit Rodriguez, who eventually scored on a Suarez fielder’s choice.

“It was a pretty lengthy at-bat with Cal and ended up not executing the front-hip sinker,” said Manoah. “Just continued to tell myself: 'Continue to execute.' They beat me on my mistakes and I felt like I was able to start executing after that.”

The Blue Jays built rallies in the third, on two-out singles by George Springer and Bichette before Vladimir Guerrero Jr. flew out to centre, and the fifth, when Merrifield and Springer singled ahead of a Bichette groundout, but Castillo didn’t relent over 7.1 shutout innings.

Still, they didn’t wilt before him and Ray will need to be just as overpowering to contain an offence that still put up seven hits overall and made life difficult for one of the game’s dominant arms.

Given how many times they’ve shaken off difficult losses and emerged from trying stretches this season — including a four-game sweep in Seattle July 7-10 that led to Charlie Montoyo’s firing as manager and Mariners skip Scott Servais saying it “was pivotal for our season moving in the right direction” — it would be foolish to count against another bounce-back.

“We play in a division where we're battle-tested every single day,” said third baseman Matt Chapman. “Just build off today. Everybody felt what it's like to play in a playoff game, what it's like to lose a playoff game and we battled. I think we'll be ready to answer.”

That the Blue Jays get to play another day is the result of the expanded playoffs resulting from the collective bargaining agreement negotiated to end the owners’ lockout of players. The wild-card format of the past was a one-game, win-or-go-home affair that made for spectacular theatre but a hard-to-swallow way to resolve a season.

Asked before the series which format he prefers, Schneider said, “definitely the three.”

“Baseball is tough and over the course of 162, anything can happen on any given night,” he continued. “And to have it in a one game vacuum is a little bit weird. So it goes right into what we've been saying all year, you're trying to win a series. And I think the overall depth of your team, the talent of your team, it's a lot easier to show that over the course of a three-game series as opposed to a one. It makes decisions a little bit more consistent. It makes play a little bit more slow, if you will, as opposed to playing with your hair on fire in one game. So the three-game series is pretty good.”

Especially now that the Blue Jays are on the precipice instead of over it, with a chance to pull themselves back from the edge.