With Toronto trailing 1-0 in Game 4 of the American League Championship Series, Gim\u00e9nez strode to the plate following a leadoff double from Isiah Kiner-Falefa in the third, worked a full count and fouled off a pair of two-strike pitches before finding the bleachers for a second straight game.<\/p>\n
The sudden power binge from the Blue Jays shortstop is a stunner for a hitter who hadn’t homered in his previous 23 post-season contests and didn’t homer in his final 25 regular-season games.<\/p>\n
Acquired by Toronto in an off-season trade with the Cleveland Guardians, Gim\u00e9nez has never been a massive threat to go deep in his six-year MLB career, but at times in his debut season with the Blue Jays, the homers have come in bunches.<\/p>\n
During the opening week of the season, Gim\u00e9nez \u2014 then batting cleanup for the Blue Jays \u2014\u00a0came out of the gate on fire, hitting three big flies in the club’s first five games. And in late August, he ripped two homers in a three-game series against the Minnesota Twins at Rogers Centre.<\/p>\n
Gim\u00e9nez’s big swing on Thursday set the stage for another big inning for Toronto at T-Mobile Park, as the club’s offence continued to work Mariners starter Luis Castillo. Nathan Lukes and Vladimir Guerrero Jr. added some traffic against the right-hander with back-to-back, one-out singles, and Alejandro Kirk worked a seven-pitch walk to load the bases, ending Castillo’s night.<\/p>\n
Gabe Speier entered in relief and walked Daulton Varsho with the bases loaded, bringing in a third run in the inning,. He was able to limit the damage after that with two straight strikeouts.<\/p>\n
It was the second-shortest start of Castillo’s career, however, as Toronto chased the 32-year-old in the third inning of a start for the first time since April 2018.<\/p>\n
The move will surely have repercussions on Seattle’s pitching staff throughout the remainder of Game 4 and Game 5, as the Mariners will work through their bullpen for six innings on Thursday night.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"With Toronto trailing 1-0 in Game 4 of the American League Championship Series, Gim\u00e9nez strode to the plate…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":218694,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[435],"tags":[49,48,462,82],"class_list":{"0":"post-218693","1":"post","2":"type-post","3":"status-publish","4":"format-standard","5":"has-post-thumbnail","7":"category-mlb","8":"tag-ca","9":"tag-canada","10":"tag-mlb","11":"tag-sports"},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/218693","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=218693"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/218693\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/218694"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=218693"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=218693"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=218693"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}