One for the money

The Blue Jays have had the better lineup this series.

That’s not really a surprise, though.

While Seattle is a boom-bust operation that lives on the home run, Toronto is a high-contact team with one of the lowest whiff rates in baseball.

The surprise in this series has been Seattle’s lack of an edge when it comes to the starting pitching. 

For the past two years, we have agonized that this franchise is wasting a dominant starting rotation. What made this worse was that a dominant starting rotation was seen as the key to postseason success … if the Mariners could just get that far.

Well, the Mariners have gotten that far, and they’re getting outpitched by a Toronto rotation that includes:

• One 22-year-old who started the season in Single A (Trey Yesavage)

• One former Cy Young Award winner who only returned from Tommy John surgery in August (Shane Bieber)

• Another former Cy Young Award winner who hadn’t appeared in a game in something like a month (Max Scherzer)

If you’re into conventional pitching stats, here’s how the starters for both teams compare through the first six games:

If you like a little more analytically minded, focusing on the number of base-runners per inning and walk-strikeout ratio, here you go

Yesavage pitched into the sixth inning of Game 6, allowing two runs in Toronto’s 6-2 victory.

Logan Gilbert started for the second time this series, and while he made it into the fourth, he couldn’t get any further. The Blue Jays have scored eight runs in the seven innings he’s pitched in the series.

Luis Castillo couldn’t make it through the third inning in his start.

George Kirby probably shouldn’t have made it through the third either, but he was left in to give up eight runs in the four innings he pitched, unable to get an out in the fifth before he was replaced.

Now the Toronto Blue Jays have had quite a bit to do with this. Like the Mariners, the Blue Jays have some boppers in the lineup even with Bo Bichette out. Unlike the Mariners, they also make a lot of contact.

In the regular season, Toronto logged 1,099 strikeouts, second-fewest of any team in baseball. The Mariners finished with 1,446, fifth-most.

In the playoffs, Seattle has logged 120 strikeouts in 11 games, the Blue Jays 58 in 10.

The Mariners, as a staff, throw a ton of strikes. The Blue Jays, as a team, make a ton of contact.

But I was always told that good pitching beats good hitting especially in the playoffs, which has left me wondering if this Mariners pitching is as good as we thought.

Unless of course, Kirby goes out and throws a masterpiece in Game 7 in which case I will fully point to the fact that when it mattered most, the Mariners starting pitcher is the one who made the difference.

🏈 Whispers about Washington 🏈 

The boxscore will say that Washington lost its game at Michigan because the Huskies were outscored 17-0 in the second half.

I believe the Huskies lost their game at Michigan because Washington scored just once in the first half despite driving into the Wolverines half of the field on each of their four possessions in the first two quarters.

As Washington fell behind, the Huskies had to throw and sophomore quarterback Demond Williams wound up getting picked off three times. I’m not going to try and determine Williams’ degree of responsibility on each of those three turnovers, but that sort of thing is going to happen if you keep playing from behind as Washington has for the past three games.

Now, I’m going to veer off into the journalistic weeds.

In two of the past three weeks, ESPN’s Pete Thamel has provided updates on the availability of Washington players prior to kickoff.

On Saturday, Oct. 4, Thamel reported that CB Tacario Davis, DE Zach Durfee and LT Carver Willis would all be out at Maryland.

This past Saturday, Thamel reported that Durfee and LB Jacob Manu would both be playing at Michigan.

In both cases, UW coach Jedd Fisch had been kind of cagy about availability in the week leading up to the game. He hadn’t provided any concrete information about their availability.

In both cases, Thamel’s updates were delivered in advance of any in-stadium announcement regarding availability and were 100 percent correct.

Now I have a lot of thoughts about how these relationships are built, the complications that can come from them and what it means in the bigger picture of a coach’s ambition and trajectory.

There’s no need to go into any of that right now. I’ll just note that Thamel appears to have a line to reliable information that the Huskies coach has kept an otherwise tight lid on. I think that’s interesting as we enter a period where I believe that Fisch’s name could be mentioned in connection to any number of jobs.

🩻 Yeah, that hurt 🩻 

Every fan base has members who are capable of poor behavior.

Fans are more susceptible to behaving poorly in emotionally charged moments.

They are especially prone to poor behavior when in a group setting.

I say this not to explain away the audibly unsympathetic reaction I heard from some members of the Seattle crowd after George Springer was hit by a pitch on Friday. I’m trying to provide a better framework for discussing it so we can get past shouting about how bad Seattle’s fans are or yelling about how Springer deserved it by virtue of his involvement with the Astros when they were using an in-stadium video feed to steal signs.

Springer was hit.

Springer was hurt.

Some portion of the crowd reacted in a way that would cause you to include they not concerned over his well-being.

It wasn’t everyone in the crowd, but it was enough to hear and Toronto manager John Schneider pointed it out after the game:

Now there weren’t 40,000 people booing Springer or cheering his injury, but other than that, I agree with Schneider’s assessment.

Booing an injured player or cheering his injury is exceptionally poor form. It shows a lack of basic respect and compassion for another human who — for whatever has happened previously — is in pain.

It happens, though. It happened in Toronto in 2019 when Kevin Durant suffered a torn Achilles tendon during Game 5 of the NBA Finals. It happened in Seattle in the 2013 NFC Championship Game when someone dumped popcorn onto San Francisco linebacker Navorro Bowman as he was being taken off the field after a devastating knee injury.

We tend to think that only other cities have truly awful fans. That the 49ers fans are the worst or the Yankees fans or (in my personal opinion) Oregon Ducks fans.

The reality: every team has fans who are capable of behaving poorly. In fact, we all are capable of behaving poorly, and that is especially true in heightened emotional moments.

We’re also able to take stock of our behavior and deciding whether that is behavior we will practice or endorse in the future.

I will now step down off my soapbox.