Rosie DiManno: Alek Manoah gets his playoff legs an inning too late for the Blue Jays

It will come as no solace to Alek Manoah that not even perfection would have alleviated the big hurt for the big man.

No kid grows up dreaming about bombing in the big game. But what a moment for the magic to dissolve. And only an isolated one-inning strafing at that.

He was looking on glumly as he hung over the dugout railing after being removed with two out in the sixth inning, having just beaten up his baseball cap in fury and frustration. Starters don’t usually hang around. Manoah did.

A couple of hours earlier — before it all went abruptly egg-shaped — Manoah had covered his face with that cap, communing with himself, settling his nerves, then made the sign of the cross and gestured heavenward.

Yeah, there’d be no help from above. Or from his teammates, driven batty by Luis Castillo’s high velocity fastballs and confounding 100-m.p.h. sinker.

The Blue Jays ace, the American League pitcher of the month a heartbeat ago, had a 1.00 ERA across his previous eight starts and was exactly the horse Toronto wanted on the mound for the opening game in a best-of-three wild-card series. But he came up both over-amped and under a bad moon rising.

Maybe that’s too harsh because the Jays’ 4-0 loss to Seattle didn’t come entirely down to Manoah. A half-dozen staggered singles and one double in the last-gasp ninth was all the offence a dynamic lineup could summon at the Rogers Centre on Friday, just one Toronto hitter reaching base to lead off an inning. They never stitched together much of a threat. channelling instead the ghosts of a sweep past, the Jays who dropped four straight to the Mariners in July, the nadir point of their season, which led to the firing of manager Charlie Montoyo.

Seattle needs only one more win to scrape the Jays off their cleats in October.

Manoah, the go-to stud who had made a Cy Young candidate of himself with a sterling regular season, his second in the majors, was twitchy with verve and amplitude from the early swishes of Game 1. Yet he was too stoked, too pumped, too wired in his post-season debut, inside the emotional swirl of a ballpark that hadn’t seen playoff ball since 2016.

Facing his first batter, Julio Rodriguez, Manoah went strike one but then clipped him on the wrist with a fastball. “First strike of the game, there was great energy and felt like every out we had the whole country behind us.”

The leadoff man was on the gnarly way but there was not much to fret as Manoah induced a groundball out from Ty France. But Eugenio Suarez laced a clean single to right field and Rodriguez raced home with the first run of the game. A seventh-pitch sinker to Cal Raleigh got cranked for a two-run shot 362 feet to right and it was 3-0 in a flash.

It was evident that Manoah was having trouble with location. He couldn’t command the strike zone, his delivery was out of sync, and he was denied any wiggle room for errors.

“I think I made two good pitches to Julio and had a sinker kind of run away from me a little bit. I kind of put him on. Then was able to make some pitches to France and left a pitch over the plate — Suarez was able to put a good swing on it.

“And we know what Raleigh did.”

On the bump, Manoah was talking to himself, as per Manoah-normal, while trying to think his way to a stabilized delivery.

“Just had to tell myself, execute pitches.” He kept that front of mind in the lengthy Raleigh at-bat. “Ended up not executing the front-hip sinker. Just continued to tell myself: Continue to execute. They beat me on my mistakes and I felt like I was able to start executing after that.”

Too late, of course, with zilch run support.

At the press conference, Manoah was subdued, The 24-year-old usually thrives on self-confidence, on emotions worn on the sleeve, like the canvas of tattoos across his bulging biceps. Hubris doesn’t rest easily on his wide shoulders. And it should be pointed out that the right-hander retired 12 of the next 14 Mariners, Seattle crafting their fourth run off a weak ground ball, with yet another hit batter — Rodriguez, for the second time — coming ’round to score.

“(Manoah) settled in great after the first inning,” interim manager John Schneider said of his money starter. “I don’t know if he was a little bit fired up, but he had some velo and just a couple of bad pitches.

“I think he did a really good job … He did what he’s been doing all year. It was tough to take him out (with the score 4-0 in the sixth).”

Manoah allowed four runs on four hits, with one walk, and threw 79 pitches before left-hander Tim Mayza took over.

“We’re trying to just match up accordingly with their lineup,” said Schneider, who was not about to point a finger of blame at his ace, acknowledging only “an uncharacteristic first inning, for sure.”

Three in the hole after one inning is a steep rock face to climb in the post-season but this is a team that, even with its ears pinned back, is entirely capable of rallying with kinetic multiple run innings. Except they couldn’t solve Castillo, Seattle’s trade-deadline acquisition and a pivotal arm that Toronto should have pursued harder.

Manoah spoke like a guy who believes there is yet time for playoff redemption, which would require Toronto to get back-to-back wins. The last time they lost two in a row was to the Yankees a week ago. They’ll have to muster a comeback against reigning Cy Young winner Robbie Ray, a teammate a year ago.

It’s up to Kevin Gausman now, and an offence that better find its mojo.

“Expect us to come out swinging,” Manoah predicted. “Yeah, put a couple of hits together, and hopefully we get more runs than them.”

Rosie DiManno is a Toronto-based columnist covering sports and current affairs for the Star. Follow her on Twitter: @rdimanno