Schneider wins as Blue Jays checkmate Mariners

Baseball, more than any other sport, is a game of moves and countermoves. You do this, I'll do that. Strategies carefully laid out and then executed.

And then someone comes along and knocks the chess pieces all over the room.

Heading into the bottom of the seventh inning of the American League Championship Series on Monday night, Seattle Mariners manager Dan Wilson had plainly outmaneuvered John Schneider, his Toronto Blue Jays counterpart.

Wilson had stayed with starting pitcher George Kirby after some opening wobbles, and he delivered four solid innings of one-run ball. He followed Kirby with Bryan Woo, Seattle's best starter in the regular season, who returned from an injury layoff in the ALCS. Woo pitched two brilliant innings, and in a series that had taxed both bullpens, he looked like an inspired choice.

Schneider, in the opposing dugout, hooked starter Shane Bieber with two runners on in the fourth inning. He went with Louis Varland, his security blanket in these playoffs, to extinguish the threat. Varland responded by retiring Julio Rodríguez, who had already doubled and homered to give the Mariners a 2-1 lead.

But Schneider left Varland out there for the fifth inning, and Cal Raleigh homered. It seemed ominous.

Two innings later, with Seattle's two-run advantage still intact, it was Wilson who sent his pitcher back out for another inning. He had a stocked bullpen at his disposal, but Woo was dealing and looked strong.

Addison Barger led off the seventh with a walk. Next in the order was Isiah Kiner-Falefa, who'd been acquired after the trade deadline as a spare part. Schneider left him in to hit. The decision seemed baffling when the Toronto manager had power bats such as Davis Schneider available.

But after Kiner-Falefa fell behind in the count, and looked overmatched while doing it, he rapped a Woo pitch up the middle for a single. John Schneider called for a sacrifice bunt from Andrés Giménez, inviting more second-guessing of a manager who'd been burned by some of his choices in Game 5.

Wilson lifted Woo for Eduard Bazardo, who had pitched two scoreless innings a night earlier.

And George Springer promptly rewrote the history of two franchises.

His three-run home run, arcing into the left-field seats, was one of those baseball moments that undid everything that came before it. Suddenly it was Schneider who was making all the right moves on the chessboard, and Wilson who had let the game get away from him. Needing just nine outs to get to the World Series, and with all his relievers available, Wilson had instead tried to get a third inning out of Woo, planting the seeds of disaster.

From there, Schneider could do no wrong. Chris Bassitt, another starting pitcher coming back from injury, came in to pitch the eighth inning and was excellent. A significant proportion of Blue Jays fans might have been happy to see Bassitt return for the ninth, but the Toronto manager went back to his closer, Jeff Hoffman, despite the fact that he had pitched two innings on Sunday night. And despite the fact that the nightmare scenario for the Jays - a walk followed by a two-run homer - was just the kind of thing that had happened to Hoffman on occasion this season.

Would Schneider get burned one last time?

He would not. Hoffman struck out the side to send the Blue Jays to their first World Series since 1993. The record will show that the final batter, Rodríguez, faced six pitches, none of them in the strike zone, but Hoffman got him to chase.

Raleigh, with 64 home runs this season, was left standing in the on-deck circle.

It was all perfectly ridiculous. Six games of the ALCS had established some certainties: Seattle had a much better bullpen, and its lineup had more game-changing power. Toronto's hitters had touched up the Mariners' starting pitching, but they had struggled to turn games around against a succession of hard-throwing bullpen arms.

All of that flipped in an instant. Springer's seventh-inning Game 7 shot was the response to Eugenio Suárez's eighth-inning grand slam in Game 5 - a swing that, at the time, felt like it might define the series. The Suárez bomb was the kind of blow opposing teams often don't withstand, especially since it exposed the plain fact that Schneider didn't have a lot of arms he trusted to navigate a tight game late.

That was still true Monday night. But it ultimately didn't matter.

The soft underbelly of the Toronto bullpen - now featuring starters! - made sure that Springer's heroics didn't end up a forgotten postscript.

In playoff baseball, sometimes all it takes is one swing, and the stories they will tell about your team are changed forever.

Scott Stinson is a contributing writer for theScore.