Kikuchi (7 K's) recovers from tough 1st inning

TORONTO -- The thing about these early days of his tenure with the Blue Jays is that you never know which Yusei Kikuchi you’re going to get.

There’s the one who attacks hitters with a well-located, 95 mph fastball and deceives opponents with a nasty slider or split changeup to rack up the strikeouts for some quick innings. And then there’s the Kikuchi who doesn’t seem able to grip the baseball, loses command of his pitches and loads the bases multiple times in the same frame.

Both sides of the left-hander made an appearance in the Blue Jays’ 3-2 loss to the Reds on Sunday afternoon at Rogers Centre. Toronto missed an opportunity for its first sweep of the season after taking the first two in the three-game Interleague set.

“I think a lot of pitchers struggle with that first inning to start the ballgame,” Kikuchi said through an interpreter. “I think it’s more trying to get early outs too much, try to do a little bit too much.”

Kikuchi faced eight Reds batters in the first inning alone, walking the very first hitter on four pitches, striking out the next, then allowing two more walks to load the bases. That prompted a mound visit from pitching coach Pete Walker and an early warmup for Ross Stripling in the bullpen. Kikuchi, who pitched 4 1/3 innings of two-run ball on two hits and three walks to go with seven strikeouts, didn’t throw a strike until pitch No. 6 of his outing.

After Teoscar Hernández made an impressive running catch on a Kyle Farmer fly ball to keep the runners in check, Aristides Aquino sent a Kikuchi slider to left field for a two-run ground-rule double. The Blue Jays’ starter followed that up by hitting the next batter before finally getting out of the inning with his second strikeout as Taylor Motter whiffed on a fastball up and away.

Kikuchi threw 37 pitches in the first frame, but just 17 for strikes.

“I couldn’t quite get into a good rhythm, with good tempo,” he said.

But a lot can change between innings.

When Kikuchi came back for the second inning, it was his dominant side that took the mound. He retired 10 Reds hitters in a row -- including a strikeout of Motter to end the first -- as Blue Jays hitters mustered two runs to tie the game.

Kikuchi started mixing in more changeups to go with his fastball, since Cincinnati’s hitters seemed to have the slider figured out.

“He kept us in the game,” manager Charlie Montoyo said. “He came back throwing strikes and that was huge, because we didn’t want to use Stripling in the first inning. He was one hitter or two away from [us] taking him out of the game and he came back, and we had a chance until the end because of what he did.”

Kikuchi is certainly a more well-rounded pitcher than the one that arrived in Toronto in April, though his latest outing still indicates that the adjustment period isn’t over.

He didn’t throw his cutter at all on Sunday, furthering a fastball-heavy game plan the Blue Jays have envisioned for him. Sixty of Kikuchi’s 86 pitches were four-seamers, good for 70 percent of his total count. In 2021, the fastball amounted to 35.7 percent, a number that’s already up to 51 percent this season.

Three of his seven strikeouts came by way of the fastball.

“I’m just gaining more and more confidence in that pitch every outing,” Kikuchi said. “The numbers that I see back that up. That pitch is a very good pitch. And I feel that as well, out on the mound, the more I throw it the more I see how hitters are reacting to that pitch. It just gives me more confidence.”

But all of this effort may be moot if the Blue Jays can’t make adjustments on offense.

This one featured a barrage of missed opportunities for Toronto hitters -- who faced a rookie pitcher with wild tendencies making his MLB debut in Reds righty Graham Ashcraft -- long before Joey Votto’s storybook game-winning home run off of Yimi Garcia in the eighth.

The most glaring example of that came in the fifth, when the Blue Jays loaded the bases with one out on a couple of Motter fielding errors, but whiffed on both opportunities to drive in runs. Toronto went 1-for-10 overall with runners in scoring position.

“The positive side is that we’re winning games without our offense swinging the bats the way everybody expects,” Montoyo said. “We took two out of three from Seattle and two out of three from Cincinnati. Pitching and defense have been great, so we’re hoping that our bats get hot.”