The Toronto Blue Jays needed a different script for Wednesday's Game 4 against the New York Yankees. They'd gotten their lead in the series by socking the ball all over the damn place—six extra-base hits in Game 1, eight in Game 2; 29 total hits and eight dingers—and by getting commanding performances from starting pitchers Kevin Gausman and Trey Yesavage. Now they were out of starters, having left Max Scherzer and Chris Bassitt off their ALDS roster, and would need to survive a bullpen game. Worse, they were facing bazooka-armed Yankees rookie Cam Schlittler, who knocked out the Red Sox last week in a historic performance.
The Blue Jays won the AL East, yes, but with the same overall record as the Yankees, and I think if you wipe away the current standings and put these two teams on a field together, history and prominence and the soup of national and regional neurotic complexes tend in combination to make it a lot easier to think of the Yankees as a kind of inevitability. The Blue Jays themselves are susceptible to this way of thinking: Veteran Toronto outfielder George Springer spent part of the final week of the regular season worrying that Major League Baseball was unfairly tilting the scales for the Bronx Bombers, amid a team-wide meltdown that nearly cost the Blue Jays the division. Give the Yankees home field, give them a shining Adonis of a starting pitcher, give them momentum from a stirring Game 3 comeback, and give nine innings of responsibility to Toronto's entirely ho-hum bullpen, and it becomes very easy to think of the odds against the visiting Canadians as basically insurmountable.
John Smoltz, working the call for FS1, talked before the first pitch about the aura of Schlittler, about the demoralizing effect it might have on the Blue Jays if the 24-year-old opened the game with some quick, dominant outs. "What he's trying to do is continue the narrative that he's unbeatable," said Smoltz, while Schlittler stalked the mound, looking angry and determined. "Don't give the Toronto Blue Jays any thought that you're not on your A-game." The Blue Jays roughed up Schlittler the last time they saw him, posting seven baserunners and four runs and chasing the rookie in his second inning of work. This, in theory, was a different dude. Smoltz referenced some mechanical refinement in Schlittler's delivery, but the performances speak for themselves: Over his last three starts entering Wednesday night, Schlittler had thrown 20-plus innings, struck out 27 batters, issued just two walks, and allowed just one single run.
The Blue Jays were not impressed! Springer, cured of his conspiratorial thinking, smoked Schlittler's second pitch of the game down the left field line for a stand-up double. Vladimir Guerrero Jr., who has been savaging Yankees pitchers all series, whacked Schlittler's sixth pitch down the line in right, scoring Springer. Addison Barger punched Schlittler's eighth pitch of the inning into right, moving Guerrero to third. Only a fantastic sliding two-out catch from Cody Bellinger in left prevented the Blue Jays from posting a crooked number in the inning, but the Blue Jays had proven, for the time being, that Schlittler was at least mortal.
Ryan McMahon evened the score with a low liner of a dinger in the third inning, but Game 3 was otherwise a less pyrotechnic affair than the others in the series. The Blue Jays gave the start to reliever Louis Varland, the hard-luck Game 3 loser whose brushback fastball Aaron Judge turned into maybe the most significant home run of his career. Per TSN, Varland became the first pitcher in MLB history to lose a playoff game and then start his team's very next game. Varland recorded four outs, the first of eight Toronto pitchers to take the mound. Toronto's relievers finished the regular season 19th in bullpen ERA, 16th in combined WHIP, and tied for 16th in average against. Here they were facing a Yankees team that led all of baseball in runs scored, in a close-out game, on the road. No big deal!
Eric Lauer, who got five clean outs and worked through the top of New York's lineup, credits Toronto's coaches for feeling their way through delicate in-game situations. "They understand the flow of the game, pockets where guys need to be used, what situations are bigger and smaller," Lauer said after the game. "Having the trust to bring in every guy that they brought in and get the job done." There weren't really any "smaller" pockets in this game. Manager John Schneider brought in closer Jeff Hoffman while up four runs in the eighth inning, but with two runners on. Hoffman often enough creates his own obstacles: Here he immediately walked the bases loaded before retiring Austin Wells on a flyout to center. Back out there for the ninth, Hoffman hung a 1–1 splitter to Jasson Domínguez for a leadoff double, and then even more glaringly hung a 1–2 slider to Judge, a ball that under many circumstances would've been sockdolagered into another dimension but in this case was merely roped to the wall for an RBI single. That was the game's final blow: Hoffman struck out Bellinger one batter later, and doomed the Yankees to the gleeful mockery of FS1 studio analyst David Ortiz.
It's not that another huge offensive explosion from the Blue Jays would've seemed fake, but there's something especially real-seeming about needing an alternate path to victory, and finding it, and against the Yankees. Read this next part in the voice of Boris Karloff: It came without any dingers; it came without a big-time pitching performance; it came without standout heroics from Guerreros or Springers. Toronto proved in the first two games of the series that they can go crazy and put up gaudy numbers. They showed in Game 3 what I think a lot of people were waiting to see, which is that their offense can cool down and become frustrated, and that their bullpen is touchable. I don't think it would've surprised anyone if the exposure of those vulnerabilities had turned out to be fatal. Winning without a return to the fireworks formula doesn't necessarily prove anything—it for sure does not mean the Blue Jays are invulnerable—but Toronto fans would be right to feel extra-good that their team brings with it to the ALCS the experience of winning a playoff game some other way.
"I think we more than showed what we can do in this series between all that pitching, defense, everything," said a beer- and champagne-soaked Schneider, in the euphoric visitor's locker room. "The guys in here know what we’re capable of and we don’t really care what anyone else thinks." Confidence is good, and certainly the Blue Jays should not care how I feel about their seriousness going forward, but it's nice to have established something. They out-bombed the Bronx Bombers, and then, when they needed to, they outmaneuvered them as well. If it's still confusing to ponder the Blue Jays as The Real Thing, certainly it is getting easier by the day.
