Five runs before an out in the second
Baltimore won 7-4 in Toronto overnight and the damage was done almost entirely inside one inning. Gunnar Henderson, Samuel Basallo and Christian Encarnacion-Strand opened the second with three straight singles. Heston Kjerstad drove one in, Colton Cowser doubled home two, Dylan Beavers singled home two more. Five runs, nobody out, Max Scherzer still on the mound.
Beavers had already opened the night with a home run off Scherzer’s second pitch, an 0-1 cutter driven to right. Three runs driven in before the fifth inning, from the leadoff spot.
Scherzer lasted five innings and allowed six of the seven runs on seven hits. He falls to 2-8. That record belongs to a pitcher with three Cy Young Awards, which says plenty about where Toronto’s rotation has arrived in September.
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One game back, five meetings left
The win moved the Orioles to 72-76 and dropped the Blue Jays to 73-75. A single game separates them in the race for the third American League wild card, and neither of them currently holds it. Cleveland does.
The season series sits at 4-4 with five games still to play between the two, and those games count twice over: the result itself, and the tiebreaker that goes to whoever takes the series if Baltimore and Toronto finish level. Few September schedules hand two rivals that much direct control over the same playoff slot.
Chris Bassitt, a former Blue Jay himself, went five-plus innings for two runs on six hits and three walks with five strikeouts. He needed help in the first and got it from his catcher, Basallo picking Vladimir Guerrero Jr. off first base for the second out of an inning Toronto had loaded.
Toronto’s answers arrived too late
Kazuma Okamoto homered leading off the fourth and doubled in the sixth, the second of those setting up the run Andres Gimenez grounded in. Coby Mayo then took Braydon Fisher’s 1-2 slider out to left with two outs in the seventh, restoring the cushion Baltimore had just given back.
Brett Bateman made the ninth awkward with the first home run of his major league career, a two-run shot off Alex Hoppe, and two singles followed it. Rico Garcia needed one out and got it for his eighth save.
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