Yesavage dominates M’s as Jays force Game 7

TORONTO — Trey Yesavage had just finished his bullpen session in Seattle on Thursday, his final tuneup before taking the ball and helping extend the Toronto Blue Jays‘ season with a 6-2 win in Game 6 of the American League Championship Series on Sunday, when he asked Chris Bassitt and Kevin Gausman, two veteran starters with 24 major-league seasons between them, what was the furthest they’ve ever advanced in the postseason.

«This is as far as I’ve gone,» the 34-year-old Gausman, a 13-year veteran, told the rookie. «You don’t get these opportunities very often.»

The conversation left a mark on Yesavage as he prepared for his sixth career start — all since making his debut on Sept. 15 — with the Blue Jays’ season riding on his right arm. And he made sure to give the Blue Jays a chance to advance further by limiting the Seattle Mariners, sloppy and wasteful with the chance to put the Blue Jays away, to two runs across 5⅔ innings with help from three consecutive inning-ending double plays at a raucous Rogers Centre.

«This was the most electric, energized crowd I’ve ever played in front of before,» said Yesavage, who struck out seven and walked three. «And the team rallied behind the fans. They were a huge motivation for us.»

Toronto outplayed the Mariners in every facet on Sunday. Perhaps the best defense in baseball, the Blue Jays played mistake-free defense while the Mariners committed three errors. They ran the bases intelligently while the Mariners failed to snatch every 90-foot advancement available. They delivered when scoring opportunities arose.

With the execution, the Blue Jays forced a Game 7 on Monday night. It’ll be Toronto’s first Game 7 in 40 years and Seattle’s first Game 7 in franchise history. The Blue Jays, after dropping two games at home to begin this season, will play for their first American League pennant since 1993. The Mariners seek their first pennant in franchise history. The winner will face the Los Angeles Dodgers in the World Series.

«My emotional state has been a fricking mess for months, man, to be honest with you,» Blue Jays manager John Schneider said. «I’m just calling it what it is. This is fun. I wish we were playing right now.»

The Mariners’ first two defensive miscues moments apart in the second inning helped dig a two-run hole. First, Julio Rodríguez failed to cleanly track down a single from Daulton Varsho to the left-center field gap, allowing Varsho to take second base. The next batter, Ernie Clement, laced a groundball to third baseman Eugenio Suárez, who smoothly gloved it but lost the ball on the transfer to throw.

Addison Barger and Isiah Kiner-Falefa immediately capitalized with consecutive RBI singles to open the scoring against Mariners right-hander Logan Gilbert. An inning later, after Clement drove a two-out triple off the top of the wall in right field, Barger cracked a two-run home run to double Toronto’s lead. Barger, the Blue Jays’ right fielder, has hit safely in four straight games and has reached base safely in seven of his eight starts after beginning the season as Triple-A Buffalo’s starting shortstop.

«It felt awesome,» Barger said. «Obviously, that’s a moment you dream about as a kid and everything. Yeah, Gilbert’s, he’s disgusting. He has a great arm. I think [he] just left that slider a little too middle and [I] got extended on it and that was it.»

On the other side, the Mariners ran traffic on the bases against Yesavage, but unfathomably encountered the same abrupt rally killer for three straight innings. The misfortune began when Cal Raleigh, the possible AL MVP with four postseason home runs, hit into a 3-6-1 double play on a splitter with the bases loaded in the third inning to extinguish the first danger Yesavage faced. Raleigh finished 0 for 4 with three strikeouts.

In the fourth, Crawford, again with the bases loaded and on a splitter from Yesavage, grounded into a 4-6-3 double play as the Mariners became the first team ever to ground into double plays with the bases loaded in two straight innings in a postseason game since it became an official statistic in 1940, according to Elias.

«In that moment, to make pitches, to get over and cover first and not screw it up, to settle himself down, I think that shows exactly who he is and what we think he is,» Schneider said.

Finally, with runners on first and second in the fifth, Rodríguez completed the trifecta, grounding into a 6-4-3 double play that left the Mariners stunned and the crowd jacked by Yesavage’s successful highwire acts in succession after not inducing a groundball double play in his big-league career before Sunday.

«We did have some opportunities to score, and we did get some base runners on,» Mariners manager Dan Wilson said. «But you give a little credit to Yesavage. The secondaries that he had tonight were good. It kept us off stride and kept the ball on the ground for those double plays.»

Vladimir Guerrero Jr. then continued his October assault in the bottom half of the inning with a leadoff home run to chase Gilbert from the game. The homer was Guerrero’s sixth of the postseason, tying him with José Bautista and Joe Carter for the franchise record for most career postseason home runs.

He finished off the night’s scoring by wreaking havoc on the bases: After getting hit by a pitch with one out in the seventh inning, Guerrero advanced to second base on a single from Alejandro Kirk, took third on a wild pitch and jogged home when Raleigh’s throw to third base bounced past Suárez into left field.

«A run is a run,» Guerrero said in Spanish. «We had to score as many as possible, however we could.»

The Mariners broke through with two outs in the sixth inning. Josh Naylor, an Ontario native, swatted his third home run of the series for Seattle’s first run. Randy Arozarena followed with a single that knocked Yesavage out of the game with 87 pitches. Suarez then welcomed reliever Louis Varland by dropping a bloop double down the right-field line to score Arozarena from first base.

But that was all Seattle’s offense, a unit that heavily relies on the home run and didn’t hit any on Sunday, could muster. From there, Varland and Jeff Hoffman held Seattle scoreless over the final 3⅓ innings to finish off what the Blue Jays’ 22-year-old rookie started.

Yesavage’s postseason career began with a gem: 5 ⅔ no-hit innings with 11 strikeouts and no walks in Game 2 of the AL Division Series against the New York Yankees. His second start was not nearly the same.

It had been six days since the Mariners scored five runs in four innings against Yesavage in Game 2, handing the 2024 first-round pick his first adversity at the highest level. For Gausman, a fellow splitter-heavy right-hander, Yesavage’s outing came down to one mistake splitter that Rodríguez swatted down the left-field line for a three-run home run in the first inning.

On Sunday, Yesavage threw the splitter — his signature pitch — 31 times and got 10 whiffs. He used it to wiggle out of the game’s biggest jams with a composure not expected from someone who began his season by walking six batters in Low-A. Six-plus months later, those pitches helped keep Toronto’s season alive and a deeper run possible.

«His confidence for 22 is — I couldn’t make that start when I was 22,» Gausman said. «I’ll be honest with you.»