It might have been a cellar dweller against a first-place ball club, but there was a playoff feel as the Blue Jays took the rubber match of their series against the Mariners: a 5-4, 10-inning win before a bipartisan crowd of 34,885 at T-Mobile Park in Seattle on Sunday.
After splitting a pair of tense, one-run affairs, the Jays came back from a three-run deficit in the seventh inning to take the finale and win a series in the Pacific Northwest for the first time since 2018.
Starter José Berríos was dominant over most of his six-inning stint, striking out a season-high 10, but got bitten by the long ball at the wrong time, serving up a three-run shot to Mitch Garver in the fifth.
It was the second home run allowed by the right-hander — after Victor Robles smacked a solo shot in the third to open the scoring, the centre-fielder’s first home run since September 2022 — and, more important, the 21st time Berríos has been taken deep this season.
That number leads the major leagues and is only one away from the Jays record for home runs allowed before the all-star break, shared by Yusei Kikuchi (2023) and Dave Stieb (1986). Berríos has one start left before the break, scheduled for Saturday in Arizona.
George Springer tied it with a three-run blast of his own in the seventh, the resurgent right-fielder’s fifth dinger in his last 11 starts, four of those with two runners on.
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In a newly tied game, the Jays’ beleaguered bullpen bent but didn’t break. Brendon Little wriggled out of Zach Pop’s bases-loaded jam in the eighth inning and Chad Green got out of his own in the ninth, allowing the Jays to take the lead on Daulton Varsho’s two-out, two-strike single in the 10th.
Génesis Cabrera closed it out, leaving the bases loaded in the bottom of the inning.
The Jays have shown over the last couple of weeks that, even in their current state, they can hold their own against the best teams in the league. Nine of their last 13 games have come against teams currently holding playoff spots, and they’ve gone 5-4 in those contests.
Holding your own isn’t enough, though, when you’re in last place and need to rattle off a bunch of wins to get back into the playoff race before a sell-off at the July 30 trade deadline.
But, just as right-hander Yariel Rodríguez did with his dominant outing Saturday, another Jays rookie showed Sunday (as he has for the last month) that he just might be a big piece of a retooled team in 2025.
Spencer Horwitz had his second three-hit game in four days. Batting second between Springer and Vladimir Guerrero Jr., the lefty swinger’s three singles raised his batting average to .329. That would be tied for second in the majors if he had enough at-bats to qualify. His .454 on-base percentage would be tops in the game.
The 26-year-old infielder is doing no more than he was before the Jays called him up from Triple-A Buffalo on June 7. He hit .335 with a .456 OBP for the Bisons, about the same as his .337 and .450 down there last season. The consistency is remarkable, and so are the at-bats.
Horwitz saw 22 pitches in five at-bats Sunday, right in line with his average of 4.12 pitches per plate appearance, which would rank among the top 30 major-league qualifiers.
Each of his three hits Sunday came after an 0-and-2 count. There’s no panic, tremendous knowledge of the strike zone and a willingness to hit the ball where it’s pitched, as opposed to selling out for power in counts where that can work against him.
A 24th-round draft pick out of little Radford University in Virginia in 2019, Horwitz is now hitting .400 in at-bats that begin with an 0-and-2 count. Small sample alert, for sure, but it’s happened 23 times in 22 starts so far.
Contrast that with the rest of the hitters in the majors who have combined to hit .163 in such at-bats.
It’s much, much too early to put this kind of tag on him, but Horwitz has looked rather Olerudesque at the plate for the past couple of years. He has a career .413 on-base percentage across all levels of pro ball. And his path to big-league time has been hindered for the very same reason that John Olerud was eventually run out of Toronto: he’s not a big, huge slugger.
Horwitz has just seven home runs in the majors and minors combined this season, and his career high for any full year is just 12.
But now that Horwitz has added playing a passable second base to his resumé, he no longer has to worry about powering up and is free to be the kind of hitter he’s always been, which is an outstanding one.
One wonders where the Jays might be if it had been Horwitz and not Daniel Vogelbach getting big at-bats in May and early June.
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