Asked by Toronto-based reporters for a pre-game weather report from Cleveland, where his club is playing a three-game set this weekend, Toronto Blue Jays manager Charlie Montoyo was short on specifics, but told you all you needed to know.
“I haven’t gone outside,” he said. “But it’s not going to be an easy night to play baseball.”
It most certainly was not. A strong low-pressure system crossing right over northeast Ohio brought rain and heavy wind on Friday, creating waves of 8-11 feet off Lake Erie and placing the state under a gale warning that suspended ferry service and cancelled Memorial Day weekend festivities. By first pitch, the temperature was dipping beneath 10 degrees Celsius, which felt much colder thanks to a harsh wind gusting in at 40-kph from right-centre field.
That's definitely one way to stay warm at the ballpark. #BlueJaysOnSN | #BlueJays pic.twitter.com/DnnUt5fZrL
— Sportsnet (@Sportsnet) May 29, 2021
That set the stage for a wet, haphazard affair that the Blue Jays did well to come out of with an emphatic victory, 11-2. Considering the conditions, which had infielders shaking out their glove hands after snaring hard grounders and outfielders re-enacting Family Circus cartoons every time a ball was hit in the air, a win without anyone getting hurt was the best possible outcome.
And calling the long-out-of-hand game after a pointless, half-hour delay in the bottom of the seventh inning — the mound was so slippery that Blue Jays reliever Trent Thornton went skidding down it at the end of his delivery — was the best decision for all involved.
"When you're a hitter, you can hang out in the dugout. And thankfully there was some heaters. So, you can hang out and then go straight up to the plate,” said Blue Jays infielder Joe Panik, who went 4-for-4, driving in three. “But when you're out on the field and you're just standing around there, it doesn't matter if you have a hand warmer in your back pocket or not. That ball gets hit to you, it's going to be wet. it's going to feel like a cue ball, basically. So, it's just about staying mentally with it. Because we knew it was going to be lousy weather. Didn't know it was going to be this lousy. But you try to just stay with it out in the field."
Everything was a challenge. You could see it in Teoscar Hernandez’s first-inning fly ball to right, which came off his bat over 90-m.p.h. but was pushed back towards the infield, bringing Cleveland outfielder Josh Naylor charging in to snare a ball he expected to end up much deeper than it did.
You could see it on Hyun-Jin Ryu’s uniform, as the fabric whipped and tugged at the Blue Jays starter’s torso while he peered in for signs from the mound. You could see it on Amed Rosario’s face, as he squinted into the breeze and blew into his hands after withstanding the cold reverberations of fouling off back-to-back Ryu changeups.
And you could see it in Ryu’s stuff, which wasn’t landing quite where he wanted it to in that first inning. For a finesse pitcher like Ryu, extreme wind can cause all kinds of difficulty, making the difference between locating a pitch right on the edge of the strike zone and well outside of it. Ross Stripling battled something similar during a disastrous outing earlier this month in Boston, when a stiff breeze caused his changeup to cut over the plate into a left-handed hitter’s happy zone, rendering the pitch unusable.
You could tell it was giving Ryu difficulty with his changeup, too, as he left first-inning pitches up to Cesar Hernandez and Jose Ramirez, who both took advantage for base hits, before walking Harold Ramirez on five pitches to load the bases. Then he missed his location on a changeup to Eddie Rosario, who rifled it to right, cashing in two. A batter later, Ryu issued his second five-pitch walk of the inning, missing the zone by feet rather than inches.
Stuff like that just doesn’t happen. Forget walking two in an inning — Ryu hadn’t walked two in a game all season. He entered the night having thrown 54 per cent of his 2021 pitches in the zone, a top-30 mark across MLB. He’d started 63 per cent of his plate appearances with a strike. Since 2019, only one MLB starter — the all-timer Zack Greinke — has a lower walk rate than Ryu’s 3.9 per cent.
Even the pitch Ryu ultimately escaped the inning on — his 32nd of the frame, a 1-1 sinker to Yu Chang that caught plenty of plate — wasn’t perfectly located. But Ryu got his pop up into first-base foul territory, where the ball hung up and buckled and swirled in the wind, forcing Vladimir Guerrero Jr. to do pirouettes before finally willing it into his glove.
“In the first inning, I did struggle a little. And if I told you that the weather didn't impact me at all, I would be lying,” Ryu said through interpreter Jun Sung Park. “I don't think I've ever had to pitch in weather conditions this severe.”
Fortunately, the wind was blowing when Cleveland was pitching, too, and that helped the Blue Jays tie the game in the second — after Randal Grichuk’s lead-off single came around on a sacrifice bunt, another single, and a groundout — as centre fielder Ramirez came in on a Danny Jansen fly ball to left-centre that carried and carried and kept carrying over his head. On most days it’s an easy third out. But on this one it was a double and an RBI for Jansen, erasing the lead Ryu had allowed.
Any way the wind blows pic.twitter.com/perIU4bM6P
— Toronto Blue Jays (@BlueJays) May 28, 2021
Of course, as Ryu returned for his second inning of work, it started raining sideways. The wind was only picking up. There was legitimate reason to question why the game was being played at all.
But Ryu had a baseball in his hand, a batter at the plate, and an umpire behind it allowing play to carry on — so, he made an adjustment. Ten of the next 12 pitches he threw were sinkers or cutters, as Ryu de-emphasized his off-speed pitches and relied on his higher-velocity options to get him through a three-up, three-down inning.
And in the top of the third, the Blue Jays started timing up Cleveland starter Eli Morgan — a 25-year-old soft-tosser making his MLB debut — as they got their second look at him, jumping on changeups left up over the plate, lifting balls into the outfield, and letting the elements do their worst.
Morgan was having the same issues with his secondary stuff Ryu was, and paid dearly for it as Hernandez (single thrown out trying to stretch to a double), Grichuk (double), Lourdes Gurriel Jr. (double), and Joe Panik (homer) all did damage against soft pitches that Morgan couldn’t locate where he needed to. Suddenly, the Blue Jays were up by four.
No panic from Joe Panik! @BlueJays take a 6-2 lead! #BlueJaysOnSN pic.twitter.com/MQJ4fgr6Kn
— Sportsnet (@Sportsnet) May 29, 2021
That gave Ryu some middle-innings cushion to keep leaning on the hard stuff — well, hard for him. Ryu’s velocities were actually well down across the board, as he averaged 86 m.p.h. with his sinker and four-seamer (Ryu’s season average is 89.5 m.p.h.) and 83 m.p.h. with his cutter (85.3-m.p.h. season average), as the wintery cold sapped him of what velocity he has. But the approach was working, as he faced only one over the minimum from the second inning through the end of his outing after the fifth.
“In the first inning, I noticed at my command was a little bit off. I walked two guys, found myself in some difficult situations. So, in the second inning, I just wanted to make sure I got ahead in the count and to make sure that I closed the guys as soon as possible,” Ryu said. “Regardless, I still managed to go five innings. So, I'm pretty happy with the result.”
In the end, 58 of the 91 pitches Ryu threw were sinkers, cutters, or four-seamers (and 37 of 59 after the first inning), as he essentially shelved his breaking ball and went long stretches without using his changeup at all. That’s what veterans with wide repertoires do — they recognize when to make adjustments and have the ability to pull them off in-game.
And they find ways to get outs, even on miserable days with diminished stuff. Ryu’s changeup, four-seamer, cutter and curveball all boast whiff rates over 21 per cent this season, helping him run up double-digit swinging strikes in six of his first nine outings. But he generated only six whiffs on this night, making it even more remarkable that Ryu racked up six strikeouts over his five innings, allowing only those two runs in the first.
"Right from the first inning you could tell that — even just as an infielder throwing the ball around — it was going to be a slick baseball out there for him, relying so much on movement and his off-speed pitches," Panik said. "For him to shut them down and really go into cruise control after that first inning was huge. It let our lineup do the work. I knew from the get-go it was not going to be easy on any pitcher. But that's why he's Ryu. That's why he's our ace. It doesn't matter the conditions — he'll figure out a way for us."
Meanwhile, the Blue Jays started beating up on Cleveland’s bullpen after driving Morgan from the game, plating three in the fifth thanks to a two-run Gurriel double up the third base line followed by a Panik single softly served into left-centre. Santiago Espinal drove in a couple more in the sixth, and by the seventh both managers were emptying their benches, saving their stars from the elements and the possibility of injury. Moments later, the umpires pulled everyone off the field.
The game wasn’t pretty. It didn’t look like much fun to play in. And, at the end of a wet, cold, windy three hours and 32 minutes, everyone seemed pretty happy to call it off a couple innings early. That’s baseball in late May next to Lake Erie. Don’t ever complain about the Rogers Centre roof again.
"It was nasty out there," Montoyo said. “It's slippery, it's windy. Wind's blowing everywhere. That's why Ryu deserves a lot of credit. It wasn't easy to pitch like that. He couldn't get his control early on because it was so nasty. But then he regrouped. And that's what an ace does. He did a great job pitching in those circumstances."
