TORONTO — Toronto Blue Jays manager John Schneider made the observation Friday afternoon, before his first World Series game as a manager, that he and his coaches weren’t treating this as a best-of-seven.
“To me and the coaches kind of every game is a – there’s seven one-game series, basically, is how we’re looking at it,” he said. “So every night is going to be a different way to go about it. I think that we have the roster and personnel flexibility to do that differently every night.”
And maybe that’s how Dodgers manager Dave Roberts and his coaches should be looking at it now. After dominating the first three rounds of baseball’s postseason, the Dodgers are now faced with a moving target.
Things got ugly quickly Friday night, with an abomination of a sixth inning – highlighted (or, depending on how you look at it, marred) by the first pinch-hit grand slam in World Series history by Addison Barger – allowing Toronto to get the jump on the defending champs, 11-4.
This could suggest two things. First, this is not going to be the walkover many observers (but, ahem, not this one) said it would be. Second, more performances like that and the defending champs aren’t going to be champs much longer.
The latter is likely an overreaction. One game getting out of hand doesn’t necessarily suggest a trend.
As for the first part? Don’t be so surprised. Toronto won 94 games in the regular season, finishing ahead of the New York Yankees on a tiebreaker and then pummeling them 10-1 and 13-7 in the first two games of an American League Division Series they won in four. Then they lost the first two AL Championship Series games at home to Seattle, and came back to win in seven, which says there’s some grit there, too.
And this is a team that was second in baseball only to Kansas City in not striking out during the regular season, fanning only 1,099 times, facing a Dodgers pitching staff that led the majors in striking people out (1,505).
Maybe that Blue Jays flexibility was the main factor Friday night. Blake Snell, dominant in his three previous starts this postseason – an 0.86 ERA, 28 strikeouts, five walks and six hits in 21 innings, including one hit and 10 strikeouts over eight innings in Game 1 against Milwaukee – struggled from the start.
He only struck out three, two of those on back-to-back two-strike foul tips by Myles Straw and Andres Gimenez in the second inning, and Toronto had him under stress from the beginning. Snell had to throw 29 pitches to get out of a bases-loaded situation in the first, gave up four hits in the first three innings and served up a first-pitch, four-seam fastball – a juicy one – that Daulton Varsho hit off the batter’s eye in center field for a two-run homer to tie the score in the fourth.
He wasn’t the losing pitcher because Emmet Sheehan, pitching in his first World Series game and appearing flustered amid the din of the Toronto faithful, started the nine-run conflagration in the sixth and Anthony Banda punctuated it, serving up a letter-high, middle-of-the-plate slider that Barger hit into the right field bleachers for a 9-2 lead and a place in World Series history.
Alejandro Kirk’s two-run shot made it 11-2 later in that inning. Shohei Ohtani’s two-run homer in the seventh, his sixth of the playoffs, was but a slight whimper of protest.
So what now? When a questioner suggested in the postgame interview room that the Jays were a different-looking team than the Dodgers were used to, Roberts said, “You know, actually, they’re a lot as far as putting the ball in play like the (Milwaukee) Brewers.”
Judging by recent performance, the Blue Jays do it much better.
“When he (Snell) had count leverage, he really couldn’t put ’em away because they were putting the ball in play,” Roberts said. “And there were just a couple bad walks in there. But you got to give those guys credit. They certainly fought.”
Friday night’s performances of Sheehan and Banda weren’t exactly reason for optimism with a group of relief pitchers who might be about to face another stress test. A question mark for much of the last three months of the regular season but more efficient recently, the bullpen underwent another change when Alex Vesia left the team to be with his wife because of what the team has referred to as a “deeply personal family matter.”
Obviously it’s serious enough for Roberts to say before the game that “unless something unforeseen happens,” the most likely scenario was that Vesia wouldn’t be available for the Series.
“We just didn’t want to have any potential for any kind of pressure,” Dodgers president of baseball operations Andrew Friedman said before the game. “This is so much bigger than baseball. For us, it was doing whatever small part we could to just a hundred percent be supportive.”
That’s admirable, obviously. Family is and should always be number one. But Vesia’s absence leaves a hole, and asking Edgardo Henriquez and Will Klein to fill it might be asking too much.
So maybe the solution will ultimately lie with the offense. The Dodgers wasted opportunities in the second and third innings to put pressure on Trey Yesavage, the 22-year-old who began this season in Class A and was the second-youngest Game 1 starter in World Series history. (Only Brooklyn’s Ralph Branca in 1947 was younger.)
The Dodgers had the bases loaded with one out and a run in but couldn’t get any more in the second inning, stranded a runner at second in the third inning and didn’t have another runner in scoring position all evening.
“Even (when) you look back at last couple of weeks, there’s some pivotal at-bats that can flip games. I think that we can be better at that,” Roberts said. “At times, I think that the offense looks great as far as building innings, but there’s some key at-bats that you got to win pitches and use the other side of the field, get a hit, take a walk, whatever it might be.
“We can be better. We need to be better. (Toronto Game 2 starter Kevin) Gausman, these guys are fired up. They’re playing good baseball. So just one through nine, we just got to continue to take good at-bats and play good baseball and then we’ll be fine.”
If you’re a Dodger fan, you don’t want to even think of the alternative.
jalexander@scng.com