ST. PETERSBURG, Fla. – Let’s not be empty or trite about this. To say that something about the Tampa Bay Rays seems to bring out the worst in the Toronto Blue Jays is a gross oversimplification of a matter that demands proper examination.
It’s just one of those things isn’t a good enough answer.
A three-game sweep suffered in yet another lost weekend at Tropicana Field, capped by Sunday’s 5-1 loss, brought the matter back to the forefront for the Blue Jays, who are now 1-6 versus the Rays this young season.
Whether it was game-plan, approach or execution, they were outplayed, and it’s hard to reconcile how they can play so crisply in sweeping three games from the Baltimore Orioles only to play so poorly immediately afterwards versus the Rays.
Talk about Jekyll and Hyde stuff.
"Over the course of the year we’ve got to be consistent," said Mark Buehrle, who pitched far better than his pitching line. "When we’re scoring 10 runs a game it’s good, I don’t want to say we need to score 10 a game, but we just need to be consistent all around in all aspects of the game and it seems we’re not doing that.
"We have a few games good and a few games bad. Listen, when we’re going good we’re not that good and when we’re going bad we’re not that bad. We’ve got to keep an even head on our shoulders, realize we’re not as bad as we’re playing right now and try to go to Boston and play a little better."
An interesting test begins Monday at Fenway Park against the Red Sox, and who knows which Blue Jays team shows up for the first meeting of the year between the AL East rivals.
For their sake it better not be the one that played dreadfully Friday, gave up a late lead four outs away from victory Saturday, and stunk it up Sunday.
"There are some pretty good teams in this division, we still have a really good team, there’s no reason to be down (because) we’ve lost some games here in Tampa where they’ve kind of had our number a little bit," said Josh Donaldson, who had one of five Blue Jays hits and is now 21-for-53 over his last 13 games.
"That being said, I’m looking forward to how the season is going to play out because I feel like we have a lot of talent here. … This isn’t an excuse, we’ve had a couple of guys banged up, there are some guys still trying to get it going a little bit. When everybody gets in their groove, we’re going to do some damage."
The finale was always going to be a difficult task with Jose Bautista missing a fifth straight game with shoulder soreness, Jose Reyes (playing through a cracked rib) getting some rest and Chris Archer on the mound. The ace-in-the-making righty was dealing once again, holding the Blue Jays to just three base-runners over seven dominant innings, setting down 11 straight in one stretch.
He’s now gone a Rays record four straight starts without allowing an earned run and the Blue Jays didn’t manage to score until Justin Smoak’s two-out RBI single in the top of the ninth.
"The one thing they do here is they all master the changeup," manager John Gibbons said of the Rays. "When they get here, even some of the power guys, they come up with a changeup, split, whatever it might be, and that really sets them off. It’s like we’ve said over and over, the key to pitching is throwing your off-speed stuff behind in the count, and the changeup, other than a well-located fastball, can really be the best pitch in baseball if you can develop a good one. They do a lot of that.
"Take a guy like Archer who throws that hard, then you back it off. … That makes it awful tough."
That’s why it was so costly when Smoak struck out to end the first after a Donaldson single and Edwin Encarnacion walk, and when Kevin Pillar went down chasing and Ryan Goins grounded out meekly after a Dalton Pompey double in the fifth.
Chances to score off Archer are rare, and given how stingy he is, the Blue Jays certainly needed to play better behind Buehrle, who was far more effective than the five runs on 13 hits and a walk in 5.2 innings might suggest.
Brandon Guyer’s leadoff home run was certainly on the left-hander, but the Rays’ second run in the first, on a bloop Logan Forsythe RBI double off Devon Travis’s glove in right field with Michael Saunders charging hard, definitely wasn’t.
Pompey dropped a Kevin Kiermaier fly ball in the second, while a weird hop off the turf in front of Donaldson in the third turned a double play grounder into a single and set the stage for a Guyer sacrifice fly that made it 3-0.
Four seeing-eye hits, the final one a two-out, two-run single by Guyer in the sixth, put the Rays up 5-0 and ended Buehrle’s afternoon.
With crisper play behind him, the Blue Jays would at worst have been down 3-0, possibly less.
"I feel better about this game than I did about my previous two," said Buehrle. "When you get down going up against a guy like Archer – look at his numbers, he’s been on this year – it’s a bad spot to put our team into. But I tried to throw up some zeroes, they got some base hits here and there, had some bad luck with rolling infield hits, but that’s the way baseball goes."
Topping it all off, even when they did things right they nearly went wrong.
In the fifth inning Evan Longoria lined a single off the left-field wall, turned for second but was clearly beaten by Pompey’s strong throw. Second base umpire Andy Fletcher, in poor position didn’t immediately make a call, crew chief Jerry Meals stepped into the void at third base and signalled out, and moments later Fletcher signalled safe before deferring to Meals.
Rays manager Kevin Cash came out to argue but didn’t challenge as replays clearly showed Travis getting the tag down.
If it was just rough weekend, you could understand – bad series happen. But the Blue Jays have now dropped three straight series versus the Rays and are 1-20-2 in their last 23 series at Tropicana Field.
"Whatever quirky things or weird things that happened in the past, we need to leave them exactly there, in the past," said Bautista, who took some swings in the cage and is hoping for a return in Boston but remains day-to-day. "We’ll have places where all those quirky things go in our favour, we just have to figure out how to flip the misfortunes we’ve had here and turn them into victories.
"If we focus on all those weird things that happened we’re never going to get past them. The best thing is to look past them, forget them, don’t pay attention to them and focus on what truly lets you win games, which is executing, focusing and concentrating pitch-to-pitch on defence and offence."
They’ll need to be far better in all those areas against the Red Sox than they were versus the Rays.