TORONTO — Among the ingredients for the Toronto Blue Jays’ 39th win of the season: one home run, three sacrifice flies and 3.1 innings of scoreless relief.
Just like that, the 39-39 Blue Jays are back at .500 for the first time since late May. Now, the challenge is staying there and leaving their slow start behind them for good.
Monday’s 4-2 win over the Houston Astros wouldn’t have been possible without the efforts of starter Dylan Cease, who out-pitched his counterpart, Hunter Brown, in a matchup of frontline starters. Yet the bullpen was even more effective, holding Houston scoreless while the offence rallied late.
“It shows a lot of resilience,” Cease said. “There’s still a lot of talent (here), even though we’ve underperformed what we're capable of. But we have a lot of resilience, a lot of grit and that's important — especially over the long run. We've gotten punched in the face a bit and we're (working) our way back.”
Afterwards, no one was celebrating a return to .500. The Blue Jays have bigger goals, of course. But even so, this win was necessary if they’re going to achieve anything bigger.
“Yeah, good,” manager John Schneider said. “It feels good to get back to it, you know what I mean? But there's a lot more work to do, and the goal is to win every series. It's nice to be back there, for sure. Aesthetically, if you're looking at an actual record. But my initial reaction is 'good, and let's try to go win the series tomorrow.'”
The Blue Jays had trouble generating runs early Monday, but Kazuma Okamoto homered into the left field bullpen to lead off the second. From there, Vladimir Guerrero Jr., Myles Straw and Alejandro Kirk each added sacrifice flies as the Blue Jays scored just enough to beat an Astros team that’s trying to gain ground on them in the AL Wild Card race.
“We've had a lot of really good at-bats lately,” Cease said.
Okamoto’s 17th home run of the season was one of 11 hits for the Blue Jays.
“Hunter Brown's a good pitcher,” Okamoto said through interpreter Yusuke Oshima. “So we knew coming in that we had to grind him out. I did my best to put the ball and play and I’m glad the ball went out.”
“He’s definitely shown he can hit a fastball,” Schneider added.
Pitching on an extra day of rest due to Sunday's rainout in Chicago, Cease completed 5.2 innings while allowing two earned runs on three hits. He struck out eight bringing his season total to 118, trailing only Jacob Misiorowski of the Brewers and Cristopher Sanchez of the Phillies.
“He has the ability to miss bats and that always comes into play,” Schneider said. “He didn't really have feel for the change-up, but fastball got him back into the count.”
But while the results were objectively good, the pitch count piled up early, preventing Cease from pitching as deep into the game as he’d like.
With Jose Altuve due up, two outs and two runners on in the sixth, Schneider jogged out to check on Cease, who was then at 106 pitches. In a brief mound conference, the right-hander assured Schneider he felt strong and wanted to face Altuve.
Four pitches later, Altuve singled on the 110th and final pitch Cease threw Monday, driving home the tying run and bringing in the bullpen.
“He was holding his stuff and he wanted it,” Schneider said. “Right away, he let me know. And, I mean there were some really good pitches to Altuve.”
With Cease out of the game, the Blue Jays turned to Braydon Fisher, who provided 1.1 scoreless innings in his 40th appearance of the season, one behind teammate Mason Fluharty for the MLB lead.
Tyler Rogers followed Fisher, and while the submariner allowed three baserunners, none of them scored. That set up another save opportunity for Louis Varland, who allowed just one walk on the way to a scoreless ninth and his 16th save of the season.
Those contributions are especially important given the news that Yimi Garcia will pause his rehab work to meet with Blue Jays team doctors after feeling soreness in his right biceps area following a recent minor-league appearance. Ideally, it would be a short shutdown for Garcia, but further consultation with doctors will be required to determine next steps.
Clearly, there’s a limit to how often the Blue Jays can ask trusted relievers like Fisher, Rogers and Varland to pitch. But it’d be an understatement to say they’ve been a big reason the Blue Jays are still contending and their success thus far is a reason for optimism as the Blue Jays look to climb above .500 for the first time since early April.
Their next chance to do so comes Tuesday with Shane Bieber on the mound making his season debut.
“We've been playing better,” Cease said. “And getting Shane back is huge.”
“On to tomorrow,” Okamoto added. “I can’t wait to get back on the field.”
