LOS ANGELES — Three years ago, one of Chris Bassitt’s lowest moments on the mound turned into one of his greatest learning lessons.
With the season on the line, the Mets gave Bassitt the ball in the deciding Game 3 of the 2022 wild-card series against the Padres. He had made two postseason starts earlier in his career in Oakland, but New York presented a different kind of stage and challenge.
At the time, he thought he was ready for it.
“I wasn’t,” Bassitt said, looking back at that experience earlier this week. “Mentally, I didn’t really know how to prepare for it. Physically, I didn’t like where I was at in that moment.”
He allowed three runs on three hits and three walks over four innings. It was his final start of his lone year with the Mets, whose season ended that night in a 6-0 defeat. He realized he had “tried to do way too much.”
“You live and learn,” Bassitt said. “I would have to say the 2022 year with the Mets taught me a lot. I didn’t think I handled that moment that well, regretted a lot of things that I did in that game, how I approached that game.”
A tough lesson learned while with the Mets. (Photo by Rob Tringali/MLB Photos via Getty Images)
Rather than let that disappointment fester, though, he hoped the failure could propel him forward. He prayed he would get another opportunity in October to make amends for his previous misfire, to have his body and mind more prepared, to not let the same mistakes happen again.
“Just, like, give me one more chance,” Bassitt recalled thinking. “Like, whatever that means, give me one more chance.”
He couldn’t have envisioned the role it would come in, but Bassitt is now just one game away from winning his first World Series title as a key cog in Toronto’s bullpen.
The longtime starter — Bassitt came out of the bullpen just once in his 164 regular-season appearances over the last six years — has thrown 6.2 scoreless innings of relief this postseason for a Blue Jays team that has a chance to celebrate its first championship in 32 years on Friday.
“He’s really gone up in the circle of trust,” Blue Jays manager John Schneider told me. “His first outing was kind of nondescript. We were down against Seattle. But I think he’s earned the right to be in any spot. It’s not easy to do, but I think at this stage of the season, man, you just trust people.”
Over the offseason, Max Scherzer trusted Bassitt, too.
The Blue Jays’ ambassador
A relationship that began in Queens and has thrived in Toronto. (Photo by Ed Zurga/Getty Images)
Bassitt is not starting games for the Blue Jays in the World Series, but he’s largely responsible for the presence of someone who is.
Despite only spending one year together with the Mets, Bassitt clicked so quickly with Scherzer in 2022 that he now considers the three-time Cy Young Award winner one of his best friends. So when Toronto’s front office called Bassitt to let him know about the team’s interest in Scherzer last winter, Bassitt went to work.
“I went after him really hard,” Bassitt said with a laugh. “Yeah, I was calling him a lot, probably a little too much for his liking.”
But it worked.
During the full-court press, Bassitt harkened back to that 2022 Mets season and how he wanted one more crack at it with Scherzer. He was convincing.
“He has a really good pulse on what this clubhouse and team needed,” Scherzer said. “We were talking kind of throughout the whole offseason, and when things started moving in my direction, it just kind of seemed to all click that getting back with him would be a great thing for me and that this was a team that could really go somewhere.”
Bassitt thought Scherzer’s style, influence and big-game experience was exactly what the Blue Jays needed.
But he had to warn Ross Atkins, the executive vice president of baseball operations, about what he would be taking on.
“At the end of the day, I knew what Max brings to a team, and I think there’s a lot of teams that don’t like Max Scherzer just because he questions everything,” Bassitt said. “Like, he wants to know every little detail — from outfield positioning to why you’re throwing this pitch to who is playing here to how we control off days. And so many organizations, I feel like, don’t like to answer questions. They like you to be a robot and say, ‘Yes, sir,’ and go about your business. But that’s not how Max is.
“I told Ross, ‘This was going to be a headache for you.’ And then I told the pitching staff about him, and I told the coaching staff, like, ‘This is a guy that’s going to stir a lot of pots.’ But everyone was on board for it.”
Eight months after signing a one-year, $15.5 million deal in Toronto, Scherzer is rubbing off on a World Series rotation in Toronto that includes a thriving 22-year-old rookie experiencing this all for the first time and rising to the occasion.
“It’s been a crazy year, but being surrounded by vets is a great thing for the future of my career,” said Trey Yesavage, who struck out 12 in a Game 5 win, putting the Blue Jays on the precipice of finishing off the reigning champs. “They’ve treated me the best I could have ever asked for. Going forward with other rookies that come up, I’m going to remember how I was treated when I got here.”
Bassitt, meanwhile, is also making an impact in a role he didn’t anticipate.
‘Let’s just go win’
Chris Bassitt has been utilized out the bullpen. (Robert Gauthier/Los Angeles Times via Getty Images)
The opportunity Bassitt and Scherzer envisioned had to wait.
When Toronto’s postseason began, both were left off the best-of-five ALDS roster. Scherzer had struggled through September, posting an ERA over 10.00 during the month. Bassitt, meanwhile, dealt with a late-season back issue and was told to heal up.
They’d be added on in the ALCS, but first a conversation had to take place. After making 31 starts for the Blue Jays this year, second on the team only to Kevin Gausman, Bassitt was asked to move to the bullpen.
“The conversation was easy,” Schneider told me. “It was, ‘You’re going to pitch out of the pen because we know you can be flexible.’ And he said, ‘I don’t care if you start me, I don’t care if you close me, I don’t care where you pitch me, I just want to pitch.’”
To be clear, Bassitt still prefers to start and sees himself as a starter. He was an All-Star in 2021, his final year in Oakland, and has started at least 30 games each of the last four years.
Bassitt finished in the top 10 in Cy Young voting three times in the last five seasons and comes from an old-school mindset, believing in the importance of a starter’s consistency and ability to work deep into games. The 36-year-old doesn’t think most starters are built to be pitching max effort, the way many of them are trying to do — and taught to do — now.
“There’s the unicorns that can do it and stay healthy,” Bassitt said, “but for everyone else, they get hurt.”
A good starter, he believes, is still more valuable than a reliever. But the Blue Jays needed his experience in a volatile bullpen that included multiple rookies.
So, Bassitt embraced an unexpected role.
“You just make a decision that, hey, you know, either I’m going to be afraid of this moment or I’m going to welcome it,” Dontrelle Willis, who made a similar switch during the Marlins’ championship run in 2003, said. “And whatever happens, happens. And Chris Bassitt has been a big factor because he’s welcoming the moment.”
Bassitt can no longer grow a rally beard with the starters, but he has the chance to impact — and shorten — more games out of the bullpen. His arm has responded well to the change, and he’s making the most of it as he takes in the game from a new vantage point alongside a different cast of characters.
“Bass is one of the best ones we got,” closer Jeff Hoffman told me. “For him to be able to step out of his comfort zone and go out there and kick it with the guys out there, he’s always a blast to be around, always insightful.”
It wasn’t hard for Bassitt to fit in with the relievers.
“I’m already kind of like constantly messing around with them, talking crap to them, things like that,” Bassitt told me. “So it wasn’t so much of me coming into like a new team or kind of thing, so to speak. I knew all these guys, I knew what they do, I understand who they are as people, so it was more like, ‘Hey, I’m here to help y’all, whatever that means…let’s just go win. It doesn’t really matter who does what. Like, I don’t care about your stats. Let’s go win.’”
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Bassitt has helped the Blue Jays get to a place they haven’t been since 1993.
In his first outing of the playoffs, he retired all five batters he faced in a blowout win. That earned him a higher-leverage opportunity in the deciding Game 7 of the ALCS against the Mariners. He entered in the eighth inning of a one-run game and threw a perfect frame to preserve the lead.
Now, in the biggest stage of his career, he is in his manager’s trust tree.
Bassitt has appeared in three of the Blue Jays’ five World Series games, allowing just two baserunners over four scoreless innings. He’s not the typical reliever, sitting in the low-90s in velocity and featuring a plethora of pitches. But his stuff has played up over shorter bursts, and his production has been vital for a bullpen that needed the help.
“He’ll do anything for the guys,” Schneider said.
Bassitt wasn’t able to bring a championship to New York three years ago, but that failure led to this moment.
And now, everything Bassitt and Scherzer envisioned over the winter is in front of them.
“If there’s anybody that I want to win a World Series with,” Bassitt said, “I want to win one with Max.”
Rowan Kavner is an MLB writer for FOX Sports. He previously covered the L.A. Dodgers, LA Clippers and Dallas Cowboys. An LSU grad, Rowan was born in California, grew up in Texas, then moved back to the West Coast in 2014. Follow him on X at @RowanKavner.
