Too sexy: How Edinson Volquez tamed the Blue Jays in Game 1 of the ALCS

KANSAS CITY, Mo. – Sexiness, in the world of baseball, looks like this: A ball spinning at 2,800 revolutions per minute, sizzling at 97 miles per hour, sidling 10 inches from left to right, freezing a hitter, emboldening the man who made the five-ounce sphere dance and a stadium stuffed with 39,753 people do the same. Edinson Volquez, 32 years old, 6-foot tall and 220 pounds, with a receding hairline and an easy smile, won't adorn the cover of People magazine anytime soon. Could've fooled him. On the way back from his warm-ups Friday before Game 1 of the American League Championship Series, Volquez strutted like he was Brad Pitt in the flesh.

"I feel sexy tonight," Volquez told his catcher and Kansas City Royals teammate, Salvador Perez, and for the next two hours, the Toronto Blue Jays succumbed under the weight of Right Said Ed. His fastball giddying up along the outside corner, his curveball crashing in the opposite direction and his changeup offsetting both, Volquez handcuffed the Blue Jays' potent offense over six shutout innings and rode his teammates' bats to a 5-0 victory at Kauffman Stadium.

Fresh off Game 5 victories in the division series, Kansas City played its standard fusion of hitting, pitching and fielding while the Blue Jays stumbled from the start and never mustered much of a threat beyond the sixth inning, when Volquez needed to summon every bit of his sexy to traverse a Toronto lineup with pitfalls at every turn.

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Edinson Volquez needed 37 pitches to get out of the sixth inning. (AP)

For 25 minutes, Volquez stood atop the mound, fans chanting his name – "Edd-ie, Edd-ie" – and the Blue Jays testing his fortitude. For 37 pitches, Volquez ground down Toronto hitters as much as they whittled him to a nub. For the final frame of his 111-pitch outing, Volquez weathered back-to-back nine-pitch walks and 13 foul balls and four full counts and broke his own rules to escape a mess of his own doing.

On the inside of his cap, Volquez writes goals at which he'll constantly peek to remind himself his imperatives. "First-pitch strikes," one says, and, "Three pitches or less," reads another, and, in hindsight, he joked: "Hey, sometimes it doesn't happen the way you want it." The Blue Jays can do that to pitchers, attack them mentally with physical superiority, make them second-guess their approach by rendering it ineffective.

Volquez, after all, came into Friday believing he would pound Toronto inside with fastballs. Then he went to the Royals' bullpen before the game and saw his two-seam fastball, a pitch in which he lost confidence for months, jumping out of his hand with late run on the outside of the plate to right-handers. He and Perez agreed to audible. Forget going inside; if the Blue Jays wanted to reach across the plate and drive a filthy two-seamer, buena suerte.

That his fastball sat from 95-97 mph all night was a pleasant surprise, too, and validated the decision that much more. Toronto's scouting report told hitters to expect the 92-94 mph at which Volquez typically throws, and the extra juice turned Volquez from difficult to straight nasty.