TORONTO – In some ways, a baseball season requires a leap of faith. Players work throughout the off-season and spring and trust that it will show on the field. Coaching staffs build game-plans and strategies believing they will effectively leverage the available talent. Front offices make projections and wait for reality to match the forecasts. Everyone’s conviction gets tested by the grind of 162 games, which in small and medium samples invariably creates divergence between expectations and results. Faith well-placed is rewarded with a soft landing.
Through 81 games, at 44-37 after a 6-1 victory over the San Francisco Giants on Wednesday night, the Toronto Blue Jays are in the air and there’s no certainty on how they end up hitting the ground.
So far, they’ve “consistently been inconsistent,” as manager John Schneider so aptly put it. In spurts, they have played inspired, crisp, complete baseball, looking like a team capable of winning in whatever fashion a given game demands. In other spurts, they have looked like a lesser version of who they were the past two seasons, lacking the big-blow offence that bludgeoned opponents time and again.
Despite that, they are in the thick of a wild-card race that should run at least five teams deep in the American League, with a significant gap that will be very difficult to make up between them and the AL-East leading Tampa Bay Rays.
There are three months to impact.
“I feel very good about the potential of this team playing even better,” general manager Ross Atkins said during a 22-minute pre-game meeting with media. “Obviously you'd love to be at the top of the division and have a better record, but I feel like we're standing in a solid position.”
Depending on your level of faith, there’s both reason to doubt and reason to believe.
First and foremost is the offence, which has regularly built innings of opportunity and routinely struggled to fulfil them. A running theme this season has been their problems hitting with runners in scoring position and through the first 80 games, the discrepancy between their numbers with the bases empty has been a major head-scratcher.
A 4-for-6-with-runners-in-scoring-position first inning Wednesday, and a 6-for-13 game overall, is a step in normalizing that, underlining the ability that’s there. They ambushed a quality starter in Logan Webb, going George Springer double, Bo Bichette RBI single, Brandon Belt run-scoring double right out of the gate. RBI doubles by Daulton Varsho and Whit Merrifield, plus an RBI single by Danny Jansen later in the inning made it, at 5-0, the Blue Jays’ most productive first of the season.
With the club running a third bullpen game since the demotion of Alek Manoah, advanced from Saturday to buy an extra day of rest for Chris Bassitt, Jose Berrios and Yusei Kikuchi, the early outburst was well-timed.
Trevor Richards, one of the club’s most unheralded contributors this season, threw three shutout frames, bulk-arm Bowden Francis followed with four innings of one-run ball while Trent Thornton and Yimi Garcia mopped up the final two frames.
It really couldn’t have gone much better before a crowd of 36,685.
“You can't really speak enough about what he's done for us,” Schneider said of Richards, “in that role tonight or coming out of the bullpen for one inning, or multiple innings.”
But the key was the offence, which included a Springer RBI single in the seventh, coming through.
“As a whole, we've done an OK job,” Springer said in assessing the first half. “Everybody in that locker room understands that. There's a lot of room for improvement. But at the end of the day, we're still in an OK position where we're still within striking distance, obviously, of a lot of things. We've got 81 to go. A lot can happen, I don't think this team has played its best baseball yet, which is a good sign. I expect that'll happen then we'll have to see what happens.”
The approach at the plate employed by the Blue Jays on Wednesday, a consistent point of emphasis for Schneider, is one path to that best baseball Springer mentioned.
If they had the same batting average with runners in scoring position as they did with the bases empty, for instance, that would equal roughly 23 more hits thus far. Given the number of games they’ve lost that would have been changed by a key hit or two, that’s at least a small handful of extra wins.
That’s how thin the margin can be between a good team and a great one, which is why the Blue Jays continue to believe their best is still to come.
“Guys forget, when you're in that situation, the pressure's on the pitcher and they're going to default to what they think you're going to chase,” Schneider said. “A walk in that situation is just as good if you know the next guy behind you is going to have the same approach. So some of it is pitchers executing and some of it is us not executing an approach. That's going to happen. But every pitcher in this league is good. I always go back to Marcus Semien saying pitchers drive nice cars, too, you know what I mean? They're doing their job. And our job as an offence is to try to counteract what they're doing. That's what gives us a lot of confidence going forward. When that does happen, we have a very capable group of guys to do it.”
A fully firing offence should also ease the stress on a rotation that’s really been a stability force, especially since Manoah was sent to the Florida Complex League to find his past form.
The other four starters have held firm despite the extra burden and if not for the work of Richards and Francis, the one bulk arm who had been performing at triple-A Buffalo prior to his recall, the Blue Jays would be in a serious bind.
Still, Atkins conceded the situation isn’t ideal and indicated the club’s plan isn’t to run a modified four-man beyond the all-star break. The problem is Manoah may not be ready by then and Hyun Jin Ryu will likely need more runway to recover from Tommy John surgery, so they won’t necessarily have a plethora of options.
Francis has been getting consideration for a proper start, although the Blue Jays have appreciated his ability to pitch in multiple roles, something he’s managed by “staying in the moment, staying present and just being adaptable and trying not to get stuck in a way being rigid,” he said.
As for Richards, he’s been too valuable a Swiss-Army-Knife arm capable for any situation to be stretched out further to go five innings, and has settled into a “whatever works” role. “I felt good, felt like I had more in the tank,” he said of possibly pitching deeper Wednesday, “but also I know we have a series this weekend and more games coming up, so I'm just staying ready.”
All of that will factor into the Blue Jays’ trade deadline plans and it was interesting to hear Atkins say “the obvious area (of opportunity) would be adding a starting pitcher.” But he contextualized that by adding that “we need to balance that with the progress of Alek Manoah and Hyun Jin Ryu,” underlining how fluid everything is for the Blue Jays over the next month.
“We’ll think about how we can improve in absolutely any area, but also feel very good about the players on this team and the trend that they have of playing better baseball as of late,” added Atkins. “We feel like there's a lot of potential for this team that is currently here to continue to improve, as well.”
By and large the Blue Jays set their team over the winter and took their leap, believing they had enough to be capable of a deep October run. With 81 games remaining before the ground arrives, they’d better hope they were right.
