Blue Jays' Will Wagner takes advantage of major league opportunity with strong debut

ANAHEIM, Calif. — The Sugar Land Space Cowboys had an off-day July 29, which also happens to be Will Wagner’s birthday, so the 26-year-old infielder and three of his teammates made some plans.

In the early afternoon, they went to see the new Deadpool movie and grabbed a bite to eat afterwards. Then, they met up with Wagner’s best friend and his two brothers and were playing some Call of Duty: Warzone when Mason Fluharty, a Liberty University teammate pitching at triple-A Buffalo in the Toronto Blue Jays system, sent him a text message.

It read: “Hey, the coaches just woke me up from a nap. Are you in this trade?”

“I texted back, ‘No, I haven't heard anything. I don't think it's me,’” Wagner recalled. “Twenty minutes later the Astros GM (Dana Brown) calls me and was like, ‘We're sending you to Toronto.’ It was crazy. I kind of blacked out for a second. 

“I was like, ‘I'm getting traded out of everyone on our team?’ Our team is really good. There were two other guys that we thought were going to be gone off the team. No one ever really said my name in trade rumours. So it was cool.”

With that, what was supposed to be a low-key off-day upended not only Wagner’s birthday, but also his career trajectory, two weeks later landing him at Angel Stadium where he joined the Blue Jays and started at second base Monday night in his major-league debut. 

And what a debut it turned out to be, as Wagner ripped the first pitch he saw for a double in the second inning, singled in a run in the third, added another base hit in the fifth and made two range plays to his right in the eighth during a 4-2 Blue Jays win.

Even the one out he made, a 374-foot drive to centre off lefty Matt Moore, was impressive.

“I don't know if it could have gone any better,” he said afterwards.

Leo Jimenez added his first homer in the majors — a two-run shot in the third right after Wagner’s single — while Bowden Francis set new career-bests with seven innings and eight strikeouts, allowing just one hit, a Mickey Moniak homer in the third. 

Francis has now made it through at least five innings in three consecutive starts, another big-league first on a night full of them for the Blue Jays.

“What a sick start to a career,” Francis said of Wagner, who was front and centre after his contract was selected earlier in the day from Buffalo, where he went 10-for-25 with five walks and four strikeouts in seven games. Fellow infielder Luis De Los Santos was optioned back to the Bisons to make room.

Since coming over with Joey Loperfido and Jake Bloss for Yusei Kikuchi in that fateful July 29 deal, Wagner started five games at second base and one at third in Buffalo, a sneak preview of how the Blue Jays intend to use him in the field. 

No matter where he plays, “he'll get plenty of runway,” said manager John Schneider, so the club can assess just how well the .315/.432/.444 batting line he’s amassed in 77 triple-A games translates. 

The first impression was a good one, and not for the results alone.

“Games like this, not only are you watching the performance, you're watching how he's moving and preparing in between pitches, where he's positioning himself, his rhythm, his cadence to each pitch. He looked the part,” said Schneider. “A guy that's been around and I was more impressed with that, just his overall heartbeat on the night.”

A lack of certainty over where he fits defensively along with a stacked infield blocked his path with the Astros, but he flashed some impressive glovework in the eighth. First, he made a sliding pick on a Taylor Ward smash up the middle for the inning’s first out and then grabbed a Kevin Pillar chopper that kicked off the mound and relayed it across the diamond to end the frame, helped by a good pick by Spencer Horwitz at first.

“Honestly, it was just a reaction,” Wagner said. “I've got to thank Spence for picking me up on that last one, threw it straight in the ground. Just trying to be in the moment.”

If he can provide even competent defence, a good performer in need of an opportunity may have very well found a match on a team able to offer him one, something he realized once he’d absorbed news of the deal.

“I was like, well, I don't think I was ever going to play in the big-leagues with the Astros,” said Wagner. “They have (Alex) Bregman, (Jeremy) Pena, (Jose) Altuve, all those guys are in front of me making it hard to get up there. Then I looked here, I was like, OK, it's a younger team, I think I have a better opportunity with the Blue Jays, to make a debut here. So I liked the trade.”

The bat, of course, is what will decide just how prominent of a role he ends up playing with the Blue Jays.

This season, he abandoned the leg-kick he’d used off and on, opting to go with a no-stride trigger that he used to use only with two strikes. Wagner picked that up from watching Bo Bichette — “He simplifies everything on two strikes and he doesn't strike out that much, he puts the ball hard in play,” he explained — and decided that he felt more comfortable without the leg-kick so he dropped it entirely.

“The no-stride helped me stay with my eyeline more parallel to the pitcher. I wasn't bouncing up and down with my eyes so I could notice the zone shrink a little bit more, and I can get my pitch when I want it,” said Wagner. “Sometimes when I was doing my leg kick, my eyes were moving a little bit and I wasn't able to see the spin or like a changeup. So I was swinging and missing and rolling over a lot more than I usually do.”

There was none of that Monday during his debut, just four balls struck hard, three base hits and a promising start to the opportunity he’d been waiting for.