TORONTO–These days don’t come around very often: bright blue skies with just a wisp of fluffy white clouds. The dome roof was open for 45,000 people to soak in the first hint of summer and the Toronto Blue Jays are in first place, all by their lonesome, in late May.
Not enough?
How about J.A. Happ pitching seven tidy innings to help the Blue Jays stake out a 3-1 win, or lumbering Melky Cabrera making a potentially game-saving catch while leaping into the left field wall in the sixth, both in the cause of the Blue Jays completing a weekend sweep of the Oakland A’s, who arrived in Toronto with the best record in baseball?
These are good times. These are times to be savoured. Do we really need the caveats? Well, just to be safe:
It’s early, and while the Blue Jays have won six straight and 16 of their past 21 to push their record to a division leading 29-22, there are still 111 games to be played. Their starting pitching — even if they are fourth in the A.L. with an ERA of 3.66 – will be classified as rickety until proven otherwise. Jose Reyes, arguably the club’s most important single player, has hamstrings like a tightly strung banjo.
But those issues are for June, July and August. If this club gets to September, everything else is gravy after last season’s graveyard of a season, a crushing capper for nearly 20 years of nearly meaningless baseball. A year ago the Blue Jays were 10.5 games out; Happ was sidelined with a fractured skull and sprained knee; Reyes was out with an ankle injury. Josh Johnson was taking a regular turn in the rotation.
Against that backdrop, days like Sunday have to be treasured. The last time the Blue Jays were alone in first place this late in the season was July 6, 2000 — in that context, things are looking way up.
“Baseball is crazy,” said Reyes who is proving the impact he can have on a team when healthy. “Last year at this time I wasn’t playing, I was in my house with my ankle injury. Right now I enjoy the game so much; we’re in first place, we win a lot of ball games. What else can I say? Hopefully we continue to play this way because we’re really enjoying this.”
Where does a roll come from? Who knows. Jays manager John Gibbons will claim the seeds were planted late last season when he saw a clubhouse full of new players finally begin to show signs of being a team. But he’s not going to over think it, not now.
“I remember last year one of the questions as we tried to bring together so many new faces was how do you make a team out of it,” Gibbons said. “Sometimes it never happens. I saw it [happening] at the end of last season and at spring training this year it was different, just a different feel. You can have all the talent in the world, but you still have to be a team.
“[But] did I see it coming? You hope to get on a nice little roll, but I don’t know if you ever see it coming,” he said. “We’re just playing good baseball. The starting pitching has been good, the offence is alive, the bullpen has been solid. We’re doing some things on the bases.”
His advice?
“Ride it,” said Gibbons. “Ride it.”
As a sample of what could be on tap, the events of the past week, and Sunday in particular, are a pretty delicious appetizer.
The Jays are emerging as a likeable team, with signs of life throughout the lineup. They can bash – a well-pitched game was cracked first by Edwin Encarnacion’s 12th home run in May, a record for any month by a Blue Jay – but the menu is more diversified than that.
All you need to know about what a fun baseball team looks like was right there in the first inning as Reyes led off with a six-pitch walk and then stole second. When Melky Cabrera grounded out to A’s shortstop Jed Lowrie, Reyes turned his back to the plate and faced him, dancing on his toes, daring the infielder to try and catch him in a rundown. The instant Lowrie opted for the sure out at first, Reyes was off with the throw to first, beating the return to third base.
Reyes didn’t score that inning, but his presence was felt. And in the fifth even though he was thrown out at home, it was electrifying stuff. The same approach paid off in the bottom of the seventh as he led off with a single, stole second, stole third and scored the Blue Jays insurance run on a sacrifice fly by Jose Bautista to give Toronto a 3-0 lead.
“Last year it was supposed to be this way, but sometimes baseball isn’t going to go your way,” said Reyes, who has scored 15 runs in his 17 games with nine stolen bases, proof his troublesome hamstrings are behaving for the moment. “Same players, same talent, now we’re playing like we’re supposed to play like.”
The game ended with the sun-drenched crowd standing, stomping their feet and roaring as closer Casey Janssen pitched a perfect ninth, earning his seventh consecutive save since coming off the disabled list, and his 23rd straight going back to last August.
An afternoon at the ballpark in Toronto doesn’t get much better. It hasn’t been better for a long, long time.