The Toronto Blue Jays offence has all but disappeared over the course of their current 9-20 run, but it’s been at a season-worst as they completed the first half of their 10-game road trip with a fifth straight loss.
The Jays have averaged just six hits a game on the trip so far which, honestly, feels high given just how impotent the bats have been. They’ve managed only six extra-base hits in the five games, with only eight walks for an overall hitting line of .182/.209/.242, which is abominable.
While a lot of observers would love to excuse the Jays’ poor offensive performance by pointing to the absences of Brett Lawrie, Edwin Encarnacion and the fact that Jose Bautista is still suffering from a bad hamstring and Adam Lind continues to have problems with a deep bone bruise on his foot, the Blue Jays’ offensive failures can’t be blamed on the Franciscos, Kawasakis, Mastroiannis and Glenns of the world.
Jose Reyes is hitting .190/.227/.190 on the trip, and Dioner Navarro .071/.071/.071. Colby Rasmus is 0-for-9 so far. Those three players have combined for exactly zero extra-base hits. Bautista homered in each of his first two starts back in the starting lineup and Lind had an OPS over 1.000 in 30 plate appearances after missing four days with the bad foot, but on the trip they’ve combined to hit just .125/.125/.188 with a double each.
Melky Cabrera, at least, is hitting an even .300 for the trip.
It’s not that the replacement-level players aren’t producing in the absences of a couple of big boppers. It’s that the players who should be hitting just aren’t getting the job done. They have in the past, and they should again.
But when the offence is shooting blanks, the pitching, defence and (when the rare opportunity arises) baserunning have to raise their games, and that hasn’t been happening, either. There was a brutal mistake on the bases by Josh Thole in Oakland, getting doubled off first on a Jose Reyes fly ball to the warning track; a bad break by Cole Gillespie on a Stephen Vogt line drive that wound up being a triple; an ugly passed ball by Dioner Navarro allowing a gift run to score late in Saturday night’s game.
That sloppiness reared its ugly head again in the series-opening loss to the Angels.
The Blue Jays had just taken a 2-1 lead in the top of the fifth on Juan Francisco’s two-out solo homer. The two runs is the Jays’ high-water mark for any game on the road trip so far – they’ve done it twice. In the bottom of the frame, J.A. Happ gave up a leadoff double to Chris Iannetta. Hit high off the wall, it missed being a game-tying home run by a couple of feet at the most. Given that break, Happ walked the next two hitters to load the bases with nobody out before giving up a bloop single to Albert Pujols that tied the game.
Nothing you can do about a bloop hit, but the back-to-back walks sure didn’t help matters at all.
The next batter was Josh Hamilton, still with the bases loaded and nobody out, and he hit a fly ball to centre. It was a high fly, not deep, and Colby Rasmus had all kinds of time to catch it. He did, but he caught it like a pop-up, not like a fly ball with a runner at third tagging and looking to score.
Longtime Blue Jays fans will remember how Jesse Barfield used to set up to make a catch when he knew he’d have a play on a tagging base runner. Current Blue Jays fans know how Jose Bautista does it. Stand a couple of steps behind the ball, come forward to catch it and, with your momentum carrying you forward make a good, strong throw with all your weight behind it.
Rasmus did none of that on Hamilton’s fly ball – in a tie game, with his team hemorrhaging and desperate for anything positive at all – and it really stood out. The Jays’ centre-fielder had no forward momentum, caught the ball flat-footed, and made an awful throw home that was up the third base line.
Those are the plays that can easily be made better, and that need to be made better, especially when a team is expected to be fighting as hard as it can to pull out of a brutal spiral of misery. And boy, do they ever stand out when everything else is going wrong, too.