TORONTO – Think about where the Toronto Blue Jays were last week as Yusei Kikuchi took the mound against the Miami Marlins. They’d lost three straight and seven of their last 10, with a bullpen game Saturday followed by short starts Sunday and Monday draining the relief corps.
With the offence grinding, too, they were a team in need of a lift when Kikuchi went out and gave them one, throwing six shutout innings in an eventual 2-0 win. For those reasons, a case can be made that the start was not only his best of the season, but most impactful, as well.
“I agree,” said pitching coach Pete Walker. “There's still a ton of season left and everything else, but you always feel like there are some important games along the way and that was a big game. He knew that we needed to win that game just for our psyche and where we were. He came in on a mission and it’s really the way he's been over the last several starts. That game in particular, he was very focused and determined and he wanted to continue on, obviously, because he felt like he was throwing the ball really well. So his mindset is really good. He realizes that he's in a pretty good place right now and he wants the ball.”
On a splendid Sunday afternoon, Kikuchi demonstrated precisely that once again, pinning the Oakland Athletics down early while the Blue Jays built a comfortable lead and finishing with a season-high seven innings of one-run ball in a 12-1 romp.
George Springer hit the 55th leadoff homer of his career, leaving him second all-time to Rickey Henderson’s 81, Whit Merrifield scored when centre-fielder Esteury Ruiz booted Vladimir Guerrero Jr.’s base hit later in the inning, a Springer double-play ball made it 3-0 in the second, Matt Chapman scored on a wild pitch in the third, a Springer sacrifice fly made it 5-1 in the sixth while Santiago Espinal’s two-run double in the seventh pushed the game into end-of-the-bullpen territory. Bo Bichette’s RBI single, Guerrero’s run-scoring groundout and Cavan Biggio’s three-run shot in the eighth extended the rout.
“We’re starting to slow down more,” Springer said of the Blue Jays’ recent production at the plate. “We're starting to have good quality at-bats up and down the lineup all the time. This is the major leagues. It's hard to score. But our guys over the last X amount days have done a good job of slowing down to get something to hit.”
The victory, before a crowd of 41,069, made it four in five outings for the Blue Jays (43-36), who are off Monday before beginning a three-game series against the visiting San Francisco Giants on Tuesday.
Their schedule between now and the all-star break offers them an opportunity to pile up some wins through what’s so far been a hot-and-cold season.
“It’s weird,” manager John Schneider said of his club’s extreme swings. “You always want to be consistent. The conversations are just continuing to be as positive and as consistent as you can. We've talked a lot with the guys over the course of the year. We're at the point where it's like, all right, who are we? What do we want to be? We've got to build it from here on out. But the ups and downs are going to come. You want to try to stay out of the ones that we kind of went through earlier in May. And you kind of roll with it a little bit. This group is special. This group is cool. They get it. They don't try to do too much when things aren't going great. And hopefully, we can get on a little bit of a roll.”
Important in that regard is Kikuchi, who after an off May, has reeled off six consecutive starts of two earned runs or less, all but one of them at least five innings or more.
Pivotal to the recent turn is the refinement of his slider, which inadvertently morphed into a harder, flatter and far less effective cutter last month, and the pairing of it with his increasingly useful curveball, which looks similar out of the hand but gives him another down-gear speed to further disrupt timing.
Against the Athletics, he got five swinging strikes on each of the breaking balls, along with another swing and miss on his fastball, which he threw for 11 called strikes and was fouled off six times. Kikuchi regularly shifted between the three pitches, setting down the first 10 batters he faced and going only four over the minimum through seven.
Carlos Perez’s double in the fourth and Tony Kemp’s leadoff shot in the sixth were the only hits against him, while Kikuchi also walked a pair against eight strikeouts.
Between the way he was pitching and the big lead, the Blue Jays even let him face seven batters for a third time, a soft cap he’s been pushing to break through.
“I haven't been able to pitch through the seventh inning ever since I've joined the Blue Jays, so that was great,” Kikuchi said through interpreter Yusuke Oshima. “Also, I was able to save the bullpen, so I think that that was really good today.”
Kikuchi returned to the dugout after the sixth inning and subtly put up his index finger, asking for one more inning and Schneider gave it to him. The manager quipped that his lefty is always asking for another frame but said Kikuchi “was as good as we'd seen him” against the Marlins and “it carried over a little bit to today.”
Walker also noted how much Kikuchi “wants to pitch a third time through the order,” and while the club wants to get him there, “we're still being smart about, depending on our bullpen, who's available, where he is, we still want to keep him rolling, we want to keep his confidence high. But he has certainly earned the right to explore that time through the order.”
Given that the Blue Jays will be running another bullpen game July 1 against the Boston Red Sox, and perhaps one more before the all-star break July 8, there’s a lot for manager John Schneider to balance at the moment. Getting the most out of the starters each time out helps the bullpen, but with off-days being used to minimize outings for the fifth spot in the rotation, finding ways to ease the burden on them matters, too.
An effective Kikuchi, one not just surviving but thriving, arrived at just the right time.
