Toronto Blue Jays' Bo Bichette walks back to the dugout after striking out during the eighth inning in Game 1 of an AL wild-card baseball playoff series against the Minnesota Twins Tuesday, Oct. 3, 2023, in Minneapolis.Bruce Kluckhohn/The Associated Press
The Toronto Blue Jays love to go on about how they’re proficient in all three phases of the game. How about a fourth – yelling at people.
Multiple Jays had screaming fits during Tuesday’s 3-1 loss to the Twins in Minnesota. They must now win Wednesday’s game to extend this best-of-three series.
Pitchers yelled about balls and strikes, batters yelled about the same thing in reverse and manager John Schneider yelled because everyone else was yelling and he didn’t want to feel left out.
While the Jays were yelling about baseball, Minnesota was playing it. This wasn’t a blowout, but it was a comprehensive defeat. From the first inning on, Toronto never looked like it thought it could win it.
Pitching gets the blame, but the offence failed to deliver. The Jays had only six hits, all but one of them singles. We’ve gotten so used to this sort of thing that it doesn’t register as a disappointment any more. It’s just what this team does.
“We hit the ball hard,” Schneider said afterward. “It happens.”
With regularity.
A lot of Jays homers were feeling smug when Toronto fumbled its way into the Twins, avoiding the Tampa Bay Rays in the process. Nobody’s feeling smug about that now.
What Minnesota lacks in star power, it makes up for in fundamentals. It beat the Jays with a combination of clutch pitching, good-enough defence and one star turn from an unexpected source.
The Twins can’t complain about their bad reputation. Until Tuesday, they had famously lost 18 postseason games in a row. The last time Minnesota had won in the playoffs, John Olerud was on the other team’s roster.
How little faith does Minnesota have in its ball club? As of noon, you could get nosebleed seats for Tuesday’s game for $7.
U.S. dollars, but still.
That curse is now over, but anyone who’s ever seen a horror movie knows how it works with curses. They don’t disappear. They attach themselves to some other sucker and then trail him around. Guess who looks like the sucker now?
It’s just one game, but it already feels like Toronto has committed a sin of hubris.
Despite their struggles to end the regular season, the Jays manoeuvred themselves into a leverage position. They got everyone healthy, they got the opponent they preferred and they were able to set up their starting pitching.
A lot of people in and around the Jays talk about this rotation like it’s the mid-nineties Atlanta Braves (minus the results).
“The best pitching staff in baseball,” according to one of its members, Chris Bassitt.
It’s become a Blue Jays article of faith that whatever the offence can’t do, the rotation will do for them.
The Jays pushed out their Cy Young contender, Kevin Gausman. The Twins countered with their own Cy Young hopeful, Pablo López.
Gausman’s signature pitch is the splitter. It starts out looking like it’s coming right down the middle. At the last second, it dives toward the plate. In Gausman’s right hand, it is as good a swing-and-miss pitch as any in baseball.
Except the Twins don’t swing at it. No team swings at it less.
In order to make the splitter work, Gausman must first convince batters he can put his four-seamer in the strike zone.
He walked the first batter he faced. The third hitter, Royce Lewis, planted a fastball that floated across the entirety of the plate into the left-field stands.
Lewis hadn’t played in two weeks. He had a hamstring strain bad enough that there was some question whether or not he should be included on Minnesota’s playoff roster. Out of such small decisions, seasons turn.
If Gausman’s pitches weren’t tipping you off, the body language was another clue. Gausman is an unusually fidgety presence on the mound at the best of times. As this game stretched on, he started to look like a man doing the breaststroke standing upright.
The splitter continued to malfunction. Gausman’s frustration grew. He started to act out, tossing balls around and yelling at the home-plate umpire. He spent a lot of time staring into the middle distance like there was an answer out there.
During his second at-bat of the game, Lewis hardly moved as he watched two textbook splitters dive bomb in on him. Forced back to the fastball, Gausman coughed up a second home run.
As Jays analyst Joe Siddall said later, “I don’t know how in the world you’re feeding this guy fastballs.”
Because he won’t swallow splitters.
The game was still close – 3-0 – but you could see it on Toronto faces. With Gausman gone walkabout, everyone else had lost the faith.
Gausman did finally figure things out in the fourth inning, looking imperious while striking out the side. That’s when he was pulled.
The closest Toronto got was within a few feet in the sixth inning. Target Field’s outfield fence in dead centre is 404 feet from home plate. With a couple of men on base, Matt Chapman hit a ball 401 feet. It was caught.
The good news is that the Jays have seen the last of López. The much worse news is that the next man up for Minnesota is Sonny Gray, who’s even better.
Despite qualifying for postseason play in three of the last four seasons, none of the Jays’ brand names have won a game there. With that in mind, Wednesday’s contest serves a double purpose.
The Jays have to win to extend this series to Thursday. But they also have to prove that they are not baseball’s next jinxed club.
If they can’t manage it, they will trail that tag, along with all their growing reputation as a purely regular-season concern, into the 2024 campaign.