NEW YORK — You likely remember the third-base collision Vladimir Guerrero Jr. withstood at Rogers Centre last weekend, meeting George Lombard Jr.’s left knee with his head while sliding around a potential tag. The Blue Jays first baseman wishes he could say the same.
“When I went to home plate, I was out — completely,” Guerrero said during a conversation at Tropicana Field earlier this week. “I realized what happened when I saw the replay.”
Guerrero has no recollection of the play, of getting up to score a tying run as the ball skipped into foul territory, of returning to the dugout for a procession of high fives. His lone memory is of his teammate, Andres Gimenez, coming up to him as he sat in the dugout and saying, ‘Hey, keep your head up.’
Evidently, the Blue Jays shortstop wasn’t the only one concerned. Guerrero was immediately lifted from the game and entered MLB’s concussion protocol after finding the lights and music in the post-game clubhouse too disorienting to withstand. He couldn’t drive himself home that night and awoke the next morning with a headache and dizziness.
“I've been talking with a lot of players that have had concussions and they told me that you're going to feel a little bit tired, maybe you're going to feel a bit dizzy,” Guerrero said. “I was worried. But after I talked with some players and they told me what it is, I was normal.”
Technically, this is the second concussion of Guerrero’s career, after he suffered one as an 18-year-old while playing winterball in the Dominican Republic. But then, he missed only two games. This one cost him six, which is why Guerrero calls it his first “real” head injury.
“This one,” he said, “is way different.”
Guerrero’s symptoms began to dissipate on Monday during an off day in St/ Petersburg, Fla. and by Tuesday he was feeling well enough to do some running and light hitting indoors. Wednesday, he made it through a full on-field workout symptom-free. Thursday, he DH’ed for the Dunedin Blue Jays, going 1-for-1 with two walks. By Friday, he’d cleared all testing required under MLB’s concussion protocol to return to service with the Blue Jays.
And so he did, Saturday in the Bronx, hitting second and playing first base as his Blue Jays eked out a closer-than-it-ought-to-have-been victory over the Yankees, 4-3. It was another Dylan Cease tour de force, as the Cy Young candidate worked north with fastballs and south with breaking balls, striking out eight while carrying a no-hitter through two outs of the seventh.
But he walked five along the way and left pitches up to his final two hitters of the day — Jazz Chisholm Jr. and Austin Wells — who both singled to break up Cease’s latest no-hit bid and drive him from the game. It was an ace-level performance from a guy who’s seldom satisfied with anything short of perfection.
"I think I had a decent mix going. I didn't command the ball super well. But I guess I threw enough strikes and had good enough stuff to get it done. But command was kind of iffy today," Cease said. “I didn't really get in a great groove. But it was good enough.”
After Cease left, Heliot Ramos Jr. made things hairy in the eighth, ambushing Tyler Rogers for a first-pitch, two-run homer — the first longball the Blue Jays submariner has allowed all season. And Chisholm upped the degree of difficulty for Louis Varland, leading off the ninth with a double. But the Blue Jays closer rallied to retire the next three consecutively, making his 29th save a hair-raising one.
Offensively, the Blue Jays fared better in a rematch with Ryan Weathers after the left-hander buried their right-handed-heavy lineup under a barrage of sinkers and changeups located consistently away last weekend. That day, Toronto’s hitters let Weathers land 14 sinkers for called strikes and chased 44 per cent of the changeups he threw outside the zone.
This time around, Weathers stuck to his sinkers-and-changeups-away-from-righties game plan while layering in the odd back-door sweeper. But the Blue Jays were BABIP-blessed, notching eight hits — only two harder than 90 m.p.h. — off Weathers through three innings.
“After his last outing against us, we tried to make some contact, we tried to get the ball in the air,” said Blue Jays manager John Schneider. “We knew he'd be in the zone. He doesn't walk a lot of guys. And he came right after us last time.”
Yet the sequencing of all those soft-contact hits was unideal, limiting the Blue Jays to only two runs off Weathers before he left due to left forearm discomfort in the fourth inning. On a day when many of New York’s most trusted relievers were overworked and unavailable, it was a second consecutive fateful gift to the Blue Jays after they encountered a substandard Cam Schlittler in Friday’s opener but couldn’t take advantage, going 1-for-14 with runners in scoring position.
And while it didn’t come easily for Toronto’s starters, Nathan Lukes was ready to take advantage off the bench, driving in a third run off bulk reliever Yerry De los Santos with a two-out, pinch-hit single in the fifth. His next time up, leading off the eighth, Lukes turned on a Bradley Hanner heater and put the game’s winning run into the second deck.
“Today was a step in the right direction, definitely. I'm happy about today, I'm happy about the progress I've made,” said Lukes, who entered the game frustrated by a 5-for-34 slump over his last 11 games. “The big one is being on time. I've been late to every heater and working on not being late to the heater. Today, it worked.”
Meanwhile, Guerrero bounced out in his first trip and drilled a pull-side single in his second at 110.2 m.p.h. off the bat — the hardest-hit ball of the afternoon. But when the game found him with the bases loaded and two out in the fourth, Guerrero produced a familiar big-spot result in this torturous season, gaining count leverage before grounding out to second base off a bad pitch to hit.
It’s tough to say what’s more representative of Guerrero’s year, that or his at-bat in the sixth with a runner on third and one out, when he got a De los Santos sinker all over the plate only to mistime his swing, popping it up into shallow right where — on a day when the Yankees were a mess defensively while the BABIP Gods shined upon the Blue Jays, mind you — Chisholm made an over-the-top play to keep the runner at third.
A scorched single back up the middle closed a 2-for-5 day in Guerrero’s return, which reads better than it felt. It wasn’t unlike Toronto’s performance offensively as a whole — reaching regularly with bases empty yet faltering in damage opportunities and going 4-for-18 with runners in scoring position.
“It'd be nice to get a couple hits with guys in scoring position or just continue to add on. You look up, and it's four runs on 15 hits. You want it to be a little bit more,” Schneider said. “Kudos to Nate for coming in off the bench and really contributing. That’s a big home run there.”
The question now, of course, is what Guerrero can make of the five weeks remaining in his season. To see him entering Saturday’s game with a 96 wRC+ — meaning he’s performed four per cent worse than a league-average hitter — is stunning considering his undeniably exceptional talent, never mind a track record of never finishing with a wRC+ below 117 over his last five seasons while producing a 143 mark in aggregate.
To have this season at 27, firmly in the heart of his athletic prime while coming off a historic postseason and rampaging World Baseball Classic, defies explanation. Little has changed. Same swing, same environment, same role. A new, record-setting contract, sure; but that was signed long before last year’s World Series run and this spring’s WBC.
Now, there have been the physical issues — back and hamstring troubles he’s battled throughout the year. Plus, the head injury. Only Guerrero himself knows how much all that damage has constrained him. But if you’re healthy enough to play, you’re healthy enough to be evaluated. And an inflated chase rate, depressed contact quality metrics, and extreme underperformance against breaking pitches all speak to something within Guerrero’s system malfunctioning.
Some with the Blue Jays hope his forced week off provided enough time to mentally reset and allow his physical ailments to recover. But some with the Blue Jays said similar things coming out of the all-star break. And after a then-unusually unproductive month of May.
Ultimately, it’s up to him. As they make a last-ditch drive for a playoff spot, the Blue Jays desperately need Guerrero to look more like himself, just as they have all year. Meantime, potential turning points continue to pass by, the end of the road growing ever clearer in view.
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