NEW YORK – The past week and a half has been a fractious and disorderly period for the Toronto Blue Jays. First, the Texas Rangers went all vigilante on Jose Bautista and the teams brawled. Bautista, Jesse Chavez, manager John Gibbons and first base coach Tim Leiper were suspended. Gibbons, who got three games, was ejected from three of the five contests in which he wasn’t banned.
Then the Minnesota Twins chirped Josh Donaldson, and when Phil Hughes quite blatantly threw at him twice, Gibbons got tossed for understandably asking why the control and command righty was still in the game. Quite rightly, the reigning AL MVP wondered why Major League Baseball wasn’t acting to protect hitters.
Hard to blame the Blue Jays if they feel aggrieved right now.
“My reaction is those are credible concerns,” president and CEO Mark Shapiro said in an interview Tuesday. “However, I feel like those need to be handled privately, and that we need to focus on how we’re playing, and that any energy spent on anything else right now is energy spent for me and for all of us away from what’s most important – that we have a sense of urgency about our team playing the best it can play.”
They found no satisfaction on that front in the series opener against the New York Yankees, either, as a much-better-than-it-looked effort from R.A. Dickey was wasted in a 6-0 loss.
Nathan Eovaldi allowed only two hits in six innings of work and the bullpen none as the offence remained stuck in neutral, and to compound matters Troy Tulowitzki left the game after the top of the seventh with tightness in his right quad. He was hopeful of playing Wednesday.
“We’re searching for a spark, some kind of spark to get us going, to generate a little bit more energy, I think,” said Dickey, who allowed four runs on five hits and two walks in 6.2 innings. “The good news is this is not uncharted territory for us, this is not doom and gloom in here. We have the experience in here to arrest what’s going on and return to the brand of baseball that we know best.
“We just need a little bit of a spark.”
Taking three of four from the Twins over the weekend helped, but the Blue Jays again struggled to mount much of an attack at the plate, most critically failing to cash in with runners at second and third with one out in the third after Donaldson bunted – not a typo – the runners over.
“We just can’t get anything going, obviously,” said Tulowitzki. “We ran into a good pitcher, tried to do some things, you saw JD drop down a bunt, trying to get us going, but offensively, couldn’t get anything going.”
The loss dropped the Blue Jays to 22-25 on the season and 10-14 against the American League East as they entered a stretch in which they’ll play 19 of the next 26 games against their division rivals. Their next 11 games are all against the Yankees and Boston Red Sox, and with seven other contests versus the Baltimore Orioles, this is a pretty meaningful piece of the schedule.
“I would normally look at the time between now and June 19 and say it’s an important stretch,” said Shapiro. “It’s safe to say we’re going to learn a lot about the team over that stretch, but based upon what’s happened the last year, we could end up in a very grey level of understanding.
“I guess what I’m hoping is that we assert ourselves over this stretch between now and when we finish with Baltimore on June 19, and when we look up at that point and say, ‘Hey, we played extremely well against primarily our division rivals over that period of time and demonstrated that we are in this race.’ I would be hesitant to say we’ll be able to draw any conclusions either way from that time period.”
The Blue Jays certainly can’t win the division during that time, but they can definitely bury themselves. And given that the stretch takes them right to June 19, the time when clubs transition from working on the draft to preparing for the non-waiver trade deadline, a strong showing is paramount.
“A front office’s job is to plan for every scenario,” said Shapiro. “Because of limited resources, we’re clearly focused on the draft right now, once the draft concludes we’ll be focused on every scenario, understanding the marketplace, understanding where the opportunities are to improve, to make trades that may subtract but still add back players, and look at every alternative that exists in the trade market.”
Charting a course for July is more layered this season with 10 pending free agents on the roster, Bautista and Edwin Encarnacion chief among them. If the Blue Jays fall out of the race early, there will be an opportunity to swap them for future assets better than compensatory draft picks.
On the flip side, if they pull back into the race, there will be incentive to add given how short the pending window of opportunity is. Injured lefty Franklin Morales’ $2 million recently became guaranteed but Shapiro says that from a financial perspective, “we will still have some opportunity to work.”
A bigger challenge on that front may be in not having the pieces to pull off deals rather than the money to make them happen after Alex Anthopoulos’ pre-deadline spree last summer stripped down the farm system. It worked, but the comeuppance is nigh.
“Last year we had an influx of people coming in here at a time when we were one game under .500 and that catapulted us into a different brand of baseball, I felt like,” said Dickey. “It’s not that we’re not capable without an addition, we’re just looking for some momentum, I think.
“This game is so much about momentum. When you get rolling, you feel like you’re invincible, and we need that feeling again. But the only thing that’s going to give us that feeling is our performance on the field. If we string some good games against a good team together that will help our confidence overall.”
The players currently in place, more or less, are going to have to make it happen. With the way schedule lines up with the baseball calendar for the Blue Jays, they need to get started sooner rather than later.
