TORONTO – Let’s open a discussion with this as the starting point: In the two-wild-card-berth era, a team has to be really bad, like wafting sewage stench bad, to play itself out of contention for the post-season. That’s why midway through August, there were nine teams within 5.5 games of each other in the American League wild-card race, the New York Yankees sitting atop the heap with the Toronto Blue Jays at the bottom, on Monday. Only the Detroit Tigers, Oakland Athletics and Chicago White Sox are undisputedly out of it.
Everyone else? Well, they’re in it, to varying degrees of reality, each a hot streak away from making a move, or a cold streak away from irrelevancy. This is life in baseball’s expanding mediocre middle, where there’s enough fuel to embolden optimists and pessimists alike. What a time to be alive.
As for the Blue Jays, the best thing they can do is keep winning games and see where it takes them, and maybe, just maybe they can make things interesting in September. They improved to 57-61 with their sixth victory in eight games Monday night, 2-1 over the collapsing Tampa Bay Rays, who are 59-61 and have scored only 12 times in dropping eight of their last 10 games.
The two division rivals are now only a game apart in the standings – things can swing that fast.
“It’s tough to win a 2-1 game,” said manager John Gibbons. “You’re living on the edge, but the guys all stepped up.”
Questions of sustainability for the Blue Jays are valid, especially since starter Nick Tepesch wiggled his way around four hits, one of them a Wilson Ramos solo shot in the second, three walks and two hit batters without a single strikeout over 6.1 innings.
To his credit, he made Josh Donaldson’s two-run homer in the first off Jake Odorizzi stand up, even with several long and loud outs.
“It’s huge for any ball club when your starter is able to give you some depth and also put up a lot of zeroes,” said Donaldson, who with eight homers in his last 16 games is giving optimists reason to have faith. “He did a great job of battling all throughout the game … and obviously that ended up being a huge start for us. We needed him to go out there and do a good job because Odorizzi was pretty stingy today.”
Tepesch and Chris Rowley are currently filling out the back-end of the rotation, but the Blue Jays continue to search for potential upgrades, agreeing to a minor-league deal with Brett Anderson, who’ll provide another option at triple-A Buffalo while Joe Biagini stretches out.
In the meantime, Aaron Loup – handling a high-leverage spot with Danny Barnes and Ryan Tepera unavailable – made sure Tepesch’s evening didn’t go to waste with his latest bit of relief wizardry, entering in the seventh after Peter Bourjos was hit by a pitch and Daniel Robertson walked.
Things got weird when he induced a weak liner from Corey Dickerson that Rob Refsnyder short-hopped and flipped to second where Ryan Goins had his foot on the bag. That removed the force and Bourjos returned to second before he was tagged, negating a double-play. Two outs were initially called, but upon review, Bourjos was returned to second.
“It’s a difficult play, things are happening so fast,” said Donaldson. “You had really great baserunning by them all the way around because that very easily could have been a triple-play. But Dickerson really got down the line, I know Goins’ initial thought from what we were talking about was trying to turn a normal double-play. I don’t think he saw Bourjos coming back to second base right there and when things are happening fast and you have a slow-hit ball, it’s easy to not realize what you have to do in the moment to get the double-play. It’s easy to do after the fact, it’s very difficult to do in the moment. …
“You just don’t get that play very often.”
Undeterred, Loup proceeded to strike out Lucas Duda and got Evan Longoria to line out softly to second base. The left-hander has now stranded 25 of the 29 runners he’s inherited this year, becoming a key weapon for the bullpen.
“I had a sense that we didn’t play it the right way because I thought I saw GoGo step on the bag first, which would have meant the runner at second didn’t have to go to third. That’s what it ended up being,” said Loup. “I thought it was going to end up going the other way (on replay), so I knew it was still going to be first and second and I needed to make a pitch to hopefully get a double-play ball.
“I ended getting a punch-out on Duda and got to face Longoria and got him to pop out.”
Loup also came back out in the eighth and struck out lefties Logan Morrison and Brad Miller around a Steven Souza Jr., walk, before Gibbons brought in Roberto Osuna to attempt a four-out save.
Osuna needed just two pitches to get Ramos to end the eighth and then went three-up, three-down in the ninth to collect his 30th save.
“Ramos is a right-handed guy, got some pop, part of the (closer’s) job is they’ve got to get four-out saves now and then,” said Gibbons. “(Osuna) had been three days (off) so he was rested. You can’t do that a lot, if you look back at the past couple of weeks, he’s pitched a lot himself. Since we were able to stay away from the past couple of days, it opened this up tonight.”
It was just the second time this season Gibbons asked Osuna to collect four outs, the type of effort demanded of a closer by a team that thinks it’s in the race.
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