Tale of Two Aces: Castillo beats Manoah and makes the difference in Game 1

TORONTO — For Whit Merrifield, Luis Castillo’s fastball speed wasn’t the problem.

These days, big league hitters are constantly confronted with upper 90’s stuff like Castillo. Merrifield himself saw 308 pitches at 95 mph or harder this season and hit .263 against them with a .321 wOBA.

The Blue Jays as a team faced over 4,700 pitches thrown at over 90 mph in 2022, which is 20.2 percent of all pitches they’ve thrown MLB leaders. Overall, the club hit .260 with a .324 wOBA against that premium velocity. Merrifield, the Blue Jays – they can hit hard stuff.

No, the problem was the fact that Castillo showed that speed on multiple fastballs. As in a four-sail he brushed away from right-handed players and in a two-sail he drove them into the hands. That made him all but impossible on Friday at the Rogers Center when he turned a 7.1-inning shutout and his Seattle Mariners almost single-handedly won the opener of this weekend’s wildcard series with the Toronto Blue Jays. He put batsmen in an impossible position from the jump.

“Speed ​​is what it is,” Merrifield said. “But he’s got a sinker that smacks your hands at 99-100 and then he’s got the four-seam he throws up and away. It doesn’t have that dive. It has more of a real carry. They have to make a decision about what that 100mph pitch is going to do.”

Castillo’s command of those two courts on Friday was a stark contrast to the starter on the other side, who throws a pair of fastballs himself – Alek Manoah. At an extremely inopportune time for one of his least effective games of the season, Manoah struggled to find one of his fastballs early, missing the side of his arm by four seams and leaving two seams over the plate, and getting tagged for four runs and a season high to bind.

“I ground as much as I could. But today wasn’t good enough,” Manoah said. “You have to go out there and do pitches. Of course I didn’t do that today.”

Manoah certainly didn’t suffer from a lack of material. His slider snapped with two inches more vertical break than is normal, and the toughest Seattle hitter to put him in play was 88 mph. The field was so good that Manoah made it through his second and third inning rode it for 17 of the 28 pitches he threw in those frames. Ultimately, it was Manoah’s biggest pitch of the night, earning him 9 of his 11 swinging strikes.

The problem was confined almost exclusively to a shaky 26-pitch first inning in which fastballs either flew off the side of his arm or rolled right over the heart of the plate:

The Mariners took full advantage of Manoah’s inconsistency when leadoff hitter Julio Rodriguez grabbed one of those sprayed fastballs to reach first base before scoring when Eugenio Suarez shot one of the stokers, center-center in the right field corner ended up making money him.

Cal Raleigh was next. And while the Mariners’ catcher hits and misses his weight nearly 30 percent of the time, the switch-hitter has built a solid 121 wRC+ season by punishing mistakes from right-handed pitchers and hitting 24 of his 27 homers that season this side of the train. And this is a punishable right-handed error:

Manoah’s catcher, Alejandro Kirk, may have set up middle-middle to cover the second bishop, but the fact that he moved quickly from middle to the inner part of the plate is a pretty obvious indication of where that square is should be located . But Manoah kept missing a guy whose game relies on making pitchers pay for such minor missteps.

“It was quite a long fight with Cal and ended up missing the front hip sinker,” Manoah said. “They hit me because of my mistakes. And I felt like I could start performing after that.”

Manoah didn’t exactly get out of that first inning. He fell 3-0 behind his closest batsman. But he eventually got the two outs he needed, and after grounding batsmen Nos. 8 and 9 with a single and a walk in the second, he went out nine straight.

This perfect second trip through Seattle’s order was as good as Manoah looked all night. Shooting just like the treacherous, attacking game manager he’s been all year, he worked on a 2.24 ERA in a season AL Cy Young deserved to pay attention to. But things were ruined in the fifth when Manoah sprayed his fastball again and hit Rodriguez with another before letting the Mariners claw over a fourth run with a single and a groundball.

Manoah’s night ended with two outs in the sixth when Blue Jays manager John Schneider made the proactive decision to raise him a batter early instead of a batter late, forcing the left-leaning bottom of the Mariners lineup to face Tim Mayza . With only 79 pitches, Manoah could certainly have continued. And if it were June, he probably would.

But it’s October. And while pitching into the sixth inning while allowing four runs doesn’t always submerge a team in the summer, it can in the fall, when the pitching standard is higher and offense is a priority. And it really can, with Castillo throwing in some of his best stuff of the season for the other side.

Castillo started Friday’s outing with both fastballs at 100 mph and lost just a touch of that speed throughout the night. He still hit 100 in the third and landed in a groove at just 98-99 in the fifth and sixth. Not a bad boost for a guy whose average fastball for the season was 97.

Mix in a slider that was sitting 87-88 – Castillo averaged 86.5 mph in the regular season – plus the odd 90 mph switch, and it wasn’t exactly a comfortable night for Blue Jays players.

But what made Castillo even meaner was his location. He raised hitters’ eye level by carrying four-seamers on-and-off, and flashed up-and-down two-seam fastballs that had them bending back in the box before going forward for sliders and changeups fell -a way. Castillo’s pitch chart tells a clear story of a pitcher making a meaningful, punchy start with a focused game plan and executing at will:

Combine elite speed with great movement and precise command to each edge of the zone – Castillo only threw two mid-mids all night – and you only need competent defenders behind you to completely dominate a line-up. To their credit, the Blue Jays batsmen have come into contact with the madness Castillo threw and hit at least twice in the first six innings. Incredibly, Castillo allowed more hits (six) than Manoah (four) that night.

But there was nothing threatening about that contact. Toronto’s best-batted ball against Castillo was George Springer’s 104.4-mph single in the third and Danny Jansen’s 380-foot flyout to center in the fifth. Remove those two results from Castillo’s line and you’ll find 20 balls in play with an average exit speed of 80.6 mph. Weak grounders, innocent flyballs and the odd flare that found its way into no man’s land.

“He could command the Zone. I feel like he’s progressed a lot,” said Matt Chapman, Blue Jays third baseman. “And whenever we had guys on base, he just made good pitches. He was able to free himself from it.”

That was perhaps the most impressive part of Castillo’s outing – the way he raised his level when the BABIP gods tested him. As in the third, with two ons and two outs, he put Vladimir Guerrero Jr. in a lose-lose situation by spotting a 90-mph transition at the knees, followed by a lively 98-mph fastball going straight ran into the Blue Jays first baseman’s kitchen:

Or in the fifth, again with two ons and two outs, as Castillo doubled on sliders against a dead red-seated Bo Bichette before forcing a groundball with a sinker:

And especially in the seventh, when Castillo emptied the tank and started blowing bats away as his pitch count crept into the 90s. He knocked out Chapman with five fastballs and a slider; Raimel Tapia with an explosive booster; and Jansen at the end of a six-pitch fight with a 98-mile fastball on and over the plate:

That was Castillo’s 99th pitch of the night and one of his meanest, betting that the Blue Jays’ catcher couldn’t predict what would follow a slider-fastball-changeup-slider-changeup sequence and his fastball just couldn’t was able to hit in a challenge spot, and proved correct.

“He was confident in his game,” said Bichette. “He served really well. He hit with just about anything. He just threw a lot of good pitches off the plate. I thought we competed well and had good bats. But he just brought out the best in us.”

Sometimes baseball can be so simple. A guy with two fastballs who could make her do whatever he wanted. Another with two fastballs who couldn’t find his feel. The margins are so slim in the post-season MLB tournament, where teams with bad pitching staff have little hope of qualifying. Everyone has good appetizers. Anyone can throw hard with movement. It often comes down to execution. At least that’s how it was on Friday.