TORONTO -- The warning sirens aren’t coming from the far side of the mountain anymore.

Alek Manoah's struggles are here, and so far, they’re real.

The Blue Jays' 2022 ace and '23 Opening Day starter who finished third in American League Cy Young Award voting last season hasn’t matched his resume through nine starts -- and Monday night’s 7-4 loss to the Yankees at Rogers Centre was the most difficult yet.

Manoah walked a career-high seven batters, including the final two he faced to open the fifth inning before manager John Schneider gave him the hook. Add in two home runs and five runs scored, and it was one of Manoah’s toughest days as a pro. This is not Manoah’s new reality and his remarkable 2022 has hardly faded from the rearview mirror, but a club trying to compete for a World Series in a challenging division needs its ace.

“That’s baseball, man. I don’t need to tell you guys the kind of year I had last year,” Manoah said. “That’s the game. This game will punch you right in the mouth. My job is to show up every single day and give this team a chance to win. I do everything I can between starts. My bullpens, I feel like everything is coming together. Right now, the game is just testing me. You find out who’s who when things aren’t going well.”

Manoah became the first pitcher since the Cubs' Jake Arrieta on Aug. 18, 2016, to allow seven walks and two home runs in the same game -- and Manoah is just the second in the past 15 seasons to do so in four innings or fewer (the Phillies' Phillippe Aumont, 2015).

The big man has had some brilliant "firsts," but these aren’t them.

The worries have come in waves. Manoah has been in a pattern of two or three poor starts followed by a bounce back, which renews the optimism that his 2022 season earned. But that pattern is only digestible when there’s a full and permanent rebound at the end of it all. There likely is, but life in the AL East demands immediacy.

“I have to look at it more closely to see if it’s mechanical or trying to do too much with certain pitches,” Schneider said. "But he needs to flip the script a little bit here and get in the zone.”

At the surface level, Manoah is allowing more walks and home runs while striking out fewer batters. Go a step deeper, and Manoah’s exit velocities and hard-hit rates are higher as opponents barrel up his pitches more frequently. His velocities aren’t down enough to be alarming, but the real problem -- or perhaps a solution -- lies in his slider.

Manoah’s slider isn’t breaking as much in 2023, meaning the balls that used to dive underneath or zip away from bats are now being put in play. He liked how it felt Monday, though, and he explained that when he isn’t getting first-pitch strikes or ahead in counts, he can’t throw the types of sliders he wants to -- ones that snap out of the zone to force swings. Every pitcher benefits from getting ahead in counts, but that could be the secret sauce here.

What Manoah still has is his competitiveness and the mental approach that can make him great when he’s at his best. It’s why general manager Ross Atkins was so optimistic when he met with the media four hours before Manoah stepped on the mound Monday.

“The thing that gives me such confidence about Alek is that he has the hardest part about performing at this level figured out, and that’s the compete factor and never backing down from a challenge,” Atkins said. “I feel, just like I do tonight, so good about him going out there against a very good lineup, and that doesn’t change. He’s working hard and he’s accountable on trying to find ways to be more consistent.”

In the middle of this is a new chapter to the drama between the Blue Jays and Yankees, as the home broadcast feed focused on Aaron Judge looking into his own dugout in the eighth inning just prior to launching his second home run, well after Manoah had left the game. Schneider said he found it “odd” and that Toronto will look into it further, while Judge said he was “trying to see who was chirping in the dugout” with the Yanks up 6-0 and his manager just having been ejected.

Whichever way this rivalry goes, Manoah will be at the center of it. The Blue Jays need him to be the aggressor, though, a role that looks so much more natural on Manoah than what we saw in the series opener.