SEATTLE – Back on June 13, when Santiago Espinal made a throw across the diamond that ripped through the webbing of Vladimir Guerrero Jr.’s glove at first base, it was easy for the Toronto Blue Jays to shrug it off as a quirky moment. Things were generally going well at the time, they were up 11-1 on the Baltimore Orioles in the game and all the faulty leather did was delay the inevitable. There wasn’t even a page to turn.
Now, though, amid the crucible of frustration the Blue Jays find themselves in, every mistake, every disappointment tends to get amplified and linger. So in the fifth inning Sunday, at the end of 31 games in 30 days and a particularly miserable road trip, the Gabriel Moreno relay on what should have been an inning-ending 1-2-3 double play that ripped through the webbing on another Guerrero glove may very well have ripped through far more.
For a team nearing a boiling point, each blip becomes tougher and tougher to overcome. Guerrero’s faulty glove led to one run that cut a Blue Jays lead to 4-2. Another run followed on an infield single, and the Seattle Mariners tied the game in the sixth when Tim Mayza hit Carlos Santana and two wild pitches past Moreno led to a Cal Raleigh sac fly.
Bo Bichette hit the reset button with a solo shot that restored the Blue Jays lead in the seventh. But Moreno, struggling against the sun, dropped a J.P. Crawford pop-up to open the eighth and Santana, who had already homered in the second, promptly went deep for the third time in two games, giving the Mariners a 6-5 victory that completed a four-game sweep.
“That changed the game. And that's just tough frigging luck,” manager Charlie Montoyo lamented of the lost double play. “I've seen it twice now, all this year, and it usually doesn't happen to the same guy twice. But it happened.”
A dagger to end a 1-6 road trip with a ninth loss in 10 outings, the Blue Jays are no longer trying to turn the page on a bad day, but rather trying to shut the book on a maddening stretch. The Blue Jays sent the first Guerrero glove that broke to the manufacturer for inspection. He declined to speak after the game, too frustrated over what happened to the second.
“This whole road trip, it's a little bit of Murphy's Law, right? If something can go wrong, it has,” said veteran reliever David Phelps, who induced the double-play ball that wasn’t. “The good thing is we've got a lot of season left. Probably not a bad time for an off-day. Regroup a little bit and ready to go against Philly on Tuesday.”
Facing a bullpen day in the absence of Kevin Gausman, Sunday could not have shaped up much better for the Blue Jays as Max Castillo shoved for four innings despite throwing three frames of mop-up duty Thursday, George Springer went deep on the first pitch of the game, Raimel Tapia homered in the fourth and Bichette opened things up with a two-run single in the fifth.
Even more steadying is that they did it against the tough Logan Gilbert, giving another heavily Canadian crowd of 37,694 at T-Mobile Park reason to believe this game would turn out differently.
But trying to extend Castillo into the fifth backfired when Raleigh and Adam Frazier hit consecutive one-out singles. In came Phelps who walked Justin Upton before Sam Haggerty hit a weak chopper back to the mound, which he promptly relayed home.
Moreno then fired to first and the game, much like Guerrero’s glove, began to unravel under the growing weight of a mind-bending stretch.
“These last three games, it's been a battle,” said Phelps. “The last two nights, they were great games and we got beat. That's it. But we played good baseball. It's just when things are going bad, it just magnifies everything else. Over 162 games, you're going to see a lot of crazy stuff. It seems like we've had it in one week right now. To a man we know the talent in that room, we know the calibre of player, the calibre of people. We're not worried. We go through stretches. We're on the verge of turning it around. And as soon as we do — it's going to take one thing, big hit, big pitch, whatever it is — we're going to go on a run. This team is capable of doing it. We've seen it. Just got to really fight through it right now.”
The Blue Jays had seemingly fortified themselves by taking two of three from the Boston Red Sox and then winning the first two games of a series against the Tampa Bay Rays. But then Gausman took a line drive off his right ankle in the first game of a doubleheader against the Rays, real-world tragedy struck when first base coach Mark Budzinski’s daughter Julia was killed in a boating accident and a building Blue Jays surge instead became a wild slide.
The Blue Jays have their first off-day since June 23 on Monday although another emotional day looms as the club has arranged a charter for a sizable portion of the team and staff to attend Julia Budzinski’s funeral.
“I’ve been through some tough stretches and some tragedies over the course of my career. Everyone handles it differently. There are a lot of us who our hearts are still with Bud and his family,” said Phelps. “We get that news and the next thing you know, we have a West Coast trip. It's been a grind. At the end of the day, nobody's going to feel sorry for us. Nothing's going to get us through it other than ourselves. We just need to keep picking each other up, from all aspects of the game, just lifting each other up and pulling together 26 guys and really just going out there and start winning some baseball games.”
The Mariners have done that in spades lately, as the victory was their eighth straight, moving into a tie with the Blue Jays for the third wild-card spot, two games ahead of Baltimore and Cleveland.
That’s left the Blue Jays grasping for any positives they can find, with Montoyo pointing to Bichette’s go-ahead homer in the seventh as evidence of his team’s ongoing fight, even in the face of the current frustrations.
“I've been around for the game for a long time,” he said. “Baseball can be cruel sometimes when things are not going right. It's time (Monday) to reset. Take a break. And again, we didn't play bad. We're not playing bad baseball. So a break here, a break there we'll get back on track.”
A task all the more difficult amid mounting frustrations during a stretch that’s thrown them off the path.
