Blue Jays takeaways: Monster comeback stuns A’s for biggest win of the season

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This article was published 03/09/2021 (1511 days ago), so information in it may no longer be current.

The view from Deep Left Field on the Blue Jays’ 11-10 win over the Oakland A’s on Friday night at the Rogers Centre:

It certainly didn’t seem as though the Blue Jays were going to take a step in the right direction in the opener of a pivotal weekend series with Oakland, but they turned a slow start into a “holy crap” finish.

In their last shot at one of the teams they’re chasing for the final playoff spot in the American League, the Jays found themselves in a six-run hole going into the bottom of the eighth inning.

Starter Alek Manoah got dinged for a pair of two-run doubles, and the last pitch he threw was sent over the right-field wall by the light-hitting Tony Kemp. Meanwhile, the scuffling Jays offence had been almost completely shut down by Sean Manaea.

Teoscar Hernández’s two-run homer in the fourth was the only damage against the Oakland lefty, who dragged a 9.90 August ERA into his first start of September.

Manaea was done after seven, but things didn’t look much sunnier in the eighth with two out and a runner on second as Vladimir Guerrero Jr. came to the plate.

But Vladdy singled — his third hit of the game — to score a run, then Bo Bichette was hit by a curveball and Hernández walked to load the bases for Alejandro Kirk, who walked on a 3-and-2 pitch to force in another run.

Up stepped Lourdes Gurriel Jr. and seconds later the game was tied. Gurriel turned on a first-pitch cutter from Yusmeiro Petit and hammered it into the back of the 100 level in left, a 421-foot no-doubt grand slam that would have blown the lid off the joint if it hadn’t already been pulled back on a cool summer night.

It was Gurriel’s third slam of the season, tying the club record shared by Carlos Delgado (1997), Edwin Encarnación (2015) and Darrin Fletcher (2000).

That euphoria didn’t last long, as Mark Canha’s two-out, two-run homer off Jordan Romano in the ninth — the first runs Romano had allowed in a dozen appearances — gave the visitors a two-run lead to take to the bottom of the ninth.

But then Breyvic Valera led off with a bloop single to left, George Springer followed with a double and the tying runs were on base with nobody out.

Marcus Semien was next, coming to the plate against the team he’d spent the last six years with, the one that didn’t even give him an offer to return as he entered free agency. He fouled off a 2-and-2 slider, then got a two-seam fastball — right down the middle of the plate — and 370 feet down the left-field line later the game was over.

A team that hadn’t been able to score for the last three weeks scored nine runs over the final two innings to pick up their biggest win of the season so far, and all of a sudden things are looking up again.

• Pearson checks in: Nate Pearson made his much-anticipated return to major-league action in the seventh inning, coming in with the Jays down 6-2.

The hope is that the big righty can be a dominant, hard-throwing, high-leverage relief option down the stretch, duplicating the success he had in the bullpen in one late-season and one playoff outing last year, when he gave up one hit while notching 11 outs.

The thought was that he’d be able to step right into the fray as a reliever, sort of the way Aaron Sanchez did the last two months of 2014. A big arm with intimidating strikeout stuff to give the back end a boost it could really use.

The first outing didn’t go so well.

Not that Pearson was bad. It was more that he was unlucky, and he didn’t get much help.

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The 25-year-old faced six hitters in his first big-league outing in nearly four months, and gave up one hard-hit line drive. It was caught in centre field by Randal Grichuk.

There were four ground balls. The first was bobbled by Bichette for an error, two more got through the infield for singles and the last one was fielded cleanly by Kevin Smith at third and turned into an inning-ending double-play. There was a duck snort to shallow right that doinked in just in front of a sliding Hernández.

Pearson deserved better, though he did only throw a first-pitch strike to three of the six hitters he faced.

As a starter, it often took Pearson a few innings to really pop the radar gun, but it seems he’s figured out how to get it going right away as a reliever. His first delivery was a fastball clocked at 99.6 miles per hour.

Mike Wilner is a Toronto-based baseball columnist for the Star and host of the baseball podcast “Deep Left Field.” Follow him on Twitter: @wilnerness