TORONTO – Just past the quarter mark of the season, not only are the Toronto Blue Jays still searching for answers, the questions before them are only getting bigger. An offence that led all of baseball by 127 runs last season is ranked ninth in the American League, and the ongoing drop-off continues to cause a vexing bewilderment. Without an otherworldly lineup to carry the load, fissures in a bullpen that’s had more than its share of struggles have been exposed. Those two elements have saddled a starting rotation that’s been mostly brilliant so far with too much of the heavy lifting.
During a three-game sweep at the hands of the Tampa Bay Rays, capped by Wednesday night’s 6-3 loss, the starters hiccupped and it made for a really bad scene. The Blue Jays were outscored 31-7 as their losing streak reached a season-high five games, and they dropped four games below .500 at 19-23 for the first time this year. Some hope came with word that second baseman Devon Travis will continue his rehab at triple-A Buffalo starting Thursday, signalling a return is near, but that some are expecting the 25-year-old with all of 239 plate appearances to act as a saviour speaks to the current desperation.
It’s unfair to Travis, and the reality is there is no single panacea.
“I think this team understands that we’re going to get past this. We’ve just got to start playing better baseball … and that includes all phases, pitching, hitting, base-running, defence,” bench coach DeMarlo Hale, serving as manager while John Gibbons serves his three-game suspension, said before the game.
“That’s a good team in that locker-room and we are a good team. There are some good players and we trust them. It’s going to change.”
To some degree things did change for the Blue Jays, as R.A. Dickey kept them from getting boat-raced again by the Rays, even though he ended up surrendering five runs, four earned, in six innings of work.
Most of the damage against came via the home run, as solo shots by Logan Morrison and Desmond Jennings put the Rays up 2-1 in the fourth, while a two-run drive by Kevin Kiermaier in the sixth opened up a 5-2 edge. Dickey hadn’t surrendered three homers in outing since he gave up four on June 27, 2014 against the White Sox.
“They’re playing with a lot of confidence,” Dickey said of the Rays. “They ambushed a couple of first-pitch knuckleballs and hit them out of the park, that’s going to happen when you’re a knuckleballer. You try to get ahead with a strike and they put some good swings on some balls, they’re seeing the ball well, and they’re homers. It’s not always going to be so.”
Last year, the 5-2 deficit would have been no biggie for the Blue Jays, but not right now.
They managed all of four hits against Jake Odorizzi, Erasmo Ramirez and closer Alex Colome, although three of them were home runs from newcomer Jimmy Paredes, Michael Saunders and Edwin Encarnacion.
Despite the pop, the production remains a ways away from the relentless machine this lineup should be at the plate, and getting back there has been a season-long quest.
“One through nine, I just want to see professional at-bats,” said Saunders. “Everyone cares, everyone is working their tail off before the game, in the cages, BP, everyone is putting in the time and the effort. All you can hope for is that guys consistently put up professional at-bats. This is a very results-oriented game and it’s easy to get caught up in that. Take a look at Kevin Pillar, he hammered the ball the last few days and has nothing to show for it. Things like that, it’s easy to get discouraged if the results aren’t there, but we just need to individually concentrate on putting up professional at-bats, moving runners over, getting the runners in with less than two from third.
“We hit three homers today, but they were all solo shots. If we have one or two guys on, it’s a completely different game.”
The Blue Jays have 47 homers so far this season, 24 of them solo shots, 15 with one man, aboard, six with two runners on and a single grand slam. Though their homers per game is down from 1.43 in 2015 to 1.12, the bigger difference is that right now 79 of their 168 runs, or 47 per cent, of their offence has come via the longball compared to 371 of 891 runs, or 41.6 per cent, last year.
The gap is rooted in an inability to create sustained rallies, and on the rare occasions when the Blue Jays do build innings, they squander their chances, like going 0-for-6 with runners in scoring position Wednesday.
“The only thing that kind of sticks out that is different is the amount of strikeouts,” Jose Bautista said after Tuesday’s game. “We’re a group that has good plate discipline, we’re taking a lot of borderline pitches that just aren’t going our way, but that happens. We’ve got to grind those at-bats out and not let it affect us negatively and play the game. Any way we can we’ve got to scrap (out) runs here and there. And when those three-run homers come, they’ll come, we can’t just go up to the plate all the time in search of that.”
The Blue Jays strikeout rate entering the game stood at 23.3 per cent, well down from the near 30 per cent it soared to earlier in the season, but still significantly higher than the 18.5 per cent they posted in 2015.
But with so many other key numbers down, too, this isn’t a simple fix. With 120 games remaining they have plenty of time to correct things, but right now they don’t seem any closer to finding any solutions while the losses pile up.
