Manoah's latest outing complicates Blue Jays' pitching position

TORONTO -- It felt familiar, but not in the way you wanted it to.

Alek Manoah’s second start back in the big leagues looked like too many of the outings that led to his demotion to Rookie ball six weeks ago. This comes after Manoah looked very sharp in his return 10 days ago against the Tigers, though, leaving the Blue Jays in a spot where it’s difficult to evaluate exactly what Manoah will be able to offer for the rest of this season.

Two weeks from the MLB Trade Deadline, that’s uncomfortable.

The Blue Jays' 9-1 loss to the Padres on Tuesday night put Manoah up against a more daunting lineup than the Tigers’. San Diego has been one of baseball’s biggest disappointments, but the heart of its order is still stacked with superstars. Like manager John Schneider said just a few hours before Manoah took the mound, Toronto was trying not to be the team that wakes the Friars up.

“I thought the line looked worse than it really was,” said Schneider. “A couple of close pitches he didn’t get, and that team does damage. I thought he got ahead of hitters, but had a tough time putting them away. He was probably trying to be a bit too fine, so his pitch count got driven up.”

Manoah echoed some of that sentiment, saying there were things in Tuesday’s outing beyond his control. The loss featured a couple of bad bounces, George Springer losing a ball in the lights and a strike zone that led to the early ejection of pitching coach Pete Walker, who said the magic words while he stood atop the mound for a visit with Manoah.

“I don’t think anything Pete said would have gotten you kicked out of a 10-year-old travel ballpark,” Manoah said. “I don’t know what he said before. I don’t know what the history is there. I really don’t know. I just know that he was talking to me and said, ‘There were a couple calls that didn’t go our way. Don’t worry about that. Keep pitching. I’ll handle everything else.’ Next thing you know, he was tossed.”

There was also plenty of loud contact in the air, though, including a two-run home run from Juan Soto and a worrying lack of strikeouts.

Manoah walked five Padres, but he didn’t strike out any. His 41-pitch first inning, as he tried and tried to find a third strike that just never came, was the third-most pitches thrown in an opening frame this season. Only Luke Weaver (Reds) and Drey Jameson (D-backs) have thrown more, with 43. The big right-hander’s struggles earlier this season had more to do with attacking the zone early in counts, but in the series opener, you saw Manoah struggle to find that big pitch in the big moment.

Schneider pointed to Manoah’s slider as the key in all of this, but he stood firmly behind his pitcher and a line he didn’t think represented his performance.

“I don’t think it was a step backwards,” Schneider said. “All of the things we’ve been talking about him improving on, I thought he continued to do so tonight.”

The long-term view of Manoah must still respect his 2022 season, a year with a 2.24 ERA over 196 2/3 innings that landed him third in AL Cy Young Award voting. That doesn’t happen by accident. This isn’t about the next decade, though. It’s about the next three weeks and the next three months, a stretch of the road the Blue Jays can already see.

Even for a club as inconsistent as Toronto has been through the first 95 games, teams with this much talent and this big an opening to make a true run in the postseason are rare. Just ask a Blue Jays fan who followed this team for the two decades between 1995 and 2015. When you have an opening, you need to nail it.

This will get twice as interesting when Hyun Jin Ryu returns. The lefty is scheduled to pitch Friday for Triple-A Buffalo in what could be his second-to-last, or even final, tune-up start before returning. The Blue Jays aren’t exactly eager to shift to a six-man rotation for a great length of time, but they recognize it could be a useful short-term strategy until all of the chips fall.

“A lot of it will play itself out after his outing on Friday,” Schneider said, “whether we’re going to do that or whether we’re going to stick with five.”

Whether it’s four, five or six, the Blue Jays first need to figure out what they have in Manoah, who can still be such an important part of this.