TORONTO – Before the #FireGibbons set gets too far ahead of itself, the Toronto Blue Jays aren’t there yet with manager John Gibbons, nor pitching coach Pete Walker for that matter. A real ugly dip in the next few weeks might bring them to that point, sure, but only once the front office is completely bereft of ideas to turn the club’s fortunes.
Any slate of dismissals will be an act of last resort, a desperate roll of the dice to stave off a potential asset sell-off that will come if the team is legitimately out of it in a month or so. At present those calls are down the road, not around the corner.
Of course all such considerations will be rendered moot if Aaron Sanchez’s latest step forward in Tuesday night’s 3-2 loss to the Los Angeles Angels can be replicated on a regular basis, and the rest of the rotation doesn’t continually force the offence to outhit it struggles.
Really, that’s where the season hinges for the 18-23 Blue Jays, and unless a new manager or pitching coach arrives with Johnny Cueto stuffed in his duffel bag, it’s not going to matter who’s in charge. As things stand now, club president Paul Beeston hasn’t escalated any plans for change up the ladder to ownership, but it’s likely that he’ll be the driving force behind any potential change.
General manager Alex Anthopoulos has yet to fire a manager under his watch – Cito Gaston retired and John Farrell was traded – and at minimum he’ll look to rejig the rotation with lefty Daniel Norris and give that a shot before sacking Gibbons becomes a real possibility. It’s hard to blame Gibbons when opposing teams consistently get better starting pitching and better bullpen work.
However Beeston, who has the authority to run the team as he sees fit within the confines of the financial plan approved by ownership, could always force the matter. Whether he’d do that or not is unclear, since he fought for both Anthopoulos and Gibbons to remain in their jobs last fall.
Still, given his retirement at year’s end, and the potential for a pre-trade-deadline sell-off if the season doesn’t turn, perhaps Beeston is taking a different viewpoint on this one. Whatever the case, that someone in the front office would anonymously describe the first quarter of the season as an "(expletive) disaster" to Steve Simmons of the Toronto Sun demonstrates how frustration is building.
Winning cures all, of course, and if the Blue Jays can begin finding ways to pull out close games – they have one victory when they’ve score four runs, one when they’ve scored three and none with two or less – they should right themselves.
"We’re not very good at them, I guess you can say," Gibbons said when asked what he makes of his team’s struggles in close games. "We’re playing good, clean baseball for the most part, we’re just getting beat. Either we’re getting outpitched, or when they shut our offence down we’re not holding them in check enough, that’s the way it goes sometimes.
"But the guys are busting it every day, that’s all you can ask for, and it’s hurting. I know one thing they’ve been doing all year, they’ll show up tomorrow and we’ll go get them again."
Sanchez looked primed to give them a rare such win, but coughed up a 2-1 lead in the seventh when Kole Calhoun walked, moved to second on David Freese’s groundout, took third on a wild pitch and after a Matt Joyce walk, scored on a Chris Iannetta single.
The 22-year-old right-hander came back out for the eighth, allowed two of his first three batters to reach, and watched the tying run eventually score on a Freese sacrifice fly set up when Josh Donaldson tried to tag Erick Aybar running to third base and missed instead of trying for an out at first on Calhoun’s grounder. That left the bases loaded, and Roberto Osuna couldn’t get the strikeout.
"I thought there was going to be a play at third with Aybar there," said Donaldson. "I was wrong and it ended up costing us."
Despite that, Sanchez allowed three runs in a career-best 7.1 innings on six hits and three walks with five strikeouts. Until the seventh and eighth, he was consistently in the zone, working ahead and often times overpowering.
The only damage against him through the first six was Calhoun’s opposite field solo shot.
"We did a lot of stuff between last start to this start, and I think it proved," said Sanchez, who save for a rough second inning in Baltimore last week has delivered three straight strong outings. "Stayed back a lot better, I think that’s the biggest key, and everything works off balance. When I got that, everything was out in front and just clicking. …
"If you go back a couple of starts ago, it was there, and I showed spurts of it in my start against Baltimore, it was there for the majority of the game."
The Blue Jays managed precious little against Hector Santiago other than Donaldson’s leadoff homer in the first and the third baseman’s sacrifice fly in the fifth. Santiago went seven innings, while Joe Smith and Huston Street made quick work of them in the eighth and ninth to close things out.
"That’s a big game for Sanchie, he pitched good enough to win, the other guy did, too," said Gibbons. "That was the problem. He’ll take a lot from this game, he went deep into the game, he was very efficient and it just shows you what he can do when he’s throwing strikes. He can be a groundball machine. You look at his starts and he just keeps getting better, and better, and better. When the season is all said and done he’s going to be on his way."
The Blue Jays need him and the rest of the rotation to come around sooner than that, and the staff as a whole must find ways to make two runs work on occasion. So far that hasn’t happened, but Gibbons isn’t to blame for that – Anthopoulos is the one who sent him to a gun fight with a knife – and the team’s ability to turn that around will dictate whether or not he or someone else pays for it.