Vladimir Guerrero Jr. is sprayed with Gatorade after defeating the New York Yankees on Saturday.Nathan Denette/The Canadian Press
The Toronto Blue Jays won’t begin paying Vladimir Guerrero Jr. his half-billion dollars until next year, but he started earning it on Saturday. First thing on his to-do list – transform himself from Yankee irritant to “Yankee killer.”
Throughout September, the team’s biggest name was so marginal a figure that you’d have to check his punch card to be sure he’d shown up for work. Only two home runs, and none since the first week of the month.
It wasn’t just the numbers. It was how Guerrero looked – tired, and out of sorts. The Jays said he was feeling fine. A day before the playoffs began, Guerrero was keeping it mysterious, saying the team had to win “regardless of how I feel.”
That’s the sort of thing I say when I’m getting ready to call out sick on a Friday.
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In response, most of Toronto’s pre-game chatter avoided him. Players and the manager wanted to talk about how great George Springer was playing, or how Kevin Gausman is a Buddhist monk in cleats. In the hours before Game 1 started, the focus shifted to rookie pitcher Trey Yesavage, who will start Game 2.
There’s only two ways that’s going to go over – bold genius or desperate boner – and which it is depends entirely on the game’s outcome. Guerrero was a peripheral talking point. Nobody wanted to jinx the guy.
When he came to bat in the first inning, the Rogers Centre was in a nervy state. They’d spent the top of the first inning cheering every Yankee out like it was the last.
“It was so loud,” Gausman said. “It was crazy.”
It was a lot of noise, but you didn’t get the sense that it was born of extreme confidence. More the opposite thing.
Then Guerrero, who has spent a month looking like he’s swinging at soap bubbles, planted a ball into the stands behind the left-field bullpen. And that was his second most impressive play to start the game.
Guerrero Jr. reacts after hitting a single during the second inning.Nathan Denette/The Canadian Press
Nobody expects Guerrero to be a great first baseman, as long as he’s not a colander. In the second, the Yankees got a hitter on base – the disruptive Jazz Chisholm. The next man up, Ryan McMahon, cracked his bat in half hitting a ropey line drive in Guerrero’s direction.
The barrel of the bat was twirling so unpredictably toward first that the umpire fled his position. Guerrero lasered in on the ball, jumping to his right, catching the fly and then springing up to tag the base. An unassisted double play – you don’t see many of those by men Guerrero’s size.
There was a lot of game to go, but after those two plays, the building relaxed. This wasn’t going to be one of those post-season pile-ups the Jays had become famous for.
In the end, Toronto annihilated New York 10-1. The Yankees are in it up to their chin now.
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Saturday’s game marked the first Jays-Yankees postseason match.Mark Blinch/Getty Images
There were plenty of back pats to go around. Gausman pitched six, largely error free innings. Most importantly, he struck out Aaron Judge with the bases loaded. If the Jays win this series, that was the other moment they started to do so.
Judge has been good in the post-season, just not Aaron-Judge-type good. Now the Yankees are worrying about when – or if – he will impose himself on this series.
Alejandro Kirk hit two more home runs. That’s five in his last three games. At this rate, he will surpass Mickey Mantle in a couple of weeks.
The back half of the order was unstoppable. The bullpen was rock solid. Even Anthony Santander appeared to be awake.
Everything that could go right did, but all of it flowed from Guerrero’s autumn renaissance. When he has his mojo, so do the Jays.
Afterward, reporters tried to coax Guerrero into kicking something off with the Yankees line-up. He hasn’t been shy in the past. In an interview a few years ago with a Spanish-language outlet, he said, “I like to kill the Yankees” and that “I would never sign with the Yankees, not even (when I’m) dead.”
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But that was a different Guerrero – the treat ‘em mean to keep ‘em keen Guerrero. Telling the Yankees that you hate them and will destroy them is how great players flirt with New York. Your goal is getting the Bronx crowd so turned on that they pay you a shocking amount of money just for the pleasure of watching you take it all back.
This is a new Guerrero. The settled-down, Toronto-in-sickness-and-in-health Guerrero.
“My goal is always to win a World Series, to bring the World Series here,” Guerrero said. About the Yankees, he would not say a mumbling word.
“There was something a little different about Vlad today,” Jays manager John Schneider said, thought he couldn’t identify what exactly.
Maybe I can. Six years in, this was the first time Guerrero was the player everyone imagined he might be back when all you knew about him was some home-movie-type footage and a ton of hype. That Guerrero wasn’t just going to play well. He was going to beat people by sheer magnetism, a la golden age Yankees like Derek Jeter.
Guerrero had never had the chance to show that quality before, shrinking along with his teammates in three brief playoff appearances.
Alejandro Kirk hugs Guerrero Jr. after hitting a home run.Nathan Denette/The Canadian Press
Now he’s in there hacking at the foundation of the biggest club in baseball, making himself known. By tomorrow morning, Guerrero will be Public Enemy No. 1 in every borough but Queens. All his old quotes will be resurfaced and pored over.
Gausman put it best – Guerrero is becoming New York’s “arch-nemesis.”
Lots of Toronto players have been Bronx nemeses, but the arch one? That’s a first.
This is why they paid the guy so much money. Not to hit home runs at home in June, but to inspire fear and loathing in October.
Toronto makes its New York playoff debut on Tuesday night. After a laugher in Game 1, they should be feeling okay about themselves then, however things go in Sunday afternoon’s Game 2.
But there is a difference between liking your chances, and swaggering in behind a guy who’s made it his mission to humiliate the opposition.