SEATTLE — In the uneasy quiet of the Toronto Blue Jays clubhouse after the Seattle Mariners had opened a 2-0 lead in the American League Championship Series, Max Scherzer stood in front of his corner locker and dropped some knowledge.
Over nearly two decades in the majors, he’d seen enough to know that fortunes can turn quickly in the post-season. “All of a sudden, this is a three-game series out in Seattle and that can be a completely different set of circumstances, games unfolding in different ways than they unfolded here,” he said then. “As disappointing as these first two games were, this is baseball, things can change on a dime.”
Lo and behold, as if spoken into existence by the future Hall of Famer, they very much have, both for the Blue Jays, suddenly tied 2-2 in the best-of-seven series after an 8-2 thumping of the Seattle Mariners, and himself, returning to the mound after a 3½-week absence with a vintage Mad Max outing, all-out agro stomps through the dugout and on-mound snarls at manager John Schneider included.
Combined with another game-changing two-run homer from Andres Gimenez, some scratch-and-claw add-on runs and a late solo shot by a back in the groove Vladimir Guerrero Jr., this ALCS is now a best-of-three, with a Kevin Gausman-Bryce Miller rematch set for Friday’s Game 5.
Things can, indeed, change on a dime and Scherzer played a key role in pulling the Blue Jays level before a stunned T-Mobile Park crowd of 46,981.
“This was big for a lot of reasons for him – he wanted this one really bad,” pitching coach Pete Walker said. “He was just as locked in as I’ve ever seen him in the short time that we’ve been together. He really enjoys this team and he wants to win for this team, wants to be a part of it and feel like he’s contributing, which he is and has. But tonight was one of those games that he knew we needed him to step up. And he did.”
Left off the roster for the ALDS victory over the New York Yankees after allowing 25 runs in 25 innings over his final six starts of the regular season, Scherzer drew back in for this round after using the downtime to get right physically.
A neck issue had helped prevent him from finishing his pitches the way he wanted, hampering location and the sharpness of his breaking ball, and while he refused to “point the finger at anything ailment-wise of why I was pitching bad — I was pitching bad,” he said, a difference was evident to the Blue Jays when he threw a simulated game last week.
“If we weren’t comfortable with him being normal,” said Schneider, “he wouldn’t have been on the roster.”
Scherzer was better than normal during his first game action since Sept. 24, when he allowed four runs in five innings during a 7-1 loss to the Boston Red Sox, this time getting through 5.2 innings of two-run ball on three hits and four walks with five strikeouts in what was his 500th big-league outing, regular season and playoffs combined.
“I told myself, Hey, you’re going to be rusty, you’ve got to find the zone, you’ve got to find the zone with all your pitches,” said Scherzer. “But with the layoff, my arm felt great. My arm felt — it was fresh. All the little ailments that I’ve been dealing with were gone, so I was able to get through the ball much better. Just for me, it was getting in the flow of the game and executing pitches.”
To that end, he set the tone in the first inning, throwing his hardest pitch of the season, a 96.5 m.p.h. fastball to Cal Raleigh, and worked around a pair of walks by getting Jorge Polanco to hit into a double play.
He surrendered a homer to Josh Naylor leading off the second, briefly putting the Mariners up 1-0, but rolled from that point forward as the Blue Jays offence chewed up Luis Castillo.
Isiah Kiner-Falefa, starting after Anthony Santander was subbed out due to lumbar spine inflammation and replaced with Joey Loperfido, opened the second with a double and Gimenez followed by yanking a 3-2 slider over the wall in right for a 2-1 lead.
A Daulton Varsho bases-loaded walk later in the inning extended the lead, George Springer ripped an RBI double and later scored on a Matt Brash wild pitch to make it 5-1 in the fourth, Guerrero went deep in the seventh while Gimenez, a leading contender for ALCS MVP honours, added a two-run single in the eighth.
Scherzer, meanwhile, kept pushing back the clock with what could be his legacy Blue Jays outing. He erased a leadoff Leo Rivas walk in the third by picking him off, put up another zero in the fourth and then, with one and two out in the fifth, provided meme-makers a scene for the ages when he yelled no at Schneider as he approached the mound and then growled at him like a lion threatening prey.
“I thought he was going to kill me,” said Schneider. “It was great.”
Said Scherzer: “I understood where the game state was, knew how I wanted to attack, and then all of a sudden, I saw Schneids coming out, and I kind of went, woah, woah, woah, like, I’m not coming out of this ball game. I feel too good. So we had a little conversation that basically I wanted to stay in the ballgame, but just with some other words involved. I just knew I was strong, I knew I wanted the ball, I knew I could get outs in this situation. I just wanted to stay in. I wanted it.”
Schneider stuck with his right-hander, Ernie Clement grinning as he returned to third base from the mound visit, and Scherzer responded by striking out Randy Arozarena to end the inning.
“You can see that coming from him — he wants to pitch so bad. It was a good moment,” said catcher Alejandro Kirk, who said the exchange not just fired him up, but also, “everybody.”
Watching from the bullpen, closer Jeff Hoffman, who ripped through the top of the Mariners lineup in a clean eighth, said that “usually Schneids points pretty early, and when he didn’t point early, I was like, Oh, he’s giving Max the chance to fight for himself, and I love that. I’m glad they stuck with him and he came through for us.”
Scherzer wasn’t done there, either, coming back out for the sixth when he got Raleigh on a fly ball to right, struck out Julio Rodriguez for a second time and then departed after a two-out walk to Polanco. No roaring at Schneider this time.
“It’s not fake,” said Schneider. “He has this Mad Max persona, but he backed it up tonight. The infielders had a good laugh, too, out there. And he got the job done.”
Added Walker: “There are many times where he knows it’s time. And it’s not like the first time we communicate is the time that he’s removed from the game. We talk every inning. So I knew he was feeling great and I knew he was executing and I knew his velocity was there. The competitive fire that he shows in those moments is something that we really haven’t seen, you know what I mean? It was our first glimpse at it, so to speak. We kind of knew what was going to happen. And to be honest with you, it was good to see. It just shows you where he is and what he still has in the tank to contribute, for the rest of this post-season.”
Mason Fluharty walked Naylor and gave up an RBI single to Eugenio Suarez, but Addison Barger extinguished the rally by throwing Naylor out at third to end the inning. The Blue Jays quickly got that run back and more and closed out a second straight win.
And so, an ALCS that looked like it might end fast is now guaranteed to return to Toronto for a Game 6, at least, a new series, with the same old Scherzer.
