TORONTO — Kyle Bradish turned 30 on Friday. He did not want to pitch.
Not against this lineup, not on this afternoon, not carrying a 7-14 record and nine consecutive starts without a win into Rogers Centre. The Baltimore right-hander loaded the bases in the first inning without allowing a run, escaped by the width of a strikeout, and then watched the entire plan collapse in the third when Alejandro Kirk and Brett Bateman both hit home runs off him in the same inning.
Kirk’s two-run shot came first, pushing Toronto in front 4-1. Bateman, a 24-year-old outfielder recalled from Triple-A in mid-August, followed with a solo blast that made the result official. Kirk had already driven in Vladimir Guerrero Jr. with an RBI double in the first. The birthday party belonged to Toronto.
The Blue Jays beat Baltimore 7-3 Friday, holding their position in the American League wild card race and offering the kind of emphatic afternoon a 74-75 club desperately needed. Toronto entered the game two games behind the Cleveland Guardians for the league’s final playoff spot. The win kept that gap from growing, even if it did not shrink it.
“We came out with the right approach,” Guerrero said after the game. He had demonstrated what that approach looked like in the first inning, scoring after Kirk’s RBI double into the left-center gap. It was the kind of at-bat that has defined Kirk’s September: a hitter who was never supposed to be carrying this club, carrying it.
According to ABC News, Kirk finished 2-for-4 with three RBI. Bradish threw 75 pitches over three innings, giving up five runs on eight hits before Baltimore pulled him ahead of the fourth. His ninth consecutive winless start extended through his 30th birthday.
Bateman’s homer in the third was his second career blast and his second in as many weeks, a development the Blue Jays did not anticipate when they marked him as organizational depth in the spring. He hit a Bradish pitch into the right-field seats at Rogers Centre and rounded the bases with the deliberate pace of a player who has stopped wondering whether he belongs.
Pete Alonso’s 35th home run of the season, a two-run shot off Paul Sewald in the seventh inning, gave Baltimore a pair of late runs and gave Alonso another chapter in a strong personal season spent on a team that has not matched him. The Orioles signed him in early August and he has hit consistently since. Baltimore fell to 72-77, their wild card elimination now a matter of arithmetic more than suspense.
Toronto’s history with this particular opponent offered some useful context heading into this series. The Blue Jays rallied from a 4-1 deficit to beat Baltimore 6-4 in June, climbing the AL East standings in the process. That was a different club at a different moment. This one is thinner, further from its rotation anchors, and still competing in September, which says something even if no one is quite sure what.
As EH’s coverage of the AL wild card race noted last week, Toronto holds the head-to-head tiebreaker over Cleveland after winning the season series. Five of the Blue Jays’ final 13 games are against the Guardians. Win that series, and Toronto closes September in control of a spot that was supposed to belong to a different kind of team.
What no one can answer is whether the pitching gets there. According to Yahoo Sports, Toronto has now won for the second time in six games, a run of form that does not inspire confidence even when individual results do. Miles has been used as a multi-inning opener this week because Toronto is managing a depleted rotation on a game-by-game basis. The starters who left in July were not replaced. What replaced them is a collection of arms surviving on execution, sometimes luck, and occasionally both at once.
The series concludes Saturday at Rogers Centre. Bradish celebrated his birthday in the visitors’ clubhouse with a final line that raised more questions than it answered. Kirk and Guerrero will be expected to show up again. Whether the Blue Jays’ September holds together or quietly unravels over the next 13 days remains the most interesting question in the American League.
