It’s hard not to focus on what the Toronto Blue aren’t at the moment.
For every glimmer of something better the club has shown this month and in some other stretches, their lay down during the dog days of August almost guarantees their fate.
They are not a playoff team. The streak will reach 21 years.
Sure they will limp back to Rogers Centre trying to focus on the positives in a 4-2 road trip rather than the negatives — literally handing the bedraggled Boston Red Sox wins in the first two games of their weekend series before coming to the surface and gasping for some air with a win on Sunday.
But the numbers don’t lie. They begin a rare three-game interleague series with the Chicago Cubs (the two franchises have played just nine times in total and not since 2008 in Toronto) trailing the Seattle Mariners by five games for the second wild card spot with just 20 to play.
Ignoring that they would have to pass four teams, even simply winning enough games to match Seattle’s 89-win pace would require Toronto to do something crazy, like a 17-3 finish.
According to Baseball Prospectus Toronto’s probability of playing in the post-season is 0.6 percent, which seems high.
If that’s the only acceptable outcome it’s likely going to be miserable month, given the basement dwelling NL Central Cubs represent one of the few remaining softies in a schedule that features six games with the AL East leading Baltimore Orioles and four with the Mariners as well as dates with the New York Yankees and Tampa Bay Rays.
So, is it a cop-out to focus on bright spots? Does looking at some of the promise the roster has demonstrated between injury-riddled slumps and the strange bending of key pillars like previously ironclad closer Casey Janssen mean excusing mediocrity?
Or does it make more sense to look at this roster independent of its well-documented washout in 2013 and consider that there’s more reasons to be excited about the future than reasons to lament what’s happened since the club was 2.5 games up on Seattle for a playoff spot as recently as Aug. 1?
It’s fitting that it’s Marcus Stroman on the mound Monday night to start the home stand.
The rookie right-hander is an imperfect metaphor for the entire Blue Jays organization at the moment. A fan vote on trading him during the off-season or even early in this season for a package that would have returned some kind of relatively expensive veteran innings eater would like have been close to unanimous.
Instead the Duke University product is approaching folk hero status. Not trading him has been general manager Alex Anthopoulos’s masterstroke. He’s emerged from a four-start slump (8.66 ERA) to prove his early success was no fluke by going 2-0 over his last two outings with an ERA of 2.63.
Perhaps just as important is that he screams the kind of talent and attitude that any organization would have – in retrospect – been insane to part with. You couldn’t help but have your heart in your mouth when Blue Jays manager John Gibbons put the former college shortstop in to pinch-run for Edwin Encarnacion on Friday night. It would be so Jays for Stroman to pull a hamstring or jam a finger on his pitching hand scrambling back to the bag on a pick-off attempt.
But when he sprinted home from third on Dioner Navarro’s soft liner and launched into a picture perfect headfirst slide at home to score what should have been the winning run (had the Jays and Janssen been able to hold the lead on the bottom of the 10th) it was impossible not to be excited at the idea of a competitor like that being an essential part of what is shaping up to be a young, exciting and affordable stable of Blue Jays pitchers.
What seemed like a weakness now appears to be an emerging strength with Aaron Sanchez, Daniel Norris and Kendall Graveman all pushing for rotation spots alongside (in theory) the still reliable Mark Buehrle and R.A. Dickey, not to mention J.A. Happ.
Combine that with a lineup anchored by Encarnacion and Bautista and a pledge by free-agent-to-be Melky Cabrera that he wants to remain a Blue Jay (not a bad bargaining position as you head into free agency, granted) and there is cause for excitement.
Which doesn’t mean being blind to the present, but it’s interesting how everything that has happened in Toronto the past 18 months or so is viewed through the prism of the all-or-nothing off-season of 2013.
It turns out it wasn’t an all-or-nothing play by a team desperate to make the playoffs. It was neither. But the spectacular failure of expectations a year ago has tempered how this year is being viewed.
When the Jays were rolling during the first half it seemed like a fair compensation for a season gone horribly wrong.
And now that that early promise seems nearly completely out of reach with just 20 games left to play, it’s tempting to view their long slide back as the end of something.
But when Stroman takes the mound tonight with the possibility of Norris and Sanchez acting as the set-up man and closer, respectively, as they get their feet wet at the major league level, you can make the case that it’s just the beginning.
At the very least it should make the final month more bearable than the alternative.