SEATTLE — Sure, the Toronto Blue Jays needed Shane Bieber, acquired precisely for games of this type of magnitude, to shut down the Seattle Mariners. Untimely mistakes in the zone cost them a tight American League Championship Series opener and then led to Game 2 unravelling in a big way. Having Bieber, who didn’t escape the third inning in a rough ALDS outing versus the New York Yankees, pin down Seattle’s damage-seeking offence was obviously going to be essential.
Still, the way Mariners pitchers exploited the Blue Jays’ high-contact hitters to induce weak contact was really the more pressing issue. “You’ve got to think create runs first, you know what I mean?” Manager John Schneider said in his office before the game. “We obviously have to score more in this series. Start there and then see how Shane goes.”
Start there the Blue Jays did Wednesday night in the crisp low-teens air at T-Mobile Park, with both Bieber and the offence shaking off a slow start to Game 3 to lead the way in what became a 13-4 rout.
A five-run third — catalyzed by Ernie Clement’s leadoff double and Andres Gimenez’s game-tying home run, the first of his three hits — surpassed their total offensive output from the first two games and they just kept swinging from there before a stunned crowd of 46,471.
Their offence suddenly awake, the Blue Jays can now pull even in the best-of-seven series Thursday when Max Scherzer starts against Luis Castillo, the road before them suddenly less daunting than it was before the first pitch.
“Definitely changed the momentum right there, coming from Andres,” Vladimir Guerrero Jr., speaking through interpreter Hector Lebron, said of the Gimenez homer’s impact. “That’s what happens when you trust your teammates. You’ve got to trust everyone in that lineup and when you tie the game like that, everything changed in that dugout.”
Guerrero, hitless through the first two games of the series, was back to being a force himself, too, with a single in the first, doubling and scoring during the pivotal third, homering to lead off the fifth, being walked intentionally and scoring on Alejandro Kirk’s three-run drive in the sixth before doubling again in the eighth.
George Springer, who crushed a 431-foot homer to straightaway centre leading off the fourth, had three hits, Addison Barger added a solo shot in the ninth while Daulton Varsho, with a two-run double that capped the third, Clement, and Kirk each had two hits apiece as the Blue Jays blitzed George Kirby and three relievers by taking the types of shots Schneider had preached before the game.
“It comes down to taking more shots at where you think they’re going to be pitching and if not, be OK with being 0-1 instead of 0-for-1,” he said. “We’ve been saying that all year. It’s an adjustment. It’s kind of a cat-and-mouse game. Kirby may be different, but we have to really, really focus on understanding where we can do damage against this pitching staff.”
Bieber, meanwhile, shook off a rough first inning that included Julio Rodrguez’s two-run shot that opened the scoring to deliver easily his most important performance since joining the Blue Jays.
He returned to the dugout after the first inning and “told the guys like, ‘Pick me up, I got good stuff tonight,’” and delivered, striking out the side in the second and cutting up the Mariners with a five-pitch mix that held them to two runs on four hits and a walk with eight strikeouts.
The slider was especially dominant, with seven whiffs on 12 swings, but Seattle hitters also whiffed through each of his other offerings — fastball, changeup, curveball and cutter — for 17 total misses on 45 cuts.
“It was big for me to go out there and attack the zone and get some swing-and-miss and then I think the lineup responded,” Bieber said of the second. “The guys responded in a huge way and we didn’t look back after that. So credit to them in the way that they picked me up and bounced back. That’s what this team does so well. Look forward to doing that tomorrow, too.”
Despite dropping the first two games at home, the Blue Jays were confident they could pull themselves back into the series by once again marrying solid pitching with a multi-threat offence, something they did regularly all season.
In Toronto, they felt that they hadn’t played their game, which is why veteran right-hander Chris Bassitt said, “we’re not really shook by being down 2-0.”
“It sucks, but, again, we just have confidence in what we’ve built,” he added, noting that the group was “pretty excited about the opportunity that we have just to see what we’re made of, honestly.”
They made one change to the batting order, pushing Anthony Santander up to the cleanup spot and dropping Barger down to seventh, in part to simply “try to get something going,” said Schneider, but also to encourage “taking some shots.”
“Tony’s at-bats have been good. Addy’s at-bats have been fine,” he added, “but trying to have a different look of, can you clip a two- or three-run homer here?”
Gimenez was unlikely candidate to do precisely that, but that Schneider gave the Gold Glove finalist a chance to deliver such a swing after Clement’s double, rather than bunting to move the runner over, is telling of the mindset the Blue Jays took into the box.
“We’re down two so to me, at that point, you’re not trying to play catchup one at a time,” Schneider explained. “It doesn’t matter who it is, we have really good hitters and we have guys that have been in the post-season and know what the hell’s going on.
“So for Gimi right there, I love the fact that he didn’t try to just play ping-pong and get a guy over. It was really refreshing. It’s a big swing because it’s what we’re trying to do. We’re trying to make adjustments as to what they’re doing to us.”
Said Gimenez: “I swung hard, but basically I was trying to hit the ball a little bit in front, just to hit it to that part of the field, so Ernie could get to third. But, you know, I’m OK with what happened.”
So, too, were the Blue Jays, who Guerrero said got back to an approach at the plate was more like “the way we have been playing. We talked about (being aggressive). We say if they give us a first pitch, the pitch that we’re looking for, we’re going to attack and we’re going to be aggressive on that and we’re going to continue to be that way.”
And just like that, the Blue Jays are a win away from turning a series that looked like it might be headed for a one-sided finish into a much more competitive and contested affair.
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