TORONTO _ Yusei Kikuchi's last outing left his manager openly frustrated and publicly critical and left him searching for answers to questions he'd never been asked before in his professional career.
His first season in the big leagues level had started with promise and early success, but slowly spiraling into a mess of unproductive starts, homers allowed and expectations unfulfilled.
Five days after his failures in Detroit that forced a sitdown with Scott Servais to discuss what it was he was trying to do and who he hoped to be at baseball's highest level, Kikuchi responded with his best start of the 2019 season.
Kikuchi tossed his first shutout in Major League Baseball in Seattle's 7-0 win over the Blue Jays. Over his nine scoreless innings, he allowed just two hits with a walk and eight strikeouts. He needed only 96 pitches.
The hottest hitter in a Mariners uniform gave his team a quick 1-0 lead in the second inning. Kyle Seager continued his torrid stretch of production and power with a solo homer to right field off of Blue Jays opener Wilmer Font.
Seager's 16th homer of the season extended hitting streak to 12 games. He has hits in 22 of his last 23 games, including 10 home runs in that span.
Seattle pushed the lead to 4-0, scoring three runs in the fourth inning behind the next two hotter hitters on the team behind Seager. Austin Nola led off with a solo homer to right field that made it 2-0. With two outs in the inning, Tom Murphy crushed a two-run homer to left field to make it 4-0. Murphy's 13th homer of the season was his third homer in his last two games.
Keon Broxton, who was playing in place of the benched Mallex Smith, hit a solo homer in the seventh inning to make it 6-0. Broxton has three RBIs in the two games he's played instead of Smith.
Seattle tacked on two more runs in the ninth on an RBI double from Dylan Moore and a run-scoring single from Tim Lopes.
