Manoah making strides as Trade Deadline approaches

SEATTLE -- It doesn’t have to be beautiful, it just has to work.

Sunday’s 4-3 win was one the Blue Jays needed, one Alek Manoah needed and one the tens of thousands of Canadian fans deserved after turning T-Mobile Park into a postseason preview party for three days.

• Box score

The stakes were incredibly high for Manoah, making one of the biggest regular-season starts of his career following two heartbreaking losses for Toronto on Friday and Saturday. In Manoah’s two starts since returning from the Minor Leagues, he’d pitched a gem and struggled once, and with Hyun Jin Ryu a day away from rejoining the team in Los Angeles, the Blue Jays needed to see something. Not perfection, just progress.

“I wanted to make sure we got a win today,” Manoah said. “I wanted to do everything I can to help this team get a win and keep on with the road trip.”

A win is a win, perhaps carrying a little extra value against a team gaining ground in the AL Wild Card race, but the Blue Jays also needed to see some big-picture strides from Manoah. There needs to be a level of confidence that he can be a contributor in this rotation the rest of the way, even with Ryu returning and even with the Trade Deadline just more than a week away.

“I feel really good. You’ll never get to a point in this game where you feel like you’ve got it all figured out,” Manoah said. “If you do, it’s never going to end well. For me, it’s just about continuing to hone my craft and make adjustments from start to start. I just want to stay aggressive every time I’m out there.”

Manoah has been working his way through a list of priorities since he was sent back to the Blue Jays’ training complex in early June, a major move that hit the reset button on his season. Near the top of that list is Manoah’s slider, which stopped being a legitimate, two-strike weapon for him and is so crucial to his success.

The third inning in Sunday’s win captured some of that growth. Take a look at these three at-bats in a row:

1. Julio Rodríguez
Manoah got Rodríguez into a 0-2 count quickly, then threw him three consecutive balls. We’ve seen too much of that nibbling from Manoah at times in 2023, but he came right back with one of his best sliders of the game, which dived to the bottom edge of the zone and underneath Rodríguez’s swing.

2. Eugenio Suárez
Suárez worked a full count, too, but he walked when Manoah’s slider flew open to his arm side and missed inside. This was an example of the “bad” Manoah slider, which he didn’t get on top of enough.

3. Teoscar Hernández
With Hernández in a 2-2 count, Manoah found the good slider again. Instead of slipping this one underneath Hernández’s bat like he did to Rodríguez, Manoah swept this one across the zone and away from Hernández with more horizontal movement. Seeing this work the first time, Manoah used a similar slider against Hernández in the sixth, using that sweeping action to force a third-strike swing on a pitch that dived well out of the zone.

“Being able to establish the fastball was the main part,” Manoah said, “getting ahead with that and putting them in swing mode. Then, it was about being able to mix in the good sliders.”

Manoah walked four and hit another, but he managed to limit the damage to three runs over 5 1/3 innings. Again, that’s not perfect, but Manoah battling through these baserunners was an encouraging sign. The Blue Jays needed this, because coming off the two losses to open the series, another would have been an absolute gut punch.

The only letdown now is that these teams don’t play one another more often.

“It’s a back-and-forth game with a lot of these guys, going back a couple of years now,” said manager John Schneider. “It seems like that’s the way we match up. It seems like there’s always big moments, whether it’s relievers or starters pitching out of big jams and some big at-bats.”

It only gets more difficult from here, as the Blue Jays open a three-game set against the mighty Dodgers on Monday, but Manoah has done enough to curb some worries after his last outing. He remains one of the biggest variables on this roster, and the Trade Deadline could throw another wrench into all of this, but for now, he’s back where he belongs as part of the Blue Jays’ success.