TORONTO – Dylan Cease, velocity down again even after an extra day of rest, found a way. After 74 home games without a Rogers Centre home run, so too did Vladimir Guerrero Jr.
Each facing different concerns, the two most dynamic forces on the Toronto Blue Jays roster delivered Sunday in an 8-1 victory over the Baltimore Orioles, helping their team secure a timely series win while remaining one game behind the Cleveland Guardians for the American League’s third and final wild-card spot.
Cease, in allowing only one run over five innings despite a messy first, righted himself from a rough outing in Sacramento, leaving the Blue Jays with an intriguing decision on how to line up his next start. Guerrero, meanwhile, ended a mystifying power outage at Rogers Centre in his 289th home plate appearance of the season as part of a four-hit day in which the timing in his swing was as sharp as it’s been this year.
“Obviously it feels great, a game like that,” Guerrero said through interpreter Hector Lebron, “but it's about winning, it's about the team. That's my focus.”
Rightly so, given that the Blue Jays are down to 12 games left and they need to be at least one win better than Cleveland between now and the Sept. 27 season finale. But the course of those games can be altered significantly by the way the two franchise pillars perform.
Cease, coming in after his fastball averaged a season-low 94.9 m.p.h. against the Athletics, was down another tick Sunday at 94.8 m.p.h. and appeared to be in big trouble during the first inning when the Orioles loaded the bases with none out. But Brandon Valenzuela overturned a bases-loaded walk to Coby Mayo by successfully challenging that a 3-2 fastball was a strike, Cease followed with two more punchouts to escape unscathed and limited the Orioles to a single run in the fifth that tied the game 1-1.
“Went my way. Had it not, that would have been pretty devastating, but I would have kept battling,” Cease said of Valenzuela’s challenge. “Obviously having it go that way was huge.”
Added manager John Schneider: “That shifted the momentum immediately.”
As did the bottom of the fifth, when George Springer sent a Trevor Rogers changeup out to right-centre for his 15th of the season before Guerrero, who’d narrowly missed a homer on a third-inning double off the wall, hooked a sweeper 350 feet that landed in his team’s left-field bullpen, triggering bedlam among the crowd of 41,805.
Guerrero tossed his bat, took 34.14 seconds to round the bases, got mobbed by his teammates in the dugout and then came out for a curtain call after fans chanted his name.
“That was one of the best swings for me today, on a pitch up and away,” Guerrero said of his double on a 94.9-m.p.h. fastball that was a foot shy of leaving. “When I saw the way I hit that ball, I said, OK, I'm in a good position for the rest of the day.”
The celebrations had barely ended when Kazuma Okamoto sent a Rogers fastball into the second deck in left field, giving the Blue Jays back-to-back-to-back home runs for just the seventh time in franchise history, and first since June 19, 2012 at Milwaukee, when Colby Rasmus, Jose Bautista and Edwin Encarnacion connected.
The bullpen locked down that lead until a four-spot in the eighth keyed by Springer’s three-run double blew things open for the Blue Jays (75-75), who start Jose Soriano against the Detroit Tigers and Troy Melton on Monday in a three-game series that includes another TBA bullpen day.
How to optimize the pitching staff for the final 12 games is an obvious priority with Cease, already at 166.1 innings and a career-best 236 strikeouts, pivotal to the puzzle and Trey Yesavage, due to make a rehab start Tuesday, trending towards a Sept. 21 return.
If the Blue Jays stay on turn, Cease starts again Sept. 19 at Texas and Sept. 25 versus Cincinnati, each on an extra day of rest. But if they shift to a normal four days of rest, Cease could start Sept. 18 at Texas and Sept. 23 at Baltimore, which would have him ready to pitch the Sept. 29 opener of a wild-card series, should they make it, on an extra day of rest.
The latter scenario is clearly more ideal, but only if Cease is physically up for it. He felt good about mechanical adjustments between starts that led to better results Sunday and insisted that he’s concerned about the velocity drop.
“It's just late in the year, maybe mechanically getting a little out of synch,” he said. “I still think I can get outs right now and as we move forward if I continue to just keep up the process, I think it's going to be fine. I can't imagine my velo dipping much more and I can even picture it going up. So that's not something I'm worried about.”
Against the Orioles, Cease was down in the 92-93 m.p.h. range out of the gate, but after the Valenzuela challenge, he found the zone. He was better from there, allowing only one run on Pete Alonso’s bloop single to right in the fifth but maxed out at 96.2 m.p.h. and got only one whiff on a heater, although he had six with his slider and four on his curveball.
Still, twice during May starts Cease averaged 98.4 m.p.h. with his fastball, underlining the dropoff, although with more weapons to use now, he’s better suited to handle such fluctuations.
“It's critical for sure,” he said. “Having the velocity makes things easier and makes it easier to get away with mistakes, but having multiple shapes and different things you can go to and then having more of a focus on just trying to put the fastball in good spots is also a way to pitch and get outs. I'm pretty optimistic my velo will be there when I really need it, but for now, it is just executing.”
Both Cease and Guerrero did that Sunday the way the Blue Jays need them to over these final two weeks.
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