The Blue Jays’ Alek Manoah chases away the doubters while shutting out the Yankees in his big-league debut

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This article was published 27/05/2021 (1632 days ago), so information in it may no longer be current.

It took all of two batters for Alek Manoah to prove he wasn’t going to be intimidated by Yankee Stadium or the Bronx Bombers.

Manoah’s highly anticipated major-league debut ended with a 2-0 victory over New York, but long before the celebrations began the promising right-hander got off to an inauspicious start with a four-pitch walk. One offering to former Blue Jays free-agent target D.J. LeMahieu missed badly, the other three were just off the plate. Manoah didn’t get the call from umpire Sean Barber on any of them.

For a moment, one was able to envision how it might all unravel. Inexperienced minor-leaguers swing through those pitches, patient big-leaguers take them and wait for something better. Maybe this big-league stage was going to be too much, too soon, for the 23-year-old prospect. With just 35 innings on his professional baseball resumé, perhaps the Jays jumped the gun by promoting him so early.

At least some people who have been watching Jays games lately probably thought, “Uh oh, here we go again,” and who could blame them? Nate Pearson’s return earlier this month was marred by command problems. The bullpen is coming off a week in which they walked everyone in sight. Not even two months into the year, the Jays had gone through 12 starters. Pitching has been an issue for awhile.

The early doubts soon proved to be misplaced because Manoah centred himself and bounced back to strikeout Rougned Odor on three pitches. A strikeout of Aaron Judge soon followed, one that included the Yankees slugger falling to his knees on a pitch and swinging through another about a minute too late. After a weak fly ball to centre by Gleyber Torres, Manoah had a scoreless inning in the books and walks weren’t an issue for the rest of the game.

Manoah threw 60 of his 88 pitches for strikes across six scoreless innings. The 11th overall pick of the 2019 MLB draft scattered two hits while striking out seven in rather dominating fashion. After bypassing Class-A Dunedin and Double-A New Hampshire entirely, Triple-A Buffalo was deemed too easy for Manoah. His one outing against big-leaguers was more of the same.

“I think those first four pitches were the most nervous, or most excitement, I had all day,” Manoah said after earning the victory in Game 1 of the doubleheader against New York. “Then after those four, it was just like, ‘I don’t want to suck. Let’s lock it in right here and let’s start pitching. Forget everything else, we have to pitch.’ I locked it in with Bo (Bichette), made sure I knew who we had with the double play, and just got into the rhythm of playing baseball and forgetting everything else.”

The most impressive part about Manoah’s debut was his ability to effectively use four pitches: four-seam fastball, sinker, slider and changeup. The deep arsenal shows how far Manoah has come in less than two years; when he was plucked out of West Virginia University, the scouting reports suggested he had an overpowering fastball but needed to improve his slider and add another pitch.

Manoah spent last season at the Jays’ alternate training site, so it was impossible for those on the outside to gauge his progress. There were positive signs during a brief look in spring training, even more during an equally short stint at Triple-A, but it wasn’t until Wednesday night that the world got to see what the club had been banking on for several weeks, that his secondary offerings were good enough to get big-league hitters out.

The first-inning strikeout to Odor came on a 90-mph changeup that moved down and away from the left-handed hitter. Judge looked foolish during his final swing in the first because he was sitting on a slider, which was tossed three times earlier in the at-bat. Instead, he got overpowered by a 97-mph four-seamer. By the time Manoah’s outing was over, he threw 39 off-speed pitches and got strikeouts on four of them.

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So much for that reputation of being a hard thrower and nothing else. Manoah might not be a pinpoint command guy at this stage of his career, but he can do a lot more than just blow guys away. No wonder the hitters in Triple-A looked overwhelmed.

“When I can get that heater ahead in counts, that just opens the door for everything,” said Manoah, who tied for the third-most strikeouts by a Jays starter in his debut. “Sliders, changeups, just forcing them to kind of try to cheat to that will open the door for everything. I was able to do that and just throw a ton of strikes. That was the biggest thing.”

Manoah is just getting started and not every outing with go this smooth — there’s still development left to be done — but Wednesday’s outing showed his stuff plays at this level and he’s not scared of the spotlight. That he was able to handle the nerves at Yankee Stadium is even more telling because it’s a place few teams choose to unveil a rookie, and the ones that do tend to fail.

The last rookie starter to make his debut in The Bronx was Blake Snell in 2016. Since the new Yankee Stadium opened in 2009, only five starters have made their debuts there. New York was undefeated in those games, with the opposing starters combining to go to go 0-4 with a 6.66 ERA.

There were a lot of people in the media and within the fan base who questioned the Jays’ decision to promote Manoah after such a brief stint in the minors. After getting to watch him with their own eyes instead of reading a boxscore or short recap, that group probably got a whole lot smaller.