TORONTO – The willingness to grind and the ability to rally from deficits are good qualities for any team to have, especially one that keeps allowing opponents to score first like the Toronto Blue Jays. Through their first 47 games of the season, that’s happened 28 times and while they’ve managed to produce 12 comeback wins, continually playing catch-up is bad way to make up ground in the standings. They’ve won only four times when trailing after six, underscoring the need for more early offence.
“I feel like we say it all the time, we're kind of right there,” said manager John Schneider. “Be nice to get out to a lead instead of these one-run games. Kind of just waiting for that big hit or getting out to an early lead, really. It's frustrating. And just talking about it with the guys in the (pre-game hitters) meeting there, it shows a lot of fight. Last year, you think, OK, you're out of it when you're down and that's not the feel this year. But you want to try to flip the script a little bit and get ahead. I know one-run games have been tough. You've got to start finding ways to win.”
Refreshingly, that’s precisely what the Blue Jays proceeded to in a 3-0 victory Tuesday over the San Diego Padres, getting a first-inning homer from Vladimir Guerrero Jr., and adding on with Anthony Santander’s two-run shot in the fifth to capitalize on a Chris Bassitt gem.
Guerrero’s sixth homer of the season, turning around a 97.3-m.p.h. fastball from a mostly dominant Dylan Cease, marked the first time the Blue Jays opened the scoring during a homestand in which they’re now 3-4. They also hadn’t scored in the first inning since May 9 at Seattle, when they completed a three-game sweep of the Mariners.
“When we’re up, it’s better. We think better and we can go to home plate and try to do some damage instead of being down 3-0,” Guerrero said of playing with a lead. “But this is baseball. It's hard. Some days we're going to come back and win later, some days in the first inning we're going to score three or four.”
Or one, which against the Padres, was “a game changer,” said Santander. “When we score first we put the pressure on the other team.”
Bassitt then held the fort until they added on, when Cease’s run of 11 straight batters retired ended with an Alejandro Kirk walk that opened the fifth before Santander followed with his sixth homer of the season, ending an 0-for-12 drought.
Santander was playing in his second straight game after not starting the first two games of the weekend series against Detroit due to a flare up of the left shoulder soreness caused when he crashed into the outfield wall in Anaheim two weeks ago, and left hip troubles caused when an awkward swing against the Rays last week “fired up” the area.
Neither is 100 per cent — “Working on it,” he said with a grin — which is no doubt a factor in his recent slump. He’s also been working through some adjustments with his hands, moving them up to keep his shoulders from twisting in too far, creating a straighter path to the ball.
The goal is to build up the type of rhythm that feels like “when you dance with a pitcher,” he explained. “Nice and smooth. You're not jumping to the ball. You're calm. And you just let the ball get deep and you try to go straight to the ball and react like I did on the pitch on the homer. It was nice and smooth and just throw your hands to the ball.”
Schneider dropped Santander in the batting order Sunday to ease some of the burden on him as he sought his flow, and the slugger praised his teammates for their support as he’s struggled to produce, as well as their joyful reaction when the ball cleared the wall.
“I saw him grinding every day, he's been hurt, he's not locked in right now and when you see a guy hit a home run, you've got to celebrate it,” said Guerrero who led the charge, dancing outside the dugout. “If he gets the confidence back, it's going to be good for us.”
The Blue Jays had a chance to open up the game further when Addison Barger followed with a single, stole second and was sacrificed to third on an Ernie Clement bunt. But when Nathan Lukes lined out to first, he was doubled off at third, ending the inning.
Bassitt, who struck out six over six shutout innings, and the bullpen did the rest, in the type of wire-to-wire win they’d envisioned being a regular occurrence, but instead has been a rarity. While the Blue Jays would certainly want more than three hits, when two of them are homers and one gets coupled with a walk, a good pitching performance can make it work.
They certainly got that from Bassitt, who primarily used his cutter, curveball and splitter as secondary offerings to his sinker, while getting swinging strikes on six different pitches. That made for an interesting contrast to Cease, who essentially used two pitches, a fastball that averaged 96.7 m.p.h., and a wicked slider he threw 52 times, generating nine whiffs on 30 swings, although one was a hanger that Santander lined over the wall in right.
“I really try not to focus on who’s pitching,” Bassitt said of his feeling during the duel. “I've done it in the past and I've kind of been burned by it where you go up against a guy like Cease and then it's like, I'm trying to do more to hold them down. Usually trying to do more is always the wrong answer. So I’ve learned to not really care who's pitching because I'm not facing them.”
Handed a 3-0 lead, the bullpen brought it home, Brendon Little handling the seventh, the increasingly trusted Yariel Rodriguez pitching the eighth and Jeff Hoffman the ninth for his 10th save.
“It's nice to flip the script a little bit and get out to, to a lead,” said Schneider. “Chris was outstanding. He had good stuff from the get-go. Cutter was a really, really good pitch up in the zone to their lefties. It just sets the tone a little bit as opposed to playing from behind. Hopefully we can continue to do that.”
