Rapid Reaction: Blue Jays Obliterate Mariners in Ugly 14-3 Game 3 Rout
SEATTLE, Wash. — The only solace for the Mariners on Wednesday is that there is no difference between an ugly loss and a pretty loss in the final tally. It’s still 2-1 Seattle in the series, but with Toronto’s bats finally awake and Max Scherzer (he may be 40, but he’s still a hall-of-famer) on the mound for the Jays in Game 4, one blowout loss brings forth vivid overreacting visions of Toronto celebrating a six-game series win on their home turf and denying the Mariners yet another opportunity to make the Fall Classic.
None of that has come to pass, but the way the Blue Jays dismantled Seattle over the final seven innings of Game 3—where they made Mariners pitchers look like high school travel ballers—does not make for good momentum heading into Game 4.
Still, it is only one loss, and all Seattle has to do for a 3-1 series lead is win on Thursday.
Toronto’s early swings work exactly according to plan, bringing shades of the Mariners’ Philadelphia disasters.
During the first two games, the Seattle Mariners largely worked away from the Blue Jays’ wheelhouses with their fastballs and continually changed eye level between heaters and secondary pitches. Two-seamers and sinkers had stymied Toronto throughout the opening matches, as they hugged the outside and top edges of the plate.
That was not what happened on Wednesday. George Kirby worked two solid innings that brought to mind the previous two games, pounding the corners of the corners of the zone and getting that weak contact. After that, however, it was a whole lot of damage, inning after inning.
Ernie Clement got it started by shooting a first-pitch two-seamer down the left field line for a double. It may have been inside off the plate, but the pitch was about belt-high. For the rest of his outing, Kirby would continually try to sneak two-seamers at that elevation either inside or outside, but they kept running into a hittable area of the plate. Andrés Giménez got a four-seamer in that middle third of elevation and walloped a ball over the right field fence, the first of five home runs for Toronto.
Still, all Kirby had against him was a 2-2 tie. Victor Robles made a stellar catch in foul ground to get the first out and seemingly get the game back on track. But yet another two-seam ran into the middle third of elevation and Nathan Lukes singled to center, and although Kirby made an adjustment and went to the slider in the next at-bat, he did so against a slider-killer named Vladimir Guerrero Jr.
Guerrero smacked a double off the left field wall so hard that Lukes could not score, and after Anthony Santander harmlessly grounded out to first, Kirby had a real chance to get out of the inning. He never quite found his pitch against Alejandro Kirk, however, and the Jays’ catcher took his free pass to first on five pitches.
Before the game, Blue Jays manager John Schneider had indicated that his team would be more aggressive, trying to put together hits on pitches early in their at-bats. This strategy can be very feast-or-famine—if the opposing hurler stays a step ahead, they can keep their pitch count absolutely miniscule. But when something gets going, it can essentially put the pitcher on tilt, and that’s what happened on Wednesday. The siege mentality, by this point, was incessantly eating away at Kirby, and he spiked two sliders to Daulton Varsho, the second of which bounced over Cal Raleigh for a run-scoring wild pitch.
Varsho broke it open with a double off the right field wall, ending Toronto’s third with five runs on the board for the visitors. Kirby seemed to get back into a bit of a groove for two outs in the fourth, but a mistake to George Springer ended up over the wall. Kirby was unable to get an out in the fifth, but by that point, the Mariners were already all but out of it.
Kirby’s performance brought echoes of Seattle’s ugly sweep at the hands of the Phillies in mid-August, where Philadelphia bashed seemingly every offering that Mariners starters could muster. It was a bit less horrendous than those three muggy days in the City of Brotherly Love, but Wednesday’s rout was bad enough to evoke a sense of rotation-wide helplessness. Even though the Jays are still down a game, they very much have a share of the driver’s seat.
Julio Rodríguez is the Seattle offense’s lone bright spot early on as they make Shane Bieber’s life very easy from the second inning onwards.
Despite the game’s final score, things actually started well for the Mariners. Randy Arozarena drew a leadoff walk and came around to score on a home run from Julio Rodríguez, the two-run shot bringing the hopeful Seattle crowd to their feet. Jorge Polanco doubled on the very next pitch, seemingly putting Shane Bieber on the ropes, but the Jays’ starter dialed it in, mixing curveballs, cutters, and sliders on his way to dominance.
Bieber struck out eight during his six innings of work, giving up just two more hits after the first inning. He even got the first six strikes of a potential immaculate inning in the second, but although he struck out the side, J.P. Crawford took ball one and broke up that potential bit of history.
Where the Blue Jays were intelligently aggressive—seeing their pitches well and attacking the ones in their part of the zone—the Mariners didn’t seem to know how to get back into it offensively after the first. They oscillated between taking too many hittable pitches out over the plate and swinging wildly at pitches they had no business chasing.
Julio Rodríguez was one of just two batters to get a knock after the first, reaching on an infield dribbler with two away in the bottom of the third. But although the M’s were down only three runs at that point, Jorge Polanco’s easy flyout prevented any sort of counterattack from developing late in that frame, and Bieber went back to his groove.
Randy Arozarena and Cal Raleigh hit back-to-back garbage-time home runs, but the late fireworks have no effect on the final result.
Despite 27 big flies over the full season for Randy Arozarena, they had been much sparser over the final month of the year. Going into Wednesday, he hadn’t hit a home run in over a month (with a blast on Sept. 9 being his only homer in September), struggling with the business end of his characteristic streakiness.
The cold streak continued into the playoffs, where he slashed .161/.278/.194 over his first seven games. A walk in the first inning hadn’t seemed to do anything to help his slump, as his next two outs were completely unremarkable, but in the eighth inning, he finally unloaded on one. It was a full count slider out over the plate from Yariel Rodríguez and Arozarena didn’t miss it, lobbing a scorcher into the visiting bullpen.
Cal Raleigh went back-to-back three pitches later, scraping a solo shot of his own over the right field wall, but the two bombs were far too little, far too late for Seattle. If Arozarena is on the cusp of another home run streak, however, that could brighten the Mariners’ fortunes ahead of Game 4, which would matter. After all, the only thing Seattle can do after Wednesday’s loss is look ahead to the next day.
The Mariners punt quite early in the game, moving onto Game 4 to try to retake control of the series.
For Seattle, the worrying part of the game was less of the fact that the team gave up all these runs early, but rather that they threw in the towel pretty soon after falling behind. The last time the Jays and Mariners met in the postseason, the Mariners had come back from an 8-1 deficit to knock Toronto out of the playoffs entirely, but it seems that lesson didn’t make its way across the years. All while the bats were silent until the eighth inning, the arms kept digging a deeper and deeper hole for the team, and any resurgent energy was gone before it could accumulate.
A couple of runs and plenty more runners kept tricking in against Carlos Vargas, so Caleb Ferguson went out from the pen to try and keep a bit of a lid on Toronto’s landslide. Alejandro Kirk’s three-run homer took the game from a bad loss to a true blowout, putting the 12th run on the board for Toronto and taking a 10-run advantage into the visitors’ corner. At that point, the team’s slight chance of recovery had clearly washed into Puget Sound, and Dan Wilson started using the game as an opportunity to give some less-seasoned members of the roster some reps. Leo Rivas and Luke Jackson entered for the top of the eighth—Jackson replacing Vargas on the mound—while Harry Ford pinch-hit for Josh Naylor in the bottom of the ninth.
Game 4 will feature Max Scherzer for Toronto going up against Luis Castillo on Seattle’s mound. While that name carried a lot of fear with it in years past, Scherzer is 40 in 2025, had an ERA of 5.19 during 17 regular season starts, and wasn’t even on the Blue Jays’ roster for the ALDS. Still, he has more than earned his “Mad Max” nickname over the years, and it’s very probable (perhaps more than likely) that he will be able to dial it up for a few lockdown innings in T-Mobile Park on Thursday night.
