Vladimir Guerrero Jr. Pulls Blue Jays to 6-5 Win
The standings say .500. The route there involved Austin Voth, six scoreless Toronto innings, and a comeback that felt more like triage.
This is the part where everyone is supposed to say the Blue Jays showed resilience.
Fine.
They did.
They also showed why resilience keeps being required, which is the less marketable half of the sentence.
Toronto beat Baltimore 6-5 on Friday. The Jays are 29-29, back at .500, riding a W4 streak, and 8-2 over their last ten.
That all looks pleasant enough if you squint from a safe distance.
Up close, the game was a series of small fires followed by one very large bucket of water from Vladimir Guerrero Jr.
The Blue Jays trailed 5-0 after the bottom of the fifth. They had scored nothing through six innings. Then Kazuma Okamoto and Charles McAdoo hit seventh-inning homers, and Guerrero doubled home George Springer and Ernie Clement in the eighth.
A 6-5 win.
A comeback.
A little miracle with a medical bracelet.
.500 should feel better than this
The standings do not care how a team arrives.
They just say 29-29.
They say .500. They say third in the division. They say four straight wins.
For a club that has played 58 games, those facts matter. Nobody should sneer at them. The Blue Jays have 234 runs, a 4.03 runs-per-game mark, a .243 batting average, a .689 OPS, and 55 home runs.
This is not an offence so overwhelming that it can treat five-run deficits as a lifestyle choice.
And yet, that is where Friday went.
For six innings, Toronto’s line in the inning-by-inning scoring was a row of zeroes. First through sixth, nothing.
That is not dramatic interpretation.
That is the linescore.
Then the Jays scored four in the seventh and two in the eighth, as if the first two-thirds of the evening had simply been a misunderstanding.
The win counts the same.
The stress does not.
The Voth part was grimly familiar
Austin Voth had been selected from the Buffalo Bisons on Wednesday, according to the transaction log.
By Friday, he was carrying the middle of a game that got away from him.
His line was 3.1 innings, five earned runs, and no strikeouts.
The bottom of the third began Baltimore’s scoring. Adley Rutschman walked, Jackson Holliday scored, Taylor Ward went to third, and Gunnar Henderson went to second. Samuel Basallo then hit a sacrifice fly to center fielder Daulton Varsho, scoring Ward.
In the bottom of the fourth, Holliday homered on a fly ball to right field.
In the bottom of the fifth, Pete Alonso homered on a fly ball to right center. Basallo homered on a fly ball to left center.
That made it 5-0.
The Blue Jays also had two errors in the game. Baltimore had no errors. The Orioles left seven on base, which is another way of saying this could have been colder.
There are nights when the rotation situation feels like a spreadsheet with water damage.
This was one of them.
Adam Macko gave Toronto 1.2 innings with no earned runs and one strikeout. Connor Seabold later gave 1.2 innings with no earned runs and one strikeout. Mason Fluharty gave 1.1 innings with no earned runs and one strikeout. Braydon Fisher gave 1.0 inning with no earned runs.
The pitching totals: three strikeouts, five earned runs.
It held together because the later innings stopped bleeding.
Barely enough is still enough.
It is also still barely.
Guerrero turned survival into a result
The seventh inning did the heavy lifting first.
Okamoto homered off Trevor Rogers on a fly ball to left field, his 12th. Guerrero scored.
Then McAdoo homered off Rogers on a fly ball to right center, his first. Varsho scored.
Just like that, the 5-0 game was 5-4.
This is the Blue Jays experience in miniature: hours of staring into a well, followed by someone handing you a trumpet.
The eighth belonged to Guerrero.
Against Yennier Cano, he doubled on a sharp line drive to left fielder Taylor Ward. Springer scored. Clement scored.
Toronto led 6-5, and that is where the score stayed.
Guerrero finished 2-for-4 with two RBI. He scored once. In the two innings that saved the game, he was right in the middle of everything.
Okamoto and McAdoo supplied the thunder. Guerrero supplied the hinge.
There is no need to dress it up beyond that.
Without those swings, Friday is just another sour road game where the offence wakes up too late and the pitching line is left sitting in the middle of the room.
With them, it becomes a comeback win.
Baseball is unfair like that.
Sometimes the same game contains both the indictment and the alibi.
Take the win, keep the receipt
The Blue Jays have won 2 of 2 against the Orioles in this series. Thursday was 2-1. Friday was 6-5.
Today brings Trey Yesavage against Brandon Young in Baltimore.
There is no off day to sit with the weirdness. The next game is already at the door, holding its hand out.
That is probably for the best.
If you stare too long at Friday, the good parts and bad parts start arguing.
The good parts are obvious: Okamoto’s 12th homer, McAdoo’s first homer, Guerrero’s eighth-inning double, the bullpen keeping the Orioles off the board late, and a fourth straight win.
The bad parts are also obvious: 5-0 after five, six innings without a Toronto run, Voth’s line, and the familiar need for an improbable rescue.
So yes, celebrate the comeback.
Just do it quietly.
The Blue Jays got back to .500 by climbing out of a hole they helped dig.
Around here, even the ladders come with splinters.
React