Manoah's shaky start leaves Blue Jays with more questions ahead of trade deadline

TORONTO – A few realities facing the Toronto Blue Jays as the Aug. 1 trade deadline looms …

• First, making the playoffs isn’t a given, even with their current hold on a wild-card spot. Behind them are the Boston Red Sox, New York Yankees and Seattle Mariners, each capable of getting hot and further muddying the path to the post-season. Finding meaningful additions, then, is imperative.

• They still have 25 games remaining with their AL East rivals, against whom they’re 7-20 thus far, with 15 of those contests coming in the final two weeks of the season. Maybe their division record normalizes during that span, but one way or another, a trip to the playoffs goes through the teams they’ve had the toughest time with this year.

• Their roster is relatively set and with the eventual returns of Hyun Jin Ryu and Chad Green going from distant possibility to approaching reality. That’s going to make it even harder, barring injury, to find room on the club for extra pitching adds. Once you get past Jay Jackson and the out-of-options Mitch White, for instance, who are you realistically pushing off the pitching staff? (We’ll get to Alek Manoah later).

• Same thing on the position player side, where it’s tough to envision a trade pickup getting steady at-bats without some subtraction, even if Alejandro Kirk loses his DH reps and is relegated into a backup catcher role, as seems to be the trend.

• Infielder Orelvis Martinez, who homered in his triple-A debut with Buffalo on Tuesday after being promoted from double-A New Hampshire, and outfielder Alan Roden, bumped up to the Fisher Cats from high-A Vancouver, are two of the better stories in the Blue Jays' farm system this year. But having traded their first-round picks from 2018, 2020 and 2021 in recent seasons, along with several other prospects and farmhands, they must be wary of further depleting the org. Remember, three regulars in Matt Chapman, Brandon Belt and Kevin Kiermaier are pending free agents while Whit Merrifield is likely to hit the market once his $18-million, mutual option is turned down.

• All of which makes the next two weeks especially complicated for a Blue Jays team trying to straddle the line between maximizing the current group while being responsible for the years to come, and rewarding players who feel they’ve earned deadline adds.

In that vein, then, every input between now and Aug. 1 matters, which makes Manoah’s three-inning, four-run, 92-pitch slog in Tuesday’s 9-1 thumping from the puzzling San Diego Padres so intriguing.

Given that it’s been 10 days between outings for the big right-hander due to the all-star break, drawing definitive conclusions from his performance is unwise. Manoah’s start before a crowd of 42,680 could have gone much differently, for instance, if a 1-2 changeup to Juan Soto that caught the bottom of the zone is called a strike instead of a ball, keeping the star left-fielder alive to eventually slug a two-run homer that opened the scoring in the first.

And the two-spot Manoah surrendered in the third started with a Fernando Tatis Jr. grounder that hit the bag at third and skipped over Chapman for a double, and was followed by a Soto liner that George Springer seemed to lose in the lights, mistiming his lunge for another double. Soto eventually scored on a Jake Cronenworth sacrifice fly.

Those were among the reasons manager John Schneider said Manoah’s outing “looked worse than it really was.”

Still, even if home-plate umpire Malachi Moore’s strike zone so frustrated the Blue Jays that pitching coach Pete Walker was ejected during a second-inning mound visit, worth noting is that Manoah threw 36 pitches with two strikes, getting six outs while surrendering three walks and a homer.

That Manoah didn’t get any strikeouts and issued nearly as many walks – five – as he got swinging strikes – six – is notable, but between the quality of opponent and long break between starts, it shouldn’t be defining. He maintained his composure and competitiveness under trying circumstances throughout his three-plus innings when things could easily have spun.

“You can't really control some things that kind of happened tonight,” said Manoah. “My job is to just continue to try and control what I can control, forget about what already happened and just try to focus on the next pitch.”

More telling, then will be how he emerges from his next start in Seattle against the Mariners, with Schneider beforehand making it clear he’s not in the rotation on a start-to-start basis.

"When we made the decision to bring him back, he's going to be back here,” he said. “Again, he’s kind of tackled that head on. We're just looking for him to continue to build off of that.”

Unsaid is that for now, the Blue Jays don’t have alternatives although Ryu is slated to make a second rehab outing with Buffalo on Friday, with a target of 80 pitches over five or six innings. Barring any setbacks, at that point Ryu could be in play at any time. There’s enough timeline left on his rehab assignment for two more starts after that one, but the Blue Jays won’t necessarily wait for him to hit 100 pitches before returning him.

“Friday will kind of be telling, with how taxing it is and how he does,” said Schneider. “A guy like him, with the work that he's put in, where he is physically and his track record, we'll lean on him as well as leaning on what we see and what you get reported on. But I think if he gets to 85 (pitches), we would feel pretty comfortable and just kind of see how that outing goes, if it's another one or if it's not.”

Green, meanwhile, will begin a rehab assignment Saturday with low-A Dunedin and if he progresses well, he’ll potentially give the Blue Jays another late-game relief option, of a quality very difficult to acquire at the deadline.

Of course, both need to reach the finish lines in their rehab first, but once they do, they will give the Blue Jays options not currently on the table. Green, who’d presumably bump the continually impressive Jackson as things currently stand, would provide another layer of bullpen depth, with Jackson and Zach Pop among the backup options at Buffalo.

Ryu would presumably bump White, who could perhaps be used to acquire deadline help, and while the Blue Jays could go to a six-man rotation, at least through an upcoming period of 17 games in 17 days, they could get creative as well. Neither Ryu or Manoah makes a ton of sense in the bullpen, but Yusei Kikuchi perhaps does, especially given the way he pitched in relief late last season, providing the swingman protection White was supposed to have offered.

For now, though, the Blue Jays still have some runway to take stock of what they have and try to get what they need ahead of a two-month run that will decide if they’ve assembled the necessary pieces to build a better whole.