Blue Jays rout Yankees as quest to clinch a post-season berth continues

TORONTO — In the marathon that is a major league baseball season, we’ve entered the final sprint to the finish.

Over the course of six months — spanning three separate calendar seasons — teams play 162 games, but it’s often the last few that end up mattering the most.

That’s where we stand with the Toronto Blue Jays. Entering Friday’s game against the visiting New York Yankees, the Blue Jays were in possession of the top wild-card spot with 10 games remaining. But a lot can happen in 10 games.

Ten games could determine whether the Blue Jays will win the American League East division — unlikely — whether they’ll host or hit the road for the AL wild-card game or whether they’ll miss the post-season entirely. Each of these scenarios is possible. It could get crazy, these last 10 games.

But the first of those, which kicked off the Blue Jays final homestand of the regular season, went relatively smoothly as Toronto beat the visiting New York Yankees 9-0 on a Friday that felt like the first cool night at the Rogers Centre in ages.

The Blue Jays were returning home after their West Coast swing, where they went 4-3, including taking two out of three against the Seattle Mariners in what was technically a road series, yet felt like anything but because of the throngs of West Coast Jays fans that packed into Safeco Field.

But it was back to their actual field this evening, and on the mound, Blue Jays starter Francisco Liriano looked right at home. In his seventh start for the Blue Jays since being acquired on Aug. 1, he pitched six scoreless innings, giving up just three hits and recording six strikeouts. It’s the eighth straight game a Blue Jays starter has given up two earned runs of less.

“I’m just happy I was behind him tonight. I probably told him ‘wow’ about five times when he was done,” Devon Travis said of the veteran pitcher. “That guy, he’s got some awesome stuff. I told him, ‘that’s the Francisco Liriano I grew up watching.’ He really can change this ball club a lot for sure.”

The Blue Jays got on the board in the first when shortstop Troy Tulowitzki hit a two-out, bases-loaded single that drove in two runs. Toronto would make it 3-0 when Yankees starter Bryan Mitchell issued a bases-loaded walk, bringing Kevin Pillar across the plate.

But what seemed to be going in the direction of a nail-biter, turned into a rout for the Blue Jays in the seventh. With one out, the Yankees would intentionally walk Edwin Encarnacion to load the bases, only to have Jose Bautista come up next and whack a double to left field, driving in two more runs. Another Tulowitzki single would score Encarnacion and Bautista, and the Blue Jays would add another pair of runs in the eighth with a Josh Donaldson two-run shot for the 9-0 win.

The W is their 84th of the season, and gets them one step closer to wrapping up that wild-card berth (most projections peg 88 wins as the target to clinch a post-season berth).

“A lot of good things,” said manager John Gibbons when asked what he liked about the game. “This was a really well-played game.”

From here on out, it will be very tough to overtake the division-leading Boston Red Sox, winners of their last nine, but after their ghastly 6-12 start to September, the Blue Jays seemed to have halted that downward spiral of late, especially after Friday's offensive showcase.

“I mean it when I tell you that every day I walk into this clubhouse, I don’t know what happened the day before,” said Travis, who had two hits and scored two runs on Friday. “I think it’s the veterans that started it; they treat every single day like it’s another ball game, they bring that same intensity every single day and I think it’s something that I’m kind of just learning to take to and I treat every single day as a new one.”

One down. Nine more to go. In what is a long, grind of a season, this Blue Jays hope to have the legs to finish strong.

“Hopefully we can wake up the next nine mornings and score nine runs," Travis said. "It’d be pretty awesome.”