TORONTO – A little bit of drama in an outing doesn’t seem to bother Chris Bassitt.
Take last season, when on May 17, he took to the mound with a sinus infection so severe that the pressure in his head spiked unbearably when his heart rate rose too much, and he threw seven shutout innings against the New York Yankees anyway. Then there’s the outing a couple weeks later when he tossed 7.2 shutout frames at the New York Mets while his wife Jessica was in labour in Toronto, rushing to board a plane immediately after leaving the mound to return in time for son Colson’s birth.
Or how about the start last month at the Chicago White Sox, when neck spasms that prevented him from turning his head to look at the plate forced him to mould into a workable delivery, somehow producing five innings.
There are other examples from his season and a half with the Toronto Blue Jays, too, and you can add the six innings with only an unearned run against he delivered Saturday in a 9-3 win over the New York Yankees to the list.
Six pitches into Bassitt’s day, a 101.6-m.p.h. Aaron Judge liner struck him on the right forearm, and his start very much looked headed for an abrupt end. A lengthy discussion on the mound followed, he yanked his first test pitch, paused right after and then threw another that split the plate, prompting him to nod everyone away and off he went.
Underlining that he intended to not only stay in the game, but also lock it down, he quickly pitched out of a two-on, one-out jam, striking out Alex Verdugo before Alejandro Kirk threw out Ben Rice at third on an attempted double-steal to end the inning. Another gem under unusual circumstances followed, Bassitt allowing six hits and two walks while striking out eight.
“The biggest thing I’ve learned is like, I’m not going to let myself make an excuse for that game, whatever I’m dealing with, physically, mentally, whatever it may be,” he said of his penchant for overcoming obstacles. “This game is ruthless and it doesn’t really care about your excuses. So I’m just going to give whatever I got that day. It doesn’t really matter what’s going on. Just give whatever you got. And that was what I did today.”
Vladimir Guerrero Jr. hit a two-run homer in the bottom of the first to open the scoring, and Bassitt and the Blue Jays never looked back before a crowd of 37,448, bouncing back from a 16-5 drubbing Friday which had some parallels to the early innings in this one.
Like Friday, when the Blue Jays led 3-1 through five, they had this one under their thumb despite squandering a couple of opportunities to really shut the door on the Yankees.
While it cost them a night earlier when Juan Soto hit a go-ahead three-run homer in the sixth and the Yankees poured it on against the bullpen, this time Bassitt held the line on a rally in the fifth, when Anthony Volpe reached on an error and eventually scored on a Judge single. The Blue Jays then cracked the game open in the sixth, when RBI singles from Kirk and Isiah Kiner-Falefa, who had four hits and scored three times, preceded Guerrero’s three-run double for an 8-1 lead.
“I see it like a 1-1 game because you never know,” Guerrero, speaking through interpreter Hector Lebron, said of his approach in that spot. “Baseball, it’s like that, especially these guys, they can come back at any moment. It was a nice to have that double, but you still got to play hard to the end.”
To that end Guerrero added a sixth RBI in the eighth – he’s homered in three straight games and driven in 19 over his past six outings – with a single that cashed in a Kiner-Falefa double, creating ample cushion for Jose Cuas, the latest arm thrown into the Blue Jays’ bullpen churn.
A waiver claim from the Chicago Cubs last week who mopped up in the ninth, surrendering a two-run shot to Austin Wells, Cuas was recalled after Tim Mayza, the longest serving Blue Jays player drafted in 2013, was designated for assignment.
The popular lefty, who provided 2.1 bWAR of value a year ago, had struggled all season, initially battling velocity issues, his command becoming problematic afterwards. In recent weeks, the Blue Jays had struggled to find opportunities for him to pitch and when he failed to record an out while on mop-up duty in the ninth inning Friday, his runway expired.
“That was kind of our option there,” said manager John Schneider.
With the bullpen thin and Jordan Romano suffering a setback – he was shut down after experiencing elbow discomfort Friday and will visit Dr. Keith Meister on Tuesday – the Blue Jays will need the offence to help stretch out leads and the starters to do the heavy lifting while the relief corps gets sorted.
“You want to keep doing what you’re doing offensively, for sure, and then there are going to be times where you don’t hold a lead or you give up some runs and you’ve got to try to balance it out,” said Schneider. “There are going to be opportunities for guys to step up. Today (Brendan) Little did, (Zach) Pop did, Jose did you, albeit with the homer to Wells, but … there are going to be more and more opportunities for everyone, whether it’s the bullpen or the guys at the plate, to have opportunities to step up. We’ve got to keep doing it.”
Bassitt very much did, too, shaking off Judge’s liner, taking in Schneider’s message to protect himself on the mound and pushing through to another win, drama and all.