Yes, it’s still early, but the Blue Jays are falling behind the pack and they have only themselves to blame
No, didn’t see this one coming.
And if others did, if using their powers of analysis and prognostication (rather than just trolling…) they foresaw a disastrous first month of the season for the Toronto Blue Jays, they really ought to take their talents to Vegas.
Not that the unexpected doesn’t happen in sport, not that favourites always deliver.
But even those who resisted the pre-season hype didn’t put their money on an April trifecta of last place, not a single series won and a hole dug that while theoretically not too deep to be overcome, at the very least represents one heck of a handicap.
And really with no asterisks attached.
There has been one catastrophic injury, to Jose Reyes, who before turning his ankle looked like the Jays’ best player, and several niggling ones, to Josh Johnson, Jose Bautista, Brett Lawrie, R.A. Dickey and Sergio “Damaged Goods” Santos. But look no further than the New York Yankees to see what a real casualty ward looks like, and how a team might overcome it.
Toronto’s starting pitching has by and large been OK, though certainly less dominant than expected. The bullpen, worked hard because those starters struggled to get into the late innings, has mostly done its job, and closer Casey Janssen—though he admits his shoulder is still not 100 percent after off-season surgery—has been superb, easing one of the big worries coming out of spring training.
The Jays aren’t hitting for average, but they are hitting home runs—especially Bautista, Edwin Encarnacion and J.P. Arencibia—so it’s not like the team has suffered a complete power outage.
No, we are talking about something a little less specific here, though anyone who watches the sport can spot it instantly: bad baseball. The Jays’ failings so far are the sum total of all those little things that can fall through the statistical cracks—not playing the game the way it should be played, the way it must be played, even by teams stacked with talent.
You have to make routine defensive plays and not give up outs. You have to turn double-plays when offered. You have to track down catchable fly balls in the outfield. You have to hit the cut-off man. Behind the plate, you have to block pitches in the dirt. On the mound, you can’t walk your way into trouble.
You have to advance runners, and cash them in from third with less than two outs. You have to sacrifice when appropriate. You have to be unselfish, especially with two strikes. An out made swinging for the fences, even by a proven big-time home run hitter, isn’t always the best option.
You should avoid showing up umpires.
To watch a veteran team act as though it has never been drilled in all of those boring but necessary rules of baseball orthodoxy is maddening. It’s maddening for fans, so desperate to have the chance to back a winner for the first time in two decades, and it has to be maddening for the guy hanging over the dugout rail, looking so helpless.
John Gibbons and his staff always figured to be the easy scapegoats if the 2013 Blue Jays failed to live up to expectations, and predictably, the first #firejohngibbons hashtag popped up on Twitter before the season was a week old. Forget for the moment that the job of hitting coaches and pitching coaches is fine adjustment once the season has started—not how to—and that any manager’s impact on the game is limited mostly to bullpen management and the odd strategic choice. When things go terribly wrong, somebody is going to get blamed.
There’s a chance that having been hired out of the blue for his second Jays stint, Gibbons has been a bit too deferential to his stars. There’s also the real possibility that during a spring training interrupted by the World Baseball Classic, he didn’t have a chance to get a true read on some of his players (Emilio Bonifacio, for instance, who is proving himself to be a gifted athlete who may not actually be able to play a position at the major-league level).
But Gibbons has filled out his lineup card the way most anyone would have while plugging injury holes and covering for defensive weaknesses, he has handled the relievers well, understanding that by necessity they have been overused, and had no choice but to employ David Bush or Aaron Laffey or the other cannon fodder offered him because of the organization’s lack of big-league-calibre pitching depth.
Gibbons even got thrown out of back-to-back games, which—like hockey fights—is a move designed to lift and inspire a team.
Other, more famous managers might have inspired a bit of added fear in the clubhouse, though they would be similarly flummoxed watching veteran big leaguers failing to do the basics, and failing to meld into a team.
Yes, as you may have heard, it’s still early. But as anyone who watches sports knows, in times of crisis, there’s nothing worse than being expendable.
This story originally appeared in Sportsnet magazine. Subscribe here.
