Blue Jays can't back Gausman, pushed to brink by Twins

MINNEAPOLIS -- The Blue Jays just got rolled by Royce.

All of the Blue Jays’ old ghosts were out to haunt them in their Game 1 loss to the Twins, 3-1, at Target Field on Tuesday, but it’s Royce Lewis they’ll be seeing in their nightmares. Lewis launched two home runs, becoming just the third player in AL/NL history to do that in his first two career postseason at-bats, and he has single-handedly put the Blue Jays on the brink of heartbreak.

The Wild Card Series can be so sudden and cruel, but 163 games in, the Blue Jays need to find a way around the issues that kept them from taking a run at the American League East instead of the third and final AL Wild Card spot. Lose Wednesday, and it’s another long winter spent talking about a season that went no further than the last six.

“Our back is against the wall tomorrow,” said Brandon Belt, one of the veterans this club will look to over the next 24 hours. “We’ve got to show up and play our best baseball of the year, but it’s definitely not impossible. I’ve played a lot of elimination games, and we’ve come through in a lot of them.”

The Blue Jays scoring just one run should be your first hint that Kevin Gausman was on the mound. Toronto’s ace has dealt with dreadful run support all season, receiving the fifth-worst run support among qualified pitchers while he was in the game, averaging 3.2 runs.

“We hit some balls hard. [Matt Chapman] hits the ball farther than Lewis and it's caught,” Blue Jays manager John Schneider said. “It happens. … [Pablo López] threw the ball well. I thought that we adjusted pretty well along with him. You give him credit. We hit some balls really hard that didn't find any holes.”

There’s no time for batted-ball luck to correct, though. In May or June, there’s still a whole life in front of a team. That’s gone now.

This offense isn’t built to dig itself out of early holes, and López looked every bit of the ace he was billed as, but the Blue Jays compounded their problems by falling into another old habit on the bases.

With two on and two outs in the fourth, Kevin Kiermaier chopped a ball to the left side that slipped under the third baseman’s glove and rolled into no-man’s land. As Bo Bichette neared third for what looked like it would be a bases-loaded situation, he peeked back over his shoulder and decided to punch the gas.

Shortstop Carlos Correa scampered over and in one brilliant, fluid motion threw Bichette out at home. The Blue Jays have preached mistake-free baseball and better baserunning all season, which hasn’t always gone hand in hand with aggressive decisions like this. Looking back, having the bases loaded with Chapman coming up might have been this lineup’s best shot at breaking through.

“I thought it was worth the chance,” said Bichette. “I thought he would have to make a great play to get me out, and he did.”

Gausman didn’t help himself much, either. The Twins have been a rare team to give Gausman trouble over the years, and that carried into 2023 with seven runs and nine walks over just 10 innings against them. It’s a lineup that had driven Gausman “crazy,” in his words, and we saw more of that in the early innings, the Target Field crowd on top of him at every moment and loudly taunting his name.

The crowd was a real factor. There’s a growl to a postseason crowd, an urgency that the regular season just can’t simulate. Twins fans piled onto the Blue Jays with the same fervor they cheered on their home team with, and after Minnesota broke its 18-game postseason losing streak, manager Rocco Baldelli was in awe.

“I thought the place was going to split open and melt, like honestly,” Baldelli said. “It was out of this universe out there on the field. The fans took over the game. They helped us win today. They helped us win the game, and they helped us in so many ways out there. You could see it, if you were just visually watching and seeing how the players were reacting on the other side of the field.”
Wednesday’s crowd will be bigger, louder and hungrier. Minneapolis is starved for postseason success and the Twins have the Blue Jays on the ropes, just nine innings away from ending their season.

There’s nothing complicated about this for the Blue Jays. Play their best baseball, or go home.