Blue Jays get desperately needed win in series finale vs. Tigers

TORONTO – On the flight home from Seattle after a crushing Game 5 loss left the Toronto Blue Jays down 3-2 in the American League Championship Series, John Schneider and his players looked at each other and said, “Good.”

The word had become a mantra for the team, adopted from a clip of Jocko Willink, a former U.S. Navy SEAL turned author and podcaster, who preaches a “Good” mindset as a way to adapt when obstacles arise.

So, their season on the line last October, “it was like, OK, good, what are we going to do?” Schneider recalled Wednesday afternoon. “We've got to find a way to win one game. We won one game in a row 94 times in the regular season; we've got to do it again. And if we do that, we've got to do it again the next day.

“That's where we are right now,” he continued. “We have to go 1-0 once 10 times. That's how you have to approach it when the season's so long. You're not going to get back what's already happened, and you don't know what is going to happen tomorrow or even today, but you can control how you get ready for it. You can control the attitude you have coming into every single game.”

Resetting after a pair of dispiriting losses, including a 10-1 thumping Tuesday night, the Blue Jays did precisely that in a timely 5-1 win over the Detroit Tigers amid a shifting landscape in the chase for the American League’s final wild-card spot.

Led by five innings of one-run ball from Max Scherzer, who bounced back from a messy six runs in five frames against the Baltimore Orioles last Friday, the Blue Jays (76-77) moved 1.5 games back of the Chicago White Sox (77-75), who fell out of top spot in the AL Central after a 6-3 loss to the new division leaders, the Cleveland Guardians (78-75).

Their next opponent, the Texas Rangers, are lurking in the mix too and hosted the Boston Red Sox later Wednesday, so the standings remain clustered, but the team that handles its own business best, without worrying about what happens elsewhere, will likely find its way to the post-season.

Scherzer helped ensure the Blue Jays handled their end of things, shaking off an avoidable run in the first – a Colt Keith blooper dropped between three fielders and was cashed in by a Riley Greene single – to keep the game under control until the offence could punch through.

Eventually it did, scratching out two runs in the fourth on an Ernie Clement sacrifice fly and Myles Straw RBI single to take the lead and adding on with a George Springer run-scoring single in the fifth. The Tigers gifted them two more runs in the sixth, when Clement reached on a Joe Peck error and then scored on another, when he threw away Brandon Valenzuela’s fielder’s choice.