Scherzer fans four, but Bisons fall 6-3 to Worcester

Max Scherzer’s second rehab start with Buffalo gave the Blue Jays exactly the kind of read they were looking for and the Bisons exactly the kind of result they did not want. He struck out four in 4 2/3 innings, but Worcester kept finding traffic and turned Polar Park into a 6-3 win over Buffalo on Friday night.

The line on Scherzer showed both the upside and the edge he still has to sharpen. He allowed five hits, a walk and three runs, and one of the hits left the yard. Two days after his previous rehab outing, when he worked 3 2/3 innings on 73 pitches, he stretched the outing a little farther and continued building toward Toronto. For a pitcher the Blue Jays are counting on to help stabilize the rotation, the raw stuff still mattered. The strikeouts were there. The margin for error was not.

Worcester broke through in the third when Max Ferguson singled and Tyler McDonough doubled ahead of a Tsung-Che Cheng two-run double to right. Buffalo answered in the fourth on Riley Tirotta’s sacrifice fly, which scored Davis Schneider and cut the deficit to 2-1, but the WooSox answered immediately. Matt Lloyd lined a solo home run to right in the bottom of the inning, his third of the season, and the lead was back to two.

The middle innings pushed the game out of reach. Alan Castro delivered a two-RBI single in the fifth to make it 5-1, then Cheng added another RBI single in the eighth to stretch the gap to 6-1. Scherzer was out by then, having given Buffalo five serviceable but imperfect innings of work in a game where Worcester made him pay for every missed spot and every extra baserunner.

Buffalo showed a little late life in the ninth when pinch-hitter Je’Von Ward launched a two-run homer to right-center, trimming the final margin to 6-3. It was the kind of swing that can keep a box score from feeling entirely one-sided, but the outcome had already been decided.

The larger picture is bigger than one Triple-A loss. Scherzer’s assignment sits inside a broader Blue Jays ramp-up that also included Dylan Cease and Shane Bieber cycling through Buffalo, with manager John Schneider signaling that Scherzer’s rehab was underway in earnest. For Toronto, the encouraging part was the strikeout count and the workload. The caution flag was Worcester’s ability to turn a recognizable name into an ordinary outing.