Blue Jays get taste of Oct. in loss to Mets

Anything that could go wrong did go wrong for the Blue Jays on Friday night at Sahlen Field in Buffalo, N.Y., but the one run they snuck across against Jacob deGrom is more telling than the 18-run parade the Mets sent across home plate.

The Blue Jays sit at 24-20 with their playoff fate almost entirely in their own hands, but as this young lineup may soon learn, the pitchers you face in October are different than the pitchers you face in the regular season. Toronto has faced plenty of starting pitchers in August and September who won’t exactly be handed the ball in Game 1 of a series, so deGrom was a dose of reality.

• Box score

For a moment, it looked like the Blue Jays would earn a passing grade. Randal Grichuk singled in the first inning, stole second and then he was driven home by a Vladimir Guerrero Jr. single to the wall in right field. It was the first run deGrom had allowed in the first inning in 2020, and for a brief moment in time, Toronto held a 1-0 lead in a game it would eventually lose 18-1.

deGrom is baseball’s best, but still, postseason baseball means that the Blue Jays will be getting every team’s best on each night. That could mean Kenta Maeda with the Twins or Dallas Keuchel and Lucas Giolito on the White Sox. It could mean Gerrit Cole with the Yankees, Zack Greinke with the Astros or Shane Bieber and Zach Plesac with Cleveland. Add in each of those pitchers being followed by their bullpen’s finest, and it’s a whole new world for many of these young hitters who could be experiencing their first taste of the postseason.

“We’ve faced some good ones, the [Blake] Snells and [Tyler] Glasnows,” manager Charlie Montoyo said. “Of course, we haven’t faced Gerrit Cole yet, but we will. It just is what it is. The deeper you go into these games, the better the pitching is going to be, but that will be a good test for our guys.”

From a loss as lopsided as this one, the Blue Jays will need to grab a few positives and learn from deGrom. There was Guerrero’s single, the result of some mighty cuts at the plate, and later an exceptional at-bat from Travis Shaw, who forced deGrom to throw 12 pitches, fouled off eight and worked a walk. By the time the dust had settled, deGrom had thrown 102 pitches over six innings with nine strikeouts.

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“We battled early on,” Montoyo said. “He’s one of the best pitchers in baseball, there’s no doubt, which we knew coming into this game. We couldn’t give up many runs. That tells you why we played the infield in at 3-1 or 4-1, because you can not give up any more runs with that guy on the mound. We had some good at-bats early on, but then when the game got out of control, it was tougher.”

That small touch of defensive strategy -- bringing the infield in so early in a game as a reaction to the other team’s starter -- is another example of how things tend to tighten up come playoff time. The Blue Jays have thrived on baseball chaos, often making the three worst and three best plays in the same game, but the margins for error will be much smaller come October, with everything under a microscope.

Of course, the Blue Jays aren't likely to give up 18 runs when they have their own ace on the mound in Hyun Jin Ryu. Friday’s starter, Chase Anderson, couldn’t escape the third inning, resulting in the most important pitching performance of the evening actually belonging to closer Ken Giles, pitching with a 15-run deficit in the eighth. Just activated after nearly a month and a half on the injured list with a right forearm strain, Giles allowed a home run on his first pitch, but he settled in and averaged 95.2 mph with his fastball. He’s expected to be eased in, and as that velocity ticks back up towards his 2019 average of 96.9 mph, he’ll slide right back into that ninth-inning role.