DENVER — Nathan Lukes didn’t feel great at the plate last week and was especially unhappy with his weekend series against the Kansas City Royals. In general, he tends not to swing a lot — offering at 48.2 per cent of pitches this season — and it’s especially true on first pitch, swinging only 27.9 per cent of the time, something opponents had taken notice of, he felt. As he thought back on a 1-for-10 weekend, part of a wider 3-for-29 dry patch, he concluded that with “the amount of first-pitch cookie heaters just splitting the plate in half that I got, Kansas City was like, all right, here you go, we know you’re not going to swing.”
So Monday night, when he walked up to the plate, he decided that he was going to swing at Tanner Gordon’s first pitch, just to make a point. He warned No. 2 hitter Bo Bichette about it in advance so he could be ready. Lukes hammered the 91.4 m.p.h. fastball for a double, two pitches later he scored on a Bichette single, and the rout was on. “Hitting is pitch selection and timing,” explained Lukes. “I definitely think over this little slump, it’s been pretty much a combination of both. Trying to fix those two to hopefully get out of this. But definitely (Monday) night was a start.”
Tuesday night, then, was a continuance, as Lukes led off the game with a drive to dead centre that appeared headed over the wall until Brenton Doyle pulled it back, and then hammered his 10th homer of the season in the third, getting the Blue Jays rolling in an eventful 10-4 thumping of the Colorado Rockies.
Daulton Varsho’s two-run homer in the fourth gave the Blue Jays a 3-2 lead and then, after Vladimir Guerrero Jr. and Addison Barger went back-to-back to open the sixth, clubbed another two-run homer, this one off the facing of the third deck in left that at 467 feet was the longest of his career, to open up a 7-2 lead.
Varsho added a two-run double during a three-run ninth for a career-best six RBI day, making him 5-for-10 over two days in Denver after an 0-for-6 return from the injured list over the weekend in Toronto.
“It’s just more having better cues, having better thoughts and feels of being able to work on stuff and knowing what it needs to look like and what it’s supposed to feel like,” Varsho said of how his off-season work is helping him find his groove. “Obviously having that and having the great hitting coaches we have, it just helps me out a ton.”
Tensions began to rise in the sixth when Rockies reliever Angel Chivilli hit Joey Loperfido on the outside of the right knee with a 98.2 m.p.h. fastball two batters after Varsho’s homer, with the young outfielder helped off the field by manager John Schneider and trainer Jose Ministral. X-rays on Loperfido were negative for a fracture, although the Blue Jays are expecting the contusion may keep him out of Wednesday’s series finale.
The next inning, Jose Berrios, strong through five before running into trouble in the sixth, hit Jordan Beck on the left elbow with a pitch up and in, prompting the Rockies left-fielder to mutter a few words in anger back. Once he did that, Schneider charged out of the Blue Jays dugout to stand between Berrios and Beck, talking to him as he walked up the first-base line.
“I liked it. I know he has my back,” Berrios said of Schneider. “I just reacted like, we are playing baseball, I didn’t hit that guy on purpose. He tried to say something to me and I don’t approve of that.”
Despite the strange scene, the benches never emptied, calm was quickly restored and the Rockies scratched out a pair, ending Berrios’ outing at 5.1 innings and four runs, three earned.
“That’s just reaction,” Schneider said of his intervention. “I was going off of Beck’s reaction. Obviously (Berrios) is trying to throw a sinker in to get a double play, and I just wanted to make sure nothing happened. That was it. Glad nothing happened.”
From there, Yariel Rodriguez and Louis Varland bent but didn’t break in the seventh and eighth before the three-spot in the ninth helped lock down a second straight win for the Blue Jays (67-48). They remain three games up on the Boston Red Sox (64-51), who have won seven straight.
The 25 runs in two games at Coors Field come after the Blue Jays scored only 30 runs in seven games during a 2-5 week against the Baltimore Orioles and Royals.
“They turn the page, you know what I mean?” said Schneider. “They understand that you’re going to go through a series or two series where it just doesn’t go your way. … It’s just getting back to what we’re good at.”
Lukes, who also walked in the sixth, singled and scored in the ninth and added a tremendous throw from right field to get Doyle trying to stretch a single in the seventh, feels the same way.
Before Tuesday’s contest, he wasn’t yet ready to declare himself out of his slide — “I feel like I need a couple more just to kind of solidify it,” he said — and he noted that he “still am not feeling like entirely me” although “(Monday) was a big step in the right direction.”
“How I see the ball. The quality of at-bat. It’s always doing something well,” he explained. “Hitting the ball hard is kind of a thing, too. I’m always going to make contact. It’s just a matter of how solid that contact is.”
Plenty solid for Lukes and the Blue Jays all around.
