ARLINGTON, Texas — When the Toronto Blue Jays acquired Marco Estrada from the Milwaukee Brewers this winter in a trade for Adam Lind, no one foresaw the swingman with a soft fastball who led the majors in homers allowed last year saving the team’s season.
No one foresaw it in spring training when Estrada was nearly left off the team altogether; no one foresaw it in April when he was pitching out of the bullpen; and no one saw it in May, when he took Daniel Norris’ spot in the rotation because there wasn’t anyone else to do it.
But on Sunday night there Estrada was, out on the mound deep in the heart of Texas, in a win-or-go-home game, spinning 6.1 shutdown innings of one-run ball.
“It felt great,” Estrada said after the game. “I wasn’t really thinking about the situation. Obviously, I know we’re down by two, or we were. But I didn’t want to think about it. I just kept thinking, hey, the way you thought about pitching the entire year, why not keep doing the same thing. Just don’t think about being down 0-2. You want to win. I want to win every single game and that’s basically the mentality I took in.”
It’s a mentality that has worked incredibly well for Estrada, who was one of the Blue Jays most consistently reliable pitchers this season, although he rarely received the credit he deserved for it. He pitched to a 3.13 ERA across 181 innings, well more than he’d ever thrown in his career.
He kept his home runs down and developed a cutter mid-season that gave him another weapon to attack left-handed hitters with. It’s hard to imagine where the Blue Jays would have ended up without him, something that was especially prescient on Sunday, when that place was potentially on a plane home for the off-season.
“Do or die game, doesn’t surprise me,” said Blue Jays manager John Gibbons. “He stepped up. You could tell early on, too—he was on. We talked about nerves for guys that are a little too emotional and how it would affect them. I didn’t see that out of him at all. Job well done—but he’s been doing that all year.”
Estrada warmed up earlier than he usually does ahead of Sunday’s crucial game, in an attempt to begin the first inning at his best. He threw more pitches during his pre-game routine, which he said helped him start the game physically loose but mentally locked in.
Estrada leaned heavily on his fastball and cutter against the Rangers, throwing them 68.5 per cent of the time at an average velocity of 90.7 mph, while even ramping them up to 92 mph at times, which is exceptionally hard for him. He used that as a base to make his best pitch, a 78-mph change-up, nearly unhittable. He earned seven swinging strikes with the change-up, and 12 in total, while also breaking out a few wicked curveballs that almost always caught Rangers hitters off guard.
The best example of that plan working to perfection came in the bottom of the fifth inning, when Rougned Odor—who has been a persistent pest for the Blue Jays throughout the series—came to the plate with a runner on first and one out. Estrada got ahead with a pair of well-located fastballs before breaking out a looping, 78-mph curveball that buckled Odor’s knees as it sailed into the zone for a called third strike.
“That was a great, pitch,” Estrada’s catcher Dioner Navarro said. “I believe coming into this season, he was mostly a fastball-changeup guy. But we started working with the curveball and the cutter more, and now he uses all of his pitches with conviction. He just does such a good job; he keeps hitters off balance. He’s just a great pitcher.”
Estrada and Navarro have had incredible chemistry together throughout the season, and that was no different against the Rangers, as Estrada rarely shook off his catcher. The duo kept the Rangers off balance all night, earning six outs through the air, five on the ground, and four via strikeout.
“It’s just different the way he calls the game. I’ve tried to keep up with him, and I’ve said this a million times—the guy just thinks unlike anybody else,” Estrada said. “I try to follow him as much as I can. If I hit the groove, I’m going to be pretty successful with him back there.”
Of course, while Estrada credits Navarro with the duo’s success, Navarro does the opposite. Asked what worked so well for Estrada Sunday night, Navarro couldn’t narrow it down to one thing.
“Everything—his curveball, his cutter, everything he threw was right on,” Navarro said. “He was outstanding. He kept the ball down really well. He did exactly what we needed him to do. He gave us a great six innings. And I’m pretty sure he could’ve kept going.”
Russell Martin, who was brought to the Blue Jays this off-season on a five-year, $82-million free agent contract to be the club’s starting catcher, sat the game out, unselfishly ceding his job to his backup because the Estrada-Navarro battery has been so effective. He watched in awe from the dugout.
“Estrada, he just finds a way. He gets ahead of hitters, he mixes in and out, he’s able to throw up in the zone even with an 88-90 mph fastball,” Martin said. “That was a tremendous game. We needed that.”
Even Blue Jays ace David Price, who almost came into the game as an emergency reliever in the late-innings, was singing Estrada’s praises after the win.
“He’s done a great job. He threw the ball extremely well before I was a Blue Jay and ever since I’ve been here he’s been great,” Price said. “He works hard. He cares. And he takes that ball every fifth day and he’s ready.”
And who saw that coming in winter, during spring or even early in the season? If the Blue Jays are able to come back in this series, a much more doable task after Sunday night’s crucial win, they’ll likely be looking to Estrada to start one of the first two games of the ALCS. And that’s a scenario they’re going to feel very confident in.