A more aggressive Biggio

Cavan with Friends

It’s been talked about before how the young Blue Jays fare against the American League West-leading Houston Astros — or any other playoff-bound team — can be used as a barometer of sorts.
The Blue Jays are a rebuilding club. The Astros are a contending club. Ergo, how the Blue Jays handle the test against one of the World Series favourites can shed some light on how close — or far away — they might be to becoming contenders themselves.


Of course, it’s not that simplistic. In small sample sizes, baseball is a random game filled with chance, human error and lucky bounces. Bad teams beat good teams all the time. A bad baseball team can still win 50 games. (In fact, the Blue Jays have won 55). A lot of those wins will come against teams that are better than they are.
How a young team such as Toronto competes against a more polished club can certainly be used as a measuring stick. But a win here and there isn’t much more than the laws of baseball at work and isn’t worth reading much into.
Case in point: The Blue Jays hardly put up their best all-around performance of the season Saturday and certainly the pitching on display wasn’t one that would instill a ton of confidence, albeit they were facing a tough lineup. And, yet, the Blue Jays topped the Astros 6-4 to level the three-game series at one game apiece. That’s baseball. Sometimes a team wins ugly.
Toronto pitchers gave up 10 free passes — nine walks and one hit-by-pitch — to one of the most potent offences in baseball that has a collective .842 OPS. Blue Jays starter Clay Buchholz, in only his second start since returning from the injured list with what the team called shoulder inflammation, put a runner on in each inning he pitched, including walking five. It took two relievers and 11 pitches to get one out to end the sixth inning. Derek Law walked in a run in the seventh. And, yet, off the back of a strong offensive performance from Cavan Biggio, the Blue Jays found a way to win, which was made at least a little easier thanks to closer Ken Giles, who struck out the side in a tidy ninth inning.

Afterward, Buchholz appeared genuinely mentally and physically exhausted from facing the Astros. Blue Jays manager Charlie Montoyo joked in his postgame news conference that the game aged him 10 years. Saturday’s win sure wasn’t pretty. That doesn’t mean the team wasn’t pleased with the outcome.
“I feel good when we compete against this team and that’s what we’re doing right now. Today was ugly, but we minimized damage and we won the game. That’s what I want, I want us to compete and see how far we are to get to that point where they are,” Montoyo said.
Buchholz was a master at minimizing damage on the afternoon. The 35-year-old right-hander escaped jams in each of the first, third, fourth and fifth innings with an inning-ending double-play ball. He worked around five walks, the most he’d given up since June 26, 2016, and gave up just two earned runs over 5 2/3 innings.
Buchholz’s command certainly wasn’t at its sharpest — he threw 83 pitches, 50 for strikes — but part of what makes the Astros so dangerous is they can be an aggressive team like they showed one night ago in a 7-4 win. But they can also be extremely patient at the plate, foul off pitches, work competitive at-bats and make opposing pitchers grind through their relentless lineup over and over and over again.

“I don’t walk people normally, I really don’t. But I would much rather walk a few of those guys than just give in and throw a fastball down the middle or hang a curveball,” Buchholz said. “It was mentally a draining game. I knew what I had to do going into it. I told (pitching coach) Pete (Walker) and (Danny Jansen) before the game like, ‘Hey, if we get in a position to where it’s a walk and go after the next guy, I’m 100 percent OK with doing that.’ That’s how we went about it.
“Jano did a really job calling the game back there tonight and, yeah, whoo, man — glad it’s over.”
When he needed to, Buchholz was able to draw on his 13 years of major-league experience and execute a pitch to try to get Houston batters off-balance. In his two starts since returning from the IL on Aug. 25 after missing more than three months of the season, Buchholz has a 3.09 ERA.
“Whenever my body is underneath me and I’m healthy I feel like I’m pretty good,” he said. “The velocity and everything it’s not where it was 10 years ago but I have other things that I can use now to my advantage in place of the velocity that I wish I would have known how to pitch back then like I know how to pitch now. That’s how it’s somewhat calming for me to be out there with runners on base because I know what I can do if all I have to do is execute a pitch. And when you have a major-league defence behind you that are going to make good plays behind you, it makes it that much easier.”

Much like Buchholz, the Blue Jays relievers were left to grind it out, too. Tim Mayza took over in the sixth inning with two outs and walked Yordan Alvarez, the only batter he faced. Law was up next. He gave up a two-run double to Yuli Gurriel before retiring Abraham Toro on a groundball. Over the next three innings, it would take four Toronto relievers to retire nine Astros batters. Law walked two. Rookie Jordan Romano walked one and hit a batter, before escaping a jam in the eighth inning by getting Aledmys Diaz to strike out on a foul tip.
Against his former team, however, Giles was near flawless in the ninth, retiring the top of the Astros lineup — George Springer, Jose Altuve and Alex Bregman — via a trio of strikeouts.
“(Nine) walks and a hit-by-pitch against probably the best lineup in baseball, one of them, and we find a way to minimize damage,” Montoyo said. “And Giles was great at the end there and, of course, Buchholz at the beginning was really good. So that’s all I got.”
But a game is more than pitching, and while the Astros certainly wasted their chances to put up runs, the Blue Jays did not. Biggio led the way for the offence, going 2-for-3 with a walk and three RBI.
Toronto put up three runs in the third inning. After Biggio and Vladimir Guerrero Jr. walked, Randal Grichuk hit an RBI single. Following that, Teoscar Hernandez hit his 21st home run of the season to put his team up 3-1. Biggio drove in the other three runs off a two-run home run in the fourth — his second homer in as many days — and an RBI double in the sixth that drove in Bo Bichette, who was 2-for-5 giving him his 16th multi-hit game, tied for third-most in any player’s first 30 games.
The big day was a little sweeter for Biggio considering it came against the team he grew up around thanks to his dad, Craig, who played in Houston for his entire 20-year Hall of Fame career.

“It’s pretty cool, honestly,” said Biggio, who had his dad and family in attendance Saturday. “But when we go out there and play, it doesn’t really matter who’s on the other side, what’s on the other uniform. At the end of the day, you got to go out there and compete.”
It’s been a turnaround for Biggio at the plate of late. Earlier this week, Montoyo chatted with Biggio about being more aggressive. Heading into this homestand, Biggio had been slumping. Since the All-Star break, he was hitting .176/.300/.294 with only eight extra-base hits.
 Laid out how the 24-year-old rookie’s performance at the plate had dipped, including a sinking hard-hit and contact rate. Biggio was also seeing far more first-pitch strikes, a tactic Biggio thinks opposing pitchers had used against him to combat his exceptional patience at the plate.
“I think I found myself over the past couple weeks being too passive on the first couple pitches and pitchers have taken advantage of it where they get ahead and my at-bats aren’t very productive and they’re pretty short,” he said after Saturday’s game.

Cavan with Dunedin

Added Montoyo: “He was being patient and walking, but now the league makes an adjustment on you. It knows you’re patient so they start throwing you more strikes and then you get in trouble cause now you’re hitting from behind. Now he’s seeing that people are throwing more strikes to him, so he’s more aggressive and the last three days, that’s what he’s doing, he’s swinging the bat. He’s not waiting for strikes, he’s being aggressive and it’s paying off.”
Biggio indeed said he has taken to the batter’s box with a more aggressive mindset lately. It’s paid off, albeit the sample size is small. He’s hit .462 (6-for-13) with five walks and two home runs over his last four games. On his two-run home run, Biggio hit a second-pitch changeup that was left in the middle of the zone 386 feet to right field. On his sixth-inning double, he fouled off two sliders in the zone during a seven-pitch at-bat before driving one he could hit.
“When I’m aggressive, my timing’s a lot better, and when my timing’s a lot better, I see the ball a lot better — so even though I’m being more aggressive, my plate discipline is still there, just because I’m seeing the ball that much longer,” he said.
However, for Biggio and the rest of the Blue Jays, a stiffer test will come Sunday against Justin Verlander, who will be on the mound for the Astros.