TORONTO — Trey Yesavage had just finished his bullpen session in Seattle on Thursday, his final tuneup before taking the ball and helping extend the Toronto Blue Jays\u2019 season with a 6-2 win in Game 6 of the American League Championship Series on Sunday, when he asked Chris Bassitt and Kevin Gausman, two veteran starters with 24 major league seasons between them, what was the furthest they\u2019ve ever advanced in the postseason.<\/p>\n
\u201cThis is as far as I\u2019ve gone,\u201d the 34-year-old Gausman, a 13-year veteran, told the rookie. \u201cYou don\u2019t get these opportunities very often.\u201d<\/p>\n
The conversation left a mark on Yesavage as he prepared for his sixth career start — all since making his debut Sept. 15 — with the Blue Jays\u2019 season riding on his right arm. And he made sure to give the Blue Jays a chance to advance further by limiting the Seattle Mariners, sloppy and wasteful with the chance to put the Blue Jays away, to two runs across 5\u2154 innings with help from three consecutive inning-ending double plays at a raucous Rogers Centre.<\/p>\n
\u201cThis was the most electric, energized crowd I\u2019ve ever played in front of before,\u201d said Yesavage, who struck out seven and walked three. \u201cAnd the team rallied behind the fans. They were a huge motivation for us.\u201d<\/p>\n
Toronto outplayed the Mariners in every facet Sunday. Perhaps the best defense in baseball, the Blue Jays played mistake-free defense, while the Mariners committed three errors. They ran the bases effectively, while the Mariners failed to snatch every 90-foot advancement available. They delivered when scoring opportunities arose.<\/p>\n
Toronto\u2019s performance forced a Game 7 on Monday night. It\u2019ll be its first Game 7 in 40 years and Seattle\u2019s first in franchise history. The Blue Jays, after dropping two games at home to begin this season, will play for their first AL pennant since 1993. The Mariners seek their first pennant in franchise history. The winner will face the Los Angeles Dodgers in the World Series.<\/p>\n
\u201cMy emotional state has been a fricking mess for months, man, to be honest with you,\u201d Blue Jays manager John Schneider said. \u201cI\u2019m just calling it what it is. This is fun. I wish we were playing right now.\u201d<\/p>\n
The Mariners\u2019 first two defensive miscues moments apart in the second inning helped dig a two-run hole. First, Julio Rodr\u00edguez failed to cleanly track down a single from Daulton Varsho to the left-center field gap, allowing Varsho to take second base. The next batter, Ernie Clement, laced a groundball to third baseman Eugenio Su\u00e1rez, who smoothly gloved it but lost the ball on the transfer to throw.<\/p>\n
Addison Barger and Isiah Kiner-Falefa immediately capitalized with consecutive RBI singles to open the scoring against Mariners right-hander Logan Gilbert. An inning later, after Clement drove a two-out triple off the top of the wall in right field, Barger cracked a two-run home run to double Toronto\u2019s lead. Barger, the Blue Jays\u2019 right fielder, has hit safely in four straight games and has reached base safely in seven of his eight starts after beginning the season as Triple-A Buffalo\u2019s starting shortstop.<\/p>\n
\u201cIt felt awesome,\u201d Barger said. \u201cObviously, that\u2019s a moment you dream about as a kid and everything. Yeah, Gilbert\u2019s, he\u2019s disgusting. He has a great arm. I think [he] just left that slider a little too middle and [I] got extended on it and that was it.\u201d<\/p>\n
On the other side, the Mariners ran traffic on the bases against Yesavage but unfathomably encountered the same abrupt rally killer for three straight innings. The misfortune began when Cal Raleigh, the regular-season AL MVP contender with four postseason home runs, hit into a 3-6-1 double play on a splitter with the bases loaded in the third inning to extinguish the first danger Yesavage faced. Raleigh finished 0-for-4 with three strikeouts.<\/p>\n
In the fourth, Crawford, again with the bases loaded and on a splitter from Yesavage, grounded into a 4-6-3 double play as the Mariners became the first team to ground into double plays with the bases loaded in two straight innings in a postseason game since it became an official statistic in 1940, according to Elias Sports Bureau.<\/p>\n
\u201cIn that moment, to make pitches, to get over and cover first and not screw it up, to settle himself down, I think that shows exactly who he is and what we think he is,\u201d Schneider said.<\/p>\n
Finally, with runners on first and second in the fifth, Rodr\u00edguez completed the trifecta, grounding into a 6-4-3 double play that left the Mariners stunned and the crowd jacked by Yesavage\u2019s successful highwire acts in succession after not inducing a groundball double play in the big leagues before Sunday.<\/p>\n
\u201cWe did have some opportunities to score, and we did get some base runners on,\u201d Mariners manager Dan Wilson said. \u201cBut you give a little credit to Yesavage. The secondaries that he had tonight were good. It kept us off stride and kept the ball on the ground for those double plays.\u201d<\/p>\n
Vladimir Guerrero Jr. then continued his October assault in the bottom half of the inning with a leadoff home run to chase Gilbert from the game. The homer was Guerrero\u2019s sixth of the postseason, tying him with Jos\u00e9 Bautista and Joe Carter for the franchise record for most career postseason home runs.<\/p>\n
He finished the night\u2019s scoring by wreaking havoc on the bases: After getting hit by a pitch with one out in the seventh inning, Guerrero advanced to second base on a single from Alejandro Kirk, took third on a wild pitch and jogged home when Raleigh\u2019s throw to third base bounced past Su\u00e1rez into left field.<\/p>\n
\u201cA run is a run,\u201d Guerrero said in Spanish. \u201cWe had to score as many as possible, however we could.\u201d<\/p>\n
The Mariners broke through with two outs in the sixth inning. Josh Naylor, an Ontario native, swatted his third home run of the series for Seattle\u2019s first run. Randy Arozarena followed with a single that knocked Yesavage out of the game at 87 pitches. Suarez then welcomed reliever Louis Varland by dropping a bloop double down the right-field line to score Arozarena from first base.<\/p>\n
But that was all Seattle\u2019s offense, a unit that heavily relies on home runs and didn\u2019t hit any Sunday, could muster. From there, Varland and Jeff Hoffman held Seattle scoreless over the final 3\u2153 innings to finish what the Blue Jays\u2019 22-year-old rookie started.<\/p>\n
Yesavage\u2019s postseason career began with a gem: 5\u2154 no-hit innings with 11 strikeouts and no walks in Game 2 of the AL Division Series against the New York Yankees. His second start was not nearly the same.<\/p>\n
It had been six days since the Mariners scored five runs in four innings against Yesavage in Game 2, handing the 2024 first-round pick his first adversity at the highest level. For Gausman, a fellow splitter-heavy right-hander, Yesavage\u2019s outing came down to one mistake splitter that Rodr\u00edguez swatted down the left-field line for a three-run home run in the first inning.<\/p>\n
On Sunday, Yesavage threw the splitter — his signature pitch — 31 times and got 10 whiffs. He used it to wiggle out of the game\u2019s biggest jams with a composure not expected from someone who began his season by walking six batters in Single A. Six-plus months later, those pitches helped keep Toronto\u2019s season alive and a deeper run possible.<\/p>\n
\u201cHis confidence for 22 is — I couldn\u2019t make that start when I was 22,\u201d Gausman said. \u201cI\u2019ll be honest with you.\u201d<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"TORONTO — Trey Yesavage had just finished his bullpen session in Seattle on Thursday, his final tuneup before…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":226888,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[435],"tags":[49,48,462,82,507],"class_list":{"0":"post-226887","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","12":"tag-toronto-blue-jays"},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/226887","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=226887"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/226887\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/226888"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=226887"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=226887"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=226887"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}