TORONTO \u2014 Despite the chaos that surrounded the Red Sox as they arrived in Toronto, they\u2019re still a talented team.<\/p>\n
On Saturday, they dismissed their manager and five other coaches. The next morning, players expressed frustration at the decision \u2014 and the way president of baseball operations Craig Breslow explained it.<\/p>\n
And the aftershocks of the shake-up were still being felt Monday as the Red Sox scrambled to fill out a new-look coaching staff that now includes 26-year-old interim hitting assistant Jack Simonetty, 28-year-old interim first base coach Pablo Cabrera and Drew Ehrhard, a double-A player who promptly retired as a minor-league player to become the team\u2019s new bullpen catcher.<\/p>\n
It\u2019s been hectic. And yet, this team can\u2019t be overlooked, as they proved with a tidy 5-0 win over the Blue Jays, who fell to 12-16 on a night they had no answers for Ranger Suarez.<\/p>\n
\u201cEvery team is dangerous,\u201d Blue Jays manager John Schneider said Monday afternoon. \u201cAnd whenever you make a huge change like that, I think it just heightens the awareness of everybody.\u201d<\/p>\n
Those words certainly applied to Suarez, who was in peak form, holding the Blue Jays hitless until the sixth inning on his way to a dominant performance in which he allowed just one hit and one walk while striking out ten over eight scoreless innings. A Jesus Sanchez double gave the sellout crowd a little hope to lead off the sixth, but otherwise the Blue Jays\u2019 bats were mute on a day Andres Gimenez and Daulton Varsho were on the bench.<\/p>\n
\u201cGive him credit, man. He\u2019s good for a reason and he definitely pitched a good game,\u201d Schneider said. \u201cHe was just really stubborn in not living in the middle of the plate, so that was kind of the story tonight.\u201d<\/p>\n
With George Springer\u2019s broken big toe healing well, the Blue Jays could be a day or two away from getting back one of their most dangerous bats. The 36-year-old ran the bases before the game, one of his final tests before returning to DH duty atop the batting order.<\/p>\n
\u201cI watched him hit and he looked normal,\u201d Schneider said. \u201cAnd he’s been feeling fine after running.\u201d<\/p>\n<\/p>\n
With 23 home runs on the season, the Blue Jays rank 25th among the 30 MLB teams. That\u2019s partly due to injuries to the likes of Springer, Addison Barger and Alejandro Kirk, but the resulting lineup hasn\u2019t had as much power as usual all month. In games like this one, the absence of that power and experience becomes a little more apparent than usual.<\/p>\n
\u201cI thought some guys worked (good) at-bats,\u201d Schneider said. \u201cJust when you did, (Suarez) just didn\u2019t give in. He\u2019s not really predictable.\u201d<\/p>\n
On the pitching side, a frustrating fifth inning undermined a Dylan Cease start that first looked promising. The right-hander cruised through three scoreless innings, but ran into trouble in the fifth when he walked Caleb Durbin, hit Willson Contreras, made a throwing error, struggled to field a ground ball single and watched a double bounce off Sanchez’s glove in right field.<\/p>\n
\u201cI’m just trying to execute pitches and I didn’t do a very good job of it,\u201d Cease said.<\/p>\n
With better defence from Cease and his teammates, that fifth inning could easily have played out differently, but his command lapsed, too, and that ended up costing him.<\/p>\n
\u201cHe just lost feel for it for whatever reason,\u201d Schneider added. \u201cIt was one of those battles for him.\u201d<\/p>\n
Two runs and 30 pitches later, the game\u2019s complexion had changed and Cease, who had once seemed likely to give the Blue Jays six innings or more, ended up going 5.2 innings while allowing four earned runs and striking out five.<\/p>\n
\u201cI didn’t give us a real chance today,\u201d Cease said.\u00a0“Looking back, I wish I’d focused a little more on powering the ball and maybe less on trying to be so pinpoint.\u201d<\/p>\n
Ideally, the Blue Jays would have gotten more length from the right-hander since Trey Yesavage still isn\u2019t fully stretched out and Wednesday\u2019s starter remains TBD. Following Cease\u2019s exit, right-hander Chase Lee helped cover 1.1 innings of relief after taking the roster spot of Max Scherzer, who hit the injured list with right forearm tendinitis and left ankle inflammation.<\/p>\n
“Maybe you can pitch with one of these, but I’m not in the best spot to probably pitch with both of them,\u201d Scherzer said. \u201cSo this is a point in time where it’s smart to take the rest, take the week, and come back.”<\/p>\n
On Tuesday, Yesavage will make his 2026 season debut, but he won\u2019t be the only young pitching phenom taking the mound. Opposite Yesavage will be Payton Tolle, the 23-year-old left-hander with an elite fastball who struck out 11 Yankees just last week.\u00a0<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"TORONTO \u2014 Despite the chaos that surrounded the Red Sox as they arrived in Toronto, they\u2019re still a…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":636257,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[558],"tags":[64,63,591,85],"class_list":["post-636256","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","category-mlb","tag-au","tag-australia","tag-mlb","tag-sports"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/636256","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=636256"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/636256\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/636257"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=636256"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=636256"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=636256"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}