The Toronto Blue Jays’ “Mad Max” had nearly a month to fume, seethe and boil as he waited for his post-season opportunity in the MLB. Finally given the ball in the playoffs on Thursday, he shut down the Seattle Mariners — and his own manager, too.
A fiery Max Scherzer turned back the clock with a vintage pitching performance, while Andres Gimenez homered and drove in four runs as the Blue Jays beat the Mariners 8-2 to even the American League Championship Series at 2-2.
The 41-year-old Scherzer, left off the Division Series roster against the New York Yankees while dealing with neck pain, showed he still had plenty left in the tank by allowing two runs in 5-2/3 innings.
Photo: EPA
“This is what you play for,” Scherzer said. “You work so hard the whole year, make all the sacrifices, put all the work in to get to this moment to have these types of moments to be able to win in the post-season.”
Vladimir Guerrero Jr hit his fifth playoff homer for the Blue Jays, who have outscored the Mariners 21-6 in Seattle after losing the first two games at home.
Scherzer earned his eighth post-season win and first since the 2019 World Series for the Washington Nationals against the Houston Astros. Making his 500th major-league start, regular season and post-season combined, he became the oldest pitcher to start a post-season game since Jamie Moyer was 45 with the Philadelphia Phillies in the 2008 World Series.
Photo: Kevin Ng / Imagn Images
Moyer, who spent 11 years with the Mariners from 1996 to 2006, threw out the ceremonial first pitch on Thursday.
Scherzer yielded three hits, one of which was a solo home run by Josh Naylor in the second inning, but the veteran right-hander settled in from there, even picking a runner off at first base for the first time since 2013, and was not removed until manager John Schneider’s second mound visit.
With two outs in the fifth, Schneider approached Scherzer on the field and the three-time Cy Young Award winner told his skipper — in no uncertain terms — he had no interest in coming out of the game at that point.
Photo: AFP
“I thought he was going to kill me. It was great. He locked eyes with me, both colors, as I walked out,” Schneider said with a smile. “He has this Mad Max persona, but he backed it up tonight.”
Scherzer said he was busy thinking about the sequence of pitches he wanted to throw to Randy Arozarena.
“And all of a sudden I see Schneids coming out and it kind of caught me off guard,” Scherzer said.
Photo: AFP
“That’s just one of those moments where I know I wanted the ball. I knew the situation of the game. I wanted the ball and I basically told him that in a little bit different language,” he added.
Schneider left Scherzer in and the eight-time All-Star promptly struck out Arozarena swinging at a curveball.
“When a Hall of Famer like this tells you he’s good, you ought to leave him in the game,” Guerrero said. “And he showed he’s good.”
It was one of five strikeouts for Scherzer, who pounded his glove in excitement.
“I tried to stay away from him,” teammate George Springer said. “You don’t really want to get in Max’s way, so you kind of just let Max be Max. It was entertaining, for sure.”
“I’ve been waiting for that all year, for Max to yell at me on the mound,” Schneider said. “I think at that point there’s numbers, there’s projections, there’s strategy and there’s people. So I was trusting people.”
The Blue Jays’ offense picked up where it left off after scoring 13 runs in Game 3. Gimenez hit a two-run homer in the third inning for the second consecutive day, this one off starter Luis Castillo to give Toronto a lead they did not relinquish.
The Blue Jays tacked on another run in the inning when reliever Gabe Speier walked in a run.
Toronto added to their advantage in the fourth on an RBI double from Springer, who came around to score on a wild pitch by Matt Brash. Guerrero, who singled earlier in the game, smacked an opposite-field homer to right in the seventh off Eduard Bazardo.
Gimenez provided more insurance in the eighth inning with a two-run single up the middle that deflected off reliever Emerson Hancock’s glove.
TIGHT GAME: The Detroit Pistons, the NBA’s second-best team, barely outlasted the Washington Wizards, who fell to an NBA-worst 1-10 with their ninth consecutive loss Cade Cunningham’s triple double, Daniss Jenkins’ three-pointer at the buzzer and Javonte Green’s overtime dunk lifted Detroit past Washington 137-135 on Monday, stretching the Pistons’ win streak to seven games. In an unexpected thriller, the NBA’s second-best team barely outlasted a Wizards club that fell to an NBA-worst 1-10 with their ninth consecutive loss. “We knew how big this game was for us,” Jenkins said. “We wasn’t going to let nothing stop us from getting this W.” Cunningham made 14-of-45 shots and 16-of-18 free throws for a career-high 46 points, and added 12 rebounds, 11 assists, five steals and two
With a hat-trick on Wednesday, Victor Osimhen moved atop the UEFA Champions League scoring table, with the Nigeria striker netting all three goals in Galatasaray’s 3-0 victory over Ajax in Amsterdam. Osimhen moved to six goals this season in Europe’s elite club competition, one more than Harry Kane, Kylian Mbappe and Erling Haaland. The Istanbul club signed Osimhen to a permanent deal from SSC Napoli in the summer for a record transfer fee in the Turkish League reportedly worth US$86 million. The 26-year-old striker needed less than 20 minutes to complete his first hat-trick in the competition. He headed in the opener in the
LIKE FINE WINE: Thirty-eight-year-old Djokovic won his 101st title of his career in Athens, becoming the oldest tournament winner since Ken Roswell, 44, in 1977 Elena Rybakina on Saturday clinched her biggest title since Wimbledon in 2022, defeating world No. 1 Aryna Sabalenka 6-3, 7-6 (7/0) at the WTA Finals in Riyadh. The world No. 6 put on yet another serving masterclass and was at her returning best as she became the first Kazakh and the first player representing an Asian country to lift the WTA Finals singles trophy. Having gone 3-0 in round-robin play, Rybakina earned a record US$5.235 million and would finish the year ranked No. 5 in the world. “It’s been an incredible week, I honestly didn’t expect any result, and to go so far,
An amateur soccer league organized by farmers, students and factory workers in rural China has unexpectedly drawn millions of fans and inspired big cities to form their own, raising hopes China can grow talent from the ground up and finally become a global force. The nation of 1.4 billion people has about 200 million soccer fans, more than any other country, but it has failed to build world-class teams, partly due to a top-down approach where clubs pick players from a very small pool of prescreened candidates. The professional game is marred by a history of fixed matches, corruption, and dismal performances,
RSS