PITTSBURGH, Pa. — Nathan Lukes has opened a lot of eyes this season. At 31, a full decade since his A-ball debut, he’s an everyday big-leaguer for the first time and an above-average hitter with positive defensive grades on the AL’s best team. He’s one of the biggest surprise stories on a surprise contender.
But Paul Skenes isn’t surprised. He already knew. The NL Cy Young frontrunner faced Lukes on April 30, 2024, at Victory Field in Indianapolis, where he was making his second-last triple-A start prior to reaching the majors. Lukes was hitting second for the Buffalo Bisons that day, and in the first inning, he dug in, sold out for a fastball, and doubled to left off a 101-m.p.h. heater.
Two innings later, back up with a runner on first, Lukes sat on a first-pitch fastball again, this time sending it the opposite way for a single.
As he made his way up the dugout steps for his third plate appearance leading off the sixth inning, Lukes was responsible for two of the three hits Skenes had allowed in the game. He turned to Casey Candaele — the Buffalo Bisons manager who recently became the winningest in the franchise’s modern era — to ask his thoughts.
“I’ve got him twice off his heater,” Lukes said. “There’s no way he goes back to it, right?”
“It’s his best pitch,” Candaele responded. “I think he’s going to give it to you again.”
Sure enough, first pitch heater, 99-m.p.h. inside, and Lukes shot another ball to left. Three pitches, three hits, and one huge grin from Candaele in the dugout as Lukes looked into his dugout from first base.
A year-and-a-half later, with Lukes now a key component of a whole-is-greater-than-the-sum-of-its-parts Blue Jays outfit, and Skenes perhaps the single best pitcher in the game, the two finally met again at PNC Park. Of course, Lukes once again sold out for a heater. And Skenes knew that he would, so he threw him a splitter, which Lukes chopped foul.
The next pitch? Another splitter. But this time Lukes shot it through the right side for his fourth hit off the first five Skenes pitches he’d seen. Only seven big-leaguers have four hits off Skenes since his MLB debut last May. The 23-year-old has allowed fewer than four hits in over a third of his 49 starts since.
Alas, Monday against the Blue Jays wasn’t one of them. Skenes allowed five. And a couple runs. That’s one hit and two runs shy of his career highs.
When you think about it that way, the Blue Jays offence didn’t have a bad game on the absurdly curved scale Skenes’ opponents must be graded on. But their starter, Kevin Gausman, did by his standards, getting leaned on by a pesky Pirates offence that drove him from the game after five innings with two runs on his line.
So, too, did Brendon Little, who allowed a run on a wild pitch, committed an error on a pickoff attempt, walked a pair and watched a bizarre benches-clearing incident that brought Tommy Pham and Tyler Heineman face-to-face during a chaotic seventh inning as the Pirates took a late lead.
Oh, and John Schneider got ejected, Vladimir Guerrero Jr. left the game with left hamstring tightness, and the Blue Jays lost, 5-2, to a team that’s 20 games under .500.
A lot to unpack there. Managers get ejected sometimes, no biggie. Guerrero, however, doesn’t leave games unless they’re inconsequential or he absolutely must. He experienced the hamstring tightness in the third inning, sinking into the splits to make a long stretch off first base to corral a Bo Bichette throw. He played another inning defensively but didn’t take his next at-bat.
“He’s doing all right,” Schneider said. “This time of year, everyone’s grinding a little bit. And I think that just irritated his hammy. But it’s just tightness.”
Guerrero will undergo an MRI on Monday night, and the Blue Jays will evaluate him on Tuesday once they have the results and he’s had some treatment. There’s no sense speculating on severity until that process unfolds. For the time being, it’s crossed fingers and knocked wood for all involved.
Meanwhile, the seventh-inning dust-up appeared to be much ado about nothing, as the ever-volatile Pham bat-flipped a four-pitch walk, stared at Heineman, then walked straight at him without saying a word. Heineman says he didn’t say anything to Pham throughout his plate appearance, and that the heated interaction was just as confusing to him as it was to everyone watching.
“He didn’t say a word to me; I didn’t say a word to him. He just looked at me like he wanted to start a fight,” Heineman said. “I asked the umpire on the prior pitch, 2-0, ‘Hey, you got that just off? That’s a pretty close pitch right there.’ (Pham) looked at me and didn’t say a word. And then he bat flipped and looked straight at me. And I just put up my arms and he walked towards me.
“It was weird, man. It was weird. It was unprovoked and super weird.”
Anyway, nothing escalated, nothing continued, nothing picked back up later. Yet things didn’t improve for the Blue Jays, as errors by Seranthony Dominguez and Heineman in the eighth allowed the Pirates to put the game out of reach. That’s what stuck with Schneider as he reflected on the evening.
“I’m not worried about Tommy Pham’s opinion about anything, really. I’m worried about our defence, I’m worried about our at-bats, and I’m worried about our pitching,” Schneider said. “Things that we can control. Defensively, we didn’t take care of the baseball tonight. And that led to multiple runs for them. That’s what I’m looking at and what we’ll talk about going forward.”
It all started so well. Toronto’s approach against Skenes was to lean into the nine-against-one mantra its coaching staff has been preaching since spring training, each hitter in the lineup playing a different role in a coordinated attack meant to drive the opposition starter from the game.
Some were asked to dirty box in the clinch and grind out long, tenacious plate appearances, like Heineman, who saw six pitches in his first trip. Some were focused on peppering jabs and putting balls in play, such as Ernie Clement and Lukes, who each singled in the second inning. Some were up there to throw haymakers and take A-swings against specific pitches in specific spots, like Bichette and Addison Barger, who each took aggressive, early-count cuts in the game’s opening innings.
Yet it was Barger who gave Skenes his toughest plate appearance of the night in the third inning, working the count full and fouling off three straight 98-m.p.h. fastballs before crushing a fourth — this time 99 — to the wall in right at 115.8-m.p.h., the hardest-hit ball Skenes has allowed in his career.
“That was a great at-bat,” Schneider said. “It was cool to watch the adjustments throughout the at-bat. Addy, he’s been really good for us. That was power against power.”
The ball was hit so hard that a sprinting George Springer didn’t have enough time to score from first. But he came home a batter later, when Guerrero grounded out to third, before Barger scored, too, on a Bichette single the opposite way. They were the first runs Skenes had allowed at PNC Park since June 8, a span of 29.1 innings.
And he spent his next three innings beginning a new streak, retiring 9 of his next 10 to get through six. It’s hard to call scoring two over six a win, but in doing so, the Blue Jays became only the fourth team in Skenes’ last nine starts to score at all. They’ll take it.
Yet they couldn’t capitalize with Skenes out of the equation, going three-up, three-down in the seventh, erasing Springer’s leadoff single with a Barger double play in the eighth, and going down on eight pitches in the ninth.
Gausman, meanwhile, had his typical fastball velocity and splitter action but had trouble missing bats when he needed to and ending plate appearances quickly. Too much ball in play burned him in the second inning, as two singles sandwiching a five-pitch walk scored Pittsburgh’s first run. And again in the third, as the first two batters reached on hits before a fielder’s choice — Heineman dropped Guerrero’s throw home on a Bryan Reynolds grounder — cashed another.
Gausman got his outs from there, but not without a fight. He threw 24 pitches to three hitters in the fourth, 14 to three in the fifth, and that was it at 96 on the night. It was the first time Gausman didn’t complete six innings in over a month.
Ultimately, it was an eventful game full of matters both meaningful and not. Among the latter: Pham’s antics, a manager chucked for arguing balls and strikes and bad batted ball luck. The Blue Jays can let that go.
What’s left is what’s worth focusing on going forward: a nine-against-one approach that started strong then fizzled out, a pair of relievers who couldn’t find the strike zone, and a typically sound defence that suffered multiple breakdowns.
“It’s just not our style of baseball. We pride ourselves on taking care of the ball,” Schneider said. “So, it’s kind of a blip. It’s a couple comebackers. It’s a pickoff throw. (Heineman’s) been throwing the ball really well this year. So, it kind of snowballed.
“This is a game you have to absolutely flush and get ready to go tomorrow with Max (Scherzer) on the mound. Not worried about all the extracurriculars that went into it — myself included. You’ve got to focus on what you’re trying to do and be consistent with what’s gotten us to this point.”
www.sportsnet.ca (Article Sourced Website)
#Blue #Jays #battle #Skenes #slip #late #chaotic #loss #Pirates