Rain-delay drama leaves plenty for Blue Jays to navigate in loss to Yankees

NEW YORK – As the rain picked up and flashes of lightning streaked through the sky, the opportunity for the Toronto Blue Jays in the sixth inning began to carry potentially wider implications. 

If a delay hit with the New York Yankees still ahead 2-1, the teams had gotten deep enough for Saturday’s contest to qualify as an official game, meaning the score would hold if the weather didn’t let up. So when Bo Bichette was thrown out at home after Nathan Lukes’ single to end the inning and the contest immediately went into a rain delay, there was no certainty that the game would restart.

“We would have stayed here ‘til two in the morning if the league allowed it,” Blue Jays manager John Schneider said after a 3-1 loss that was completed once play resumed following a one-hour, 46-minute rain delay. “You don’t want to end the game like that. You don’t want to lose a game through 5½ innings, you know what I mean? You feel confident that we have the ability to come back, for sure. It sucks sitting there for however long we did … knowing that you didn’t want that to be the ending of the game. And give them credit. It’s a perfect throw and a perfect tag, you know? And a great at-bat from Lukey to get the knock. Glad we were able to finish it.”

The Blue Jays were less glad about the result, of course, which cut their lead in the American League East to three games over the Yankees, and came after a wild sequence of events leading into, and during, the rain delay. 

Bichette hobbled off the field after getting thrown at home, having torn up his left shin when he slid into the leg guard of Yankees catcher Austin Wells. As Schneider tried to tend to his star shortstop, he also had to check the dugout to see if there was reason to challenge the play at the plate – there wasn’t – and then be ready with a reliever to replace starter Chris Bassitt, who was coming out of the game whether or not there was a delay. 

“There’s a lot going on there,” said Schneider.

No doubt, but crew chief Alan Porter and the rest of the umpires immediately signalled for the tarp, pushing back some of those decisions, leaving the Blue Jays to seek shelter from the deluge and tend to Bichette, who went for X-rays that came back negative. 

The training staff then bandaged up Bichette’s cut-up shin, allowing him to retake the field once play resumed. And if not for the nearly two hours of lead time to deal with the injury and ensure nothing too severe had occurred, “my gut reaction, because of how important Bo is to our team, if it wasn’t a rain delay, I’m probably taking him out just to be sure,” said Schneider. “It bought him some time for sure and allowed him to slow down a little bit, get the tests that needed to get done, and keep going.”

Amid the uncertainty around Bichette, there was also the uncertainty around whether there would even be a resumption of play for him to gear up for. Last year in late April, the Blue Jays suffered through a three-hour, 38-minute rain delay in Kansas City before a five-inning game was called, resulting in a 2-1 loss to the Royals that prompted Schneider to lament how “the entire day was handled kind of poorly.”

The stakes now are much higher, obviously, and Schneider didn’t like what he was seeing from the weather trackers he was following. Still, once any game begins, any decision-making is out of the teams’ hands, as the crew chief consults with the commissioner’s office about whether a game should be called or suspended because of weather, based on the circumstances, making for an agonizing wait.

“Alan Porter, the crew chief, called me and said it was going to be a while,” said Schneider. “They were kind of meeting every 30 minutes and then at four, the meeting was we should be good at around 4:30, which they’ve got better radars than I have on my computer. I’ve got to pay for a better app or something, but it looked pretty doubtful to play.”

While Bassitt’s day was done after five innings – during which he allowed only a pair of unearned runs – that meant turning it up for the rest of the Blue Jays, who’d been in limbo awaiting a decision.

“Usually, you don’t get locked in until you kind of have to because you just don’t know,” said Bassitt. “The reality is, humans aren’t made to be locked in for a long period of time on something. So you’ve got to shut it off and kind of relax, college football’s on and things like that. You just never really know when the game’s going to start, so it’s just waiting until MLB and their team that we have here figure out when we can start game.”

Once they did, the Yankees added on a run in the bottom of sixth, Bichette came up once more in the game, striking out after Vladimir Guerrero Jr.’s leadoff single in the eighth, and David Bednar recorded the final four outs to lock down a Yankees win.

“Thought that (Bichette remaining in the game) would be a bright spot and he hits a two-run homer there in the eighth inning,” said Schneider. “Maybe tomorrow.”

Max Scherzer starts against Max Fried in the rubber-match Sunday, when more rain is in the morning forecast.

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