MINNEAPOLIS – The Blue Jays just got steamrolled by Royce.
All of the Blue Jays’ old ghosts wanted to haunt them in their 3-1 Game 1 loss to the Twins on Tuesday at Target Field, but it’s Royce Lewis they’ll see in their nightmares. Lewis launched two home runs, becoming just the third player in AL/NL history to do so in his first two career postseason at-bats, and he single-handedly brought the Blue Jays to the brink of heartbreak.
The Wild Card Series can be so sudden and cruel, but after 163 games, the Blue Jays must find a way to get around the problems that have kept them from competing in the American League East rather than securing the third and final AL Wild Card -Secure space. Lose on Wednesday and it’s another long winter of talking about a season that didn’t go past the last six.
“Tomorrow our backs are against the wall,” said Brandon Belt, one of the veterans this club will be watching over the next 24 hours. “We have to show up and play our best baseball of the year, but it’s definitely not impossible. I played a lot of elimination games and we got through a lot of them.”
The fact that the Blue Jays only scored one run should be your first clue that Kevin Gausman was on the mound. Toronto’s star struggled with terrible run support all season, averaging 3.2 runs during his time in the game, averaging the fifth-worst run support among qualified pitchers.
“We hit some balls hard. [Matt Chapman] “hits the ball further than Lewis and it gets caught,” Blue Jays manager John Schneider said. “It happens. … [Pablo López] threw the ball well. I thought we got used to him quite well. You give him credit. We hit some balls really hard even though they didn’t find a hole.”
However, there is no time to correct the luck of the hit ball. In May or June a team still has a whole life ahead of them. That’s gone now.
This offense isn’t designed to dig its way out of early holes, and López looked every bit the ace he was billed as, but the Blue Jays compounded their problems by falling into another old habit on the bases.
With two ons and two outs in the fourth, Kevin Kiermaier hacked a ball to left that slipped under the third baseman’s glove and rolled into no man’s land. As Bo Bichette approached third and it looked like it was going to be a bases-loaded situation, he looked back over his shoulder and decided to step on the gas.
Shortstop Carlos Correa ran up and threw Bichette home with a brilliant, fluid move. The Blue Jays have preached error-free baseball and better baserunning all season, which hasn’t always come with aggressive decisions like this. In retrospect, having the bases loaded with Chapman may have been this lineup’s best chance to get by.
“I thought it was worth the chance,” Bichette said. “I thought he had to make a big 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 problems over the years, and that continued in 2023, with seven runs and nine walks over just 10 innings against them. It’s a lineup that drove Gausman, in his words, “crazy,” and we saw more of it in the first innings as the Target Field crowd was all over him at every moment, loudly mocking his name.
The audience was a real factor. There’s a growl in the postseason, an urgency that the regular season simply can’t simulate. Twins fans flocked to the Blue Jays with the same enthusiasm they had cheered on their home team, and after Minnesota broke its 18-game postseason losing streak, manager Rocco Baldelli was in awe.
“I thought the place was going to crack and melt, honestly,” Baldelli said. “It was outside 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 many ways. You could see it just visually watching and seeing how the players reacted on the other side of the field.”
On Wednesday the crowd will be bigger, louder and hungrier. Minneapolis is craving postseason success and the Twins have the Blue Jays on the ropes with just nine innings left before their season ends.
There’s nothing complicated about it for the Blue Jays. Play your best baseball or go home.