TORONTO — Brett Cecil will be the first to tell you it takes something big to get him visibly fired up.
In the words of fellow bullpen arm, Joe Biagini: “Brett’s an inside-voice type of guy. I haven’t heard him make too many loud noises.”
Well, Tuesday night at Rogers Centre was one of those rare times Cecil did make a loud noise.
When the left-hander punched out Coco Crisp in the top of the seventh with an 85.8 mph curveball to retire the side in one, two, three fashion and preserve a 2-1 Blue Jays lead—with the season on the line, no less—Cecil yelled. He pumped his fist. He even jumped a little bit.
“It takes a lot to get me to do something like that,” Cecil said, grinning, after Toronto’s 5-1 win over Cleveland, which cut their ALCS deficit to two games. “Knowing that I finally did something that was worthy of a good fist pump, it definitely feels good.
“It felt awesome, knowing it’s a one-run game, and knowing that I haven’t had my best season.”
No, Cecil hasn’t. It’s been a roller-coaster of sorts: He had a terrible start to the year, and missed more than a month in the summer due to injury.
Any Blue Jays fans thinking about his first half of the season might have felt the nerves escalate when they saw the 30-year-old jog out from the bullpen Tuesday in relief of Aaron Sanchez.
The thing is, Cecil has been really good of late. As veteran catcher Russell Martin puts it: “He’s been lights out.”
In the month of September, when the Blue Jays struggled, Cecil’s ERA was 1.04 over 8.2 innings—he gave up five hits, one earned run and struck out 14.
In October, over the course of this post-season, in three innings of work so far he has given up three walks, but has yet to relinquish a hit against 11 batters.
Cecil saved his best performance of these playoffs for the biggest game of Toronto’s season.
“At this point, I’m feeling the best I have,” he said, his left shoulder wrapped in ice. “I felt good in the second half of the season, but I’m feeling even better now.”
Cecil said his curveball Tuesday was feeling “probably the best it has for a while.”
Called on to preserve a 2-1 lead, Cecil says his goal was to get strike one across the plate “and pretty much go from there.”
What went from there was pretty clinical.
He faced three righties, starting with Jose Ramirez, who lined out to centre on an 84.6 mph curveball. Next he struck out Rajai Davis, swinging, on four pitches, the clincher coming on an 85.4 mph curveball. He needed just three more pitches to strike out Crisp.
Biagini put it best on what it was like to watch Cecil and put away three straight Cleveland batters at a pivotal moment in the game: “It was like floating on a cloud of Cecil-ness.”
Of course it was.
Each of Cecil’s outs came on a curveball, his bread and butter.
“He’s got one of the best breaking balls in the league, in my opinion,” Martin said. “Even when guys are sitting on that pitch, it’s still hard to hit.
“He’s that guy that I feel like he can match up against righties or lefties, he’s tough to hit.”
The Cecil of Tuesday may have felt reminiscent of the shutdown guy Blue Jays fans saw in 2015. Biagini, who knew very little about this organization when he joined the Blue Jays this season, had heard about Cecil’s dominance before he moved to Toronto.
“I knew that he’d been really good and really consistent,” Biagini said. “This year had had a little bit of struggle early in the season, but I always made a note to not only watch him play NHL 2016 and see how he focuses on that, but also to watch him and how he handled himself throughout the season.
“He worked through that, then had the injury, then he came back and you saw him really step up when we needed him,” Biagini said. “Like you saw [Tuesday]. I was happy to see that for him, and for the team. We all thought that he was the right guy to have out there. And we hope we’ll get a bunch more games where he’s pitching, right?”
That’s not something you’d have heard a teammate say of Cecil back at the start of the season, when he had a 5.79 ERA in the month of April. Not that his performance earlier in the year matters now.
“Would you rather have a guy peak at the beginning of the season—games still matter but you’re not in the heat of competition like you are now and going through September,” Cecil said. “Or would you rather have a guy kind of step his game up at the end of the year. I feel like I could speak for mostly anybody and I’d say the latter.”
Cecil is a career Blue Jay. He’s 30 years old, and he’s been with this team since he was 22. The six-foot-three southpaw from Maryland says there’s a difference with this team compared to previous years.
“We’ve got a lot of fight. That’s what I notice most,” he said. “Pitchers, hitters, defensive plays. We have a lot of fight in us.”
The Blue Jays will need it if they’re going to win four straight—they have three more to go— to earn a World Series berth.
One thing’s for sure: Their left-handed set-up man is feeling quite good these days.
How good? Asked about his confidence level following Tuesday’s win, Cecil grinned. “Very high,” he said. “Very high.”