The Blue Jays offence is usually elite. This weekend, it was anything but

TORONTO — It was the fourth inning Sunday when Matt Chapman stepped to the plate with two on and two out to face Tucker Davidson. Chapman watched a fastball go by off the outside corner, then a breaking ball, too. Looking for something to drive on the fat part of the plate in an action count, Chapman saw Davidson’s 86-m.p.h. slider spin out of his hand on an inviting plane, sat back, and had a rip.

At 110-m.p.h. off the bat, the ball cruised 408 feet to deep centre, where it thudded off the outfield wall as Bo Bichette jogged home easily from second base. And with that, a mighty cheer went up from the 44,318 lining Rogers Centre’s blue rows on a magnificent summer Sunday, for the local baseball club had scored a run.

It was Toronto’s first since Thursday, when Cavan Biggio slid home underneath Kevin Plawecki’s tag with a 10th-inning game-winner at Fenway Park. Its first in 21 innings. Its first in nearly 65 hours. And the only time Toronto’s offence gave its fans much to cheer about all weekend long.

After getting shutout by the Los Angeles Angels on Friday and Saturday, the Blue Jays wheezed, kicked, and sputtered offensively again in Sunday’s matinee, falling 8-3 and getting swept at home by a 55-73 team in the process.

Over the course of 72 hours, the Blue Jays were outscored 22-3, out-hit 32-17, and out-classed generally by a club that, even after winning these three, sits 14 games back of the third American League wild card spot Toronto currently inhabits.

For the series, the Blue Jays went 1-for-19 with runners in scoring position and left 27 runners on base. A physical error was recorded in each of the three games. Mental ones were even more prevalent.

“Attention to detail and a good offensive approach,” Blue Jays interim manager John Schneider said when asked what his club had to do to play with more consistency. “Look at the standings and understand that every game is important. And three hours out of your day needs to be completely focused on trying to win. That's the goal moving forward.”

It was about as anticlimactic a weekend as one could imagine following Toronto’s barnstorming trip through the Bronx and Back Bay the week prior, when it took six of seven from the New York Yankees and Boston Red Sox. But that run was itself a course-reversal from the stretch that preceded it, when the Blue Jays lost 9 of 13.

Before that? The Blue Jays won 13 of 16. A streak that followed a skid with losses in 12 of 17. Check in on the Blue Jays at any arbitrary point over the last two months and the club's either been soaring at great heights or plummeting in a tailspin. But pull out and look at its last 52 games since June 29 and you find a perfectly .500 (26-26) team.

In the vain pursuit of tidy narratives to explain the randomness and chaos of a 162-game baseball season, many will point to Toronto’s record at home vs. on the road, its success or lack thereof against teams on either side of .500, its performance in this uniform colour or that. Turns out the Blue Jays are not unlike all baseball teams and all baseball players — inherently streaky.

"I think the word that's going to follow the 2022 Blue Jays for years to come is streaky. We've had more highs and lows this year than any team that I've been a part of,” said Blue Jays starter Ross Stripling.

“You're not going to see us get too down because after lows, we've had a lot of highs. So, I think we're ready to start playing good baseball again. Coming off a really good road trip and you get swept by the Angels — we didn't expect it. But they came and punched us in the mouth and took three from us.”

That was the unexpected macro outcome of this weekend’s series for the Blue Jays — three losses. But the micro ones are just as flabbergasting in the context of how the team has otherwise played.

Stripling coughed up a pair of home runs in the span of two innings after allowing only six over 97 prior. Toronto’s defence — rated within MLB’s 10-best no matter which defensive metric you prefer — was sloppy and unfocused, extending innings and handing the Angels runs. Its bullpen — a quiet strength over the last two months, ranking second in the AL in ERA (2.86) and batting average against (.216) over that span — surrendered nine runs over nine innings in the series (or seven over eight if you remove the one Whit Merrifield pitched).

And its offence, one of MLB’s best featuring eight qualified hitters with a league-average wRC+ or higher, was entirely unthreatening. Chapman’s fourth-inning drive and George Springer’s consolation solo shot in the ninth produced Toronto’s lone runs of the weekend that could be reasonably described as earned.

Toronto’s only other was the result of seventh-inning charity, as Jo Adell badly misplayed a Lourdes Gurriel Jr. looper in left field, allowing Vladimir Guerrero Jr. to go first-to-home on what was scored a triple. After averaging 5.4 runs per game in New York and Boston’s hostile environments, the Blue Jays averaged one per contest over a weekend played in front of massive home crowds.

Of course, there were opportunities. Two runners were stranded in the second as Merrifield flew out on a 1-2 Davidson slider; another was left in the third as Guerrero grounded into an inning-ending double play; and two more were erased in the fifth when Gurriel grounded a full-count heater directly into a 6-3 double play at the end of a long battle with Angels reliever Andrew Wantz.

And yet, the missed opportunity most will remember came in the sixth after Bichette and Teoscar Hernandez scorched one-out singles. A pitch after Chapman flew out, Merrifield chopped a grounder up the middle that Angels shortstop Andrew Velazquez had to slide beyond second base to corral.

But due to Hernandez running half-speed from first and opting not to slide aggressively into second, Velazquez had time to regroup and race to the bag for an inning-ending out that shouldn’t have been makable.

Now, the context. Hernandez exited a game eight days ago after fouling a ball off his left foot (X-rays returned negative) then exited another on Friday after again fouling a ball off the same area (X-rays also negative). Hernandez was out of the lineup Saturday due to discomfort from the resulting contusions and clearly wasn’t moving as well as he does when healthy while going first-to-third on Chapman’s double in the fourth.

That was again the case on Merrifield’s grounder in the sixth. But this time, it cost his team an opportunity. That’s the push-pull of the gamble the Blue Jays — desperate for an offensive spark — took by playing Hernandez Sunday. He was a threat at the dish as he reached base in three of his four plate appearances. But once he touched first, his lack of mobility became a disadvantage.

“Watching him today, he is grinding a little bit,” Schneider said. “Obviously, a guy that's important to our lineup and if he can't go 100 per cent — he battled through it today. We'll revisit it tomorrow to see how available he is.”

Meanwhile, Stripling gave the Blue Jays a quality start, allowing three earned on seven hits over his six innings. The results were perhaps a bit dissatisfying considering the standard Stripling’s set for himself of late, allowing two runs or fewer in 11 of 12 starts since joining the Blue Jays rotation in early June. But it ought to be good enough for his club to win on days its offence isn’t out of office for the weekend.

Stripling was through his first inning on seven pitches and his second on nine. But with two out in his third, Shohei Ohtani shot a 96.2-m.p.h. grounder to the right side that skipped up and over Bichette’s glove in the shift. That extended the inning for Luis Rengifo, who worked a 2-1 count before Stripling missed with a changeup out and over the plate that he didn’t get back.

Coughing up a two-run homer off your best pitch moments after getting a groundball that should have ended the inning is tough to stomach. But tougher still is giving up another one an inning later in a 1-2 count against the opposition’s 38-year-old back-up catcher who has a .277 slugging percentage on the season.

Kurt Suzuki’s had a fine career, but the pre-game odds of him hitting his 10th homer in the last two years off Stripling, who’d allowed only six on the season entering the day, would’ve been steep. But Suzuki got just enough of Stripling’s changeup and sent it to the perfect part of the ballpark, sailing a fly ball with a .080 xBA 364 feet over the left field wall.

"Two guys that don't normally do damage did damage, put up three runs there on the two home runs," Stripling said. “For the most part, feel like my stuff was good, my arsenal was good, pitch mix was fine. Just gave up a couple of home runs there. And that was that.”

And that was the kind of day it was for a Blue Jays team that played as the worst version of itself. Toronto’s bullpen had pitched to a 2.47 ERA over the club’s last 15 games, but the Angels scored three runs off Adam Cimber and Tim Mayza in the seventh, the big blow coming via Ohtani’s 28th home run of the season. Then Trout took David Phelps deep in the ninth, the first homer the Blue Jays right-hander had allowed in over 50 innings pitched this season.

Toronto’s defence has been a strength all year, as the Blue Jays began the day sixth across MLB in defensive runs saved (43) and eighth in outs above average (9). But among Sunday’s miscues were Springer letting a Trout liner fall from his grasp as he laid out for a catch in the seventh; Bichette and Merrifield getting their wires crossed on an Adell grounder that snuck through the infield in the eighth; and Guerrero letting Bichette’s throw on what should have been an inning-ending groundout go in-and-out of his glove at first moments later.

And then there’s the Blue Jays offence. It’s an elite one any way you slice it. Top-five across MLB in batting average, on-base percentage, slugging percentage, hard-hit rate, weighted runs created plus. But this weekend against one of the American League’s worst-performing teams, it was anything but.

That has to be the biggest area of focus for the Blue Jays going forward. Run production can cover up sloppy defence; it can overcome a leaky bullpen. It’s what this team is built upon. But it went 21 innings without scoring this weekend. There's no overcoming that.

And if there's a through-line between Toronto's many surges and slumps it's whether the club's bats are going or not. Offering satisfying explanations for a team's streakiness can be a difficult thing. Baseball's a maddening, complex game. But it can be a simple one if you let it. Just score more runs than the other guys.

“You've got to be consistent and you've got to understand that it's a really talented group and there's going to be ups and downs over the course of the season,” Schneider said. “At this point, it's up to the players to say this is not good enough. And I'm sure they're talking about that right now. And you trust that the guys who are leaders and the guys that are veterans on the team take care of that. And tomorrow starts a new series.”