Blue Jays notebook: Daulton Varsho gears up for probable Monday return

PHOENIX — Fresh off their best day at the plate this season, the Toronto Blue Jays should get another lift for their lineup Monday when Daulton Varsho is expected to return to action in the series opener at the Los Angeles Angels.

The Gold Glove centre-fielder left Friday’s 6-3 loss to the Arizona Diamondbacks after two innings with left knee discomfort, but said Sunday that the tightness in his quad which led to pulling on his kneecap had eased.

Varsho and the Blue Jays considered a return for Sunday’s 10-4 win but decided “out of caution” to “not to push it.” 

“I’ll probably be in the lineup (Monday),” he added. 

Varsho’s been one of the Blue Jays’ steadier threats at the plate this season, batting .262/.333/.462 with three homers and four doubles, so his return will be welcome. 

The quad issue was a first for him and “came out nowhere” before the game Friday after he had “a good day” of pre-game work.

“All of a sudden it started hurting and I was like, this is not good,” he said.  “I went out to the line, I'm like, I've got to test it out running-wise. I still didn't feel good. Told Schneids (manager John Schneider) before my first at-bat, I was like, 'Just letting you know, my knee's bothering me,' I already got it checked out by Jose (Ministral, the head trainer), structurally there's nothing wrong, so we're just going to test it out. After my first at-bat, the first inning, I was like, This is not working.”

He started improving Saturday and was much better Sunday, which was “the best-case scenario, knowing that if I can get two days off my feet, we can loosen everything back up back to normal.

“You'd try to push through it if it's a World Series-type of thing,” he added. “But when we've got 140 games left, there's no point in me (risking) being on the IL for two months. That'd be a problem more than just a couple of days.”

McKay still going: The Blue Jays and Seattle Mariners held their expansion draft Nov. 5, 1976, and Dave McKay, a bubble-of-the-roster infielder for the Minnesota Twins at the time, thought he might get a phone call that day. But he forgot that he and wife Lene had turned off the phone ringer at their Vancouver home so toddler son Cody, a future big-league catcher with the St. Louis Cardinals, could nap without interruption. 

All day long, then, the phone remained silent, and McKay figured nothing was brewing with him since no one had called, so he went for dinner with his family at the home of some friends.

“At night, we turned on the news and saw them say, ‘Our Dave McKay was picked by the Blue Jays in the expansion draft,'” recalled McKay, the Arizona Diamondbacks’ first-base coach since 2014. “I was totally blindsided. But I had been missing phone calls all day. People were saying, we'd been calling you and calling you. Kind of a unique day.”

The 49^th pick in that expansion draft made McKay the first Canadian to play for the Blue Jays, starting at third base that snowy day April 7, 1977, when the franchise opened with a 9-5 win over the Chicago White Sox. Batting eighth, he went 2-for-4 with an RBI and he recalled a photo of himself creeping in from third, footsteps left in the snow behind him.

“That was the coldest day I've ever played in my life,” McKay said of the 0 C temperature at first pitch. “We called in that morning, asking if we're going to have a few days off because there was so much snow out there. And they said, 'We're going to play this thing, come on in.' We won the game and it warmed up pretty good afterwards.”

McKay spent three years with the Blue Jays, who are celebrating their 50^th season this year, before finishing out his career with three more years with the Athletics. In 1984, he began a remarkable coaching career that’s given him five decades in the game with Oakland, St. Louis, the Cubs and now Arizona.

“You know what, you've got to be 76 to do it,” he said of his longevity with a laugh. “That's a lot of years. Last year, we were in Toronto and one of the players said, ‘You played here at one time, right?' I said, ‘Yeah, a while ago.’

“I do think a lot about how many years ago that took place. I think about the guys that were there and the few guys are not no longer with us. It's really hard to believe it was 50 years ago I played third base there and here I am still doing it. Crazy.”

Mantiply's meaningful return: Blue Jays lefty Joe Mantiply struggled last season in ways he never had before, both mentally and physically, which is why returning to Phoenix to face the Diamondbacks team that released him last June 1 meant something to him.

“Oh, for sure,” said the 35-year-old. “I’ve always felt like I belong at this level and when I'm healthy, I'm usually pretty good. That was the main focus, like, just get healthy. There's also knowing, at some point, this ends for everybody, there's an expiration date on every career, you just never know when it's going to be. I'm trying to enjoy each day back at this level and contribute the best I can.”

Mantiply’s done that since the Blue Jays selected his contract from triple-A Buffalo on April 5 amid the immediate post-Cody-Ponce-injury bullpen churn, covering 6.2 innings in six outings while earning a win April 10 versus Minnesota with a shutout inning of work. 

He’s had to rebuild himself after his career hit a wall last year, when he struggled out of the gate, was optioned, and then got hit hard again upon his return to the majors. That led Arizona to release the 2022 all-star, who was part of the 2023 World Series run and made 236 appearances for the Diamondbacks from 2021 through 2024.

At the time, Mantiply was pitching through hip issues that caused him to compensate elsewhere in his body “and it ended up mechanically throwing me off.” A ghastly 15.83 ERA in 10 games followed, which “created a lot of self-doubt and just a lot of embarrassment, really,” he said. “At some point, it's so hard to go out there when you're not confident in yourself. You feel like you're letting your teammates down and letting the organization down, which, in the grand scheme of things, you're not. But mentally, internally, you feel like you are. That was tough. That was a grind.”

A minor-league deal with the Blue Jays signed July 13 provided Mantiply with a place to figure out his issues while “letting me work at my own pace, they didn't really rush me, put a ton of pressure on me, force anything or whatever.”

“They had some good things to say about things they thought I could do to get back close to what I was,” Mantiply explained. “When the off-season hit, these guys reached out at the beginning and I felt comfortable with the relationships.”

They agreed to another minor-league deal on March 3 and he pitched well enough in camp that the parting message to him was, “just be ready when we need you.”

“I didn't expect it to be that soon,” he added. 

That meant he was back in the majors in time for the trip to Arizona, which brought back a flood of memories, good and bad. He pitched one inning Friday night, allowing a run on two hits in a 6-3 loss, further turning the page on his toughest season.

“I've never refused to take the ball and if I can't pitch in a game back-to-back days, I don't think I'm healthy — that's essentially what it came to be,” Mantiply said of his end in Arizona. “It was tough. It wasn't ideal. Didn't envision my time here ending that way. But it's part of the game. … Once I cleared waivers, the Blue Jays were one of the first teams to reach out. These guys gave me an opportunity and a place to play, which was huge.”