Blue Jays takeaways: Toronto needs more from its ace if the team is going to stay in the chase in AL East

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This article was published 01/07/2021 (1601 days ago), so information in it may no longer be current.

The view from Deep Left Field on the Blue Jays’ 7-2 loss to Seattle on Thursday:

It’s not often that the Blue Jays have been thoroughly dominated by a starting pitcher, but the big leagues’ second-most-prolific offence was stymied by Mariners left-hander Yusei Kikuchi in Buffalo.

Kikuchi was staked to a two-run lead before he even threw a pitch, and gave half of it back when Marcus Semien took him deep to lead off the bottom of the first inning, but that was it. He retired the next seven straight hitters on ground balls and gave up only four hits through the rest of his seven innings of work. He didn’t allow another Jay to get past first base until Teoscar Hernandez doubled leading off the seventh.

The 30-year-old Kikuchi kept hitters off-balance by feeding them a steady diet of cut fastballs, throwing that pitch more often than any other and inducing eight ground-ball outs with it. He added the occasional slider to great effect, only throwing the pitch nine times but getting four ground-ball outs from some very frustrated Jays hitters.

• Ryu gotta be better: It was another rough day at the office for Hyun-Jin Ryu, the lefty who is supposed to be the Blue Jays’ ace but who was badly outpitched by both Ross Stripling and Robbie Ray in the month of June.

Ryu posted a 4.88 ERA over five June starts, allowing fewer than three runs only once. He had a 2.62 ERA in April and May, giving up as many as three runs only twice in 10 starts.

The turn of the calendar didn’t reset whatever has been missing in Ryu’s game lately. He gave up hits to the first three batters, resulting in two Seattle runs, then allowed homers in the second and third innings — both times by left-handed batters — before leaving after four innings down 5-1.

It was his shortest start of the season, other than the outing in April in which he pulled a glute muscle and had to be removed with two out in the fourth.

When a historically good pitcher has an off-month or so, it’s often dismissed as just a bad stretch but, in the current environment, one naturally wonders about MLB’s crackdown on the use of “sticky stuff.” Ryu’s spin rate doesn’t point us there, though. The spin rate on his cutter and changeup actually improved from May to June, and while it dropped on his four-seam fastball, it was down by just six revolutions per minute, or 0.3 per cent.

The problem seems to be simply that Ryu is not getting hitters to chase pitches that are just off the plate, so he’s had to work from behind more often, and he’s been paying for it. That’s something that’s much easier to fix.

• A little too Chatty? Tyler Chatwood, who was brilliant for the first six weeks of the season, struggled again when he was brought in to work the top of the ninth inning with the Jays trailing 5-2.

The right-hander bounced back from some late-May ugliness with eight straight hitless appearances before giving up three runs to Baltimore on the weekend. That day, like this one, began with back-to-back walks to the first two hitters he faced.

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This time, Chatwood gave up a couple of RBI singles and struck out a pair, and it was after the second strikeout that manager Charlie Montoyo came out to get him, with two runners on, two out and two runs already in.

The cameras caught the 31-year-old yelling toward the dugout: “Hey, I’m good! I’m good! Let me finish!” to no avail. It was the second time we’ve seen Chatwood be demonstrative about getting removed from a game.

After the game, Montoyo explained that Chatwood had been dealing with a stiff neck for the past few days and was just yelling back to the dugout that his neck wasn’t bothering him and he was physically capable of staying out there to finish the inning.

Last month, Chatwood was visibly upset at being removed from the ninth inning of a game in which he had just issued a walk to load the bases with two out and the Jays up by one, so this looked familiar, but it’s certainly plausible that he was just letting the dugout know that his neck felt OK.

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