BOSTON, MASS — Adam Lind walked slowly from the on-deck circle to the Toronto Blue Jays dugout, taking quick glances to his right at the Boston Red Sox celebrating their American League East division title. He stopped at the top step, turned back for one more look, then made his way down the stairs and into the clubhouse.
This was a scene and a season he and his teammates had expected to be theirs—but instead it was their bitter rivals and former manager jumping around the mound, exchanging hugs, spraying each other with champagne in celebration of a division crown that’s long been a foregone conclusion. “Tough loss,” Lind said afterwards, his two-run pinch-hit homer in the eighth too little, too late in a 6-3 loss. “It somehow seems fitting the way it just worked out.”
Sure, why not one more cruel twist of fate in this star-crossed season, one that started with such overwhelming optimism and is ending in a slow trail of drudgery. And that’s before seeing John Farrell feted with his players by a Fenway Park gathering of 37,215. “I look at it as motivation,” said Blue Jays veteran Mark DeRosa. “I look at is as the best team won, start to finish they were the best team in our division, and to win the AL East with the talent that’s in this division is something to be proud of. A lot of things didn’t go our way. We had some injuries, we didn’t play well out of the gate, and never really came together. We showed flashes, but for a chance to get to watch them celebrate and to see the way they rushed the field, hopefully it triggers something.”
Maybe, but digesting lessons isn’t easy right after something so difficult to swallow. In some ways Friday’s contest was a microcosm of the Toronto’s season, mixing together a freak injury to Colby Rasmus, strange plays, flashes of butchery and brilliance, before finally settling at disappointment.
The sellout crowd rocked Fenway as Koji Uehara struck out Brett Lawrie to seal the Red Sox’s first AL East crown since 2007, setting off the wild celebrations. Some Blue Jays watched from the dugout, others quickly filed down the dugout stairs to the clubhouse tunnel. The relievers who had to walk across the field in from the bullpen stared forward without glancing at the revelry as they passed by. “These guys know what’s at stake, they know where we’re trying to go,” said Blue Jays manager John Gibbons. “They got a great team over there, they really do, they ran away with a good division. Tonight was a perfect example: good pitching, good defence and a lot of hitting. That’s a good recipe, we just didn’t get enough of it.”
The Red Sox did, with Farrell at the helm after his messy split from the Blue Jays last winter.
While getting less love for their off-season work than the Blue Jays, the Red Sox made a series of clever additions— Mike Napoli, Shane Victorino, Ryan Dempster, Stephen Drew and Uehara among them—that transformed a directionless club into one that played steady, dogged baseball. Boston hasn’t lost more than three games in a row all year and aside from a 2-9 stretch May 3-14, they’ve been remarkably consistent. “We’ve got players who have come from winning environments, they understand not only the game but that it’s not a game of individuals,” said Farrell. “In spring training, we made it very clear that we wanted to make the daily focal point the game that night, not anything else that goes on around it. To me, that’s somewhat the beacon that lets everything else fall in line. Our preparation, the individual routines lead up to the game that night and how we work inside it to hopefully take home a win.”
At one point while doing a TV interview on the field amid the madness, fans assembled around the Red Sox dugout and cheered Farrell wildly. He raised his arm in recognition in a rare moment of indulgence. Asked later if this was the type of scene that led him to seek a return to Boston, he replied that, “it became very clear in spring training that we felt like we had a special group. And it’s been able to play out.” If Farrell is gloating on the inside, he wasn’t going to let it show. After all, he and the Red Sox are on to bigger and better things right now.
The Blue Jays, meanwhile, have to ride out another week before heading out to their 20th straight playoff-less fall. They already had plenty to contemplate before having the image of celebrating Red Sox rammed down their throats. “All I saw was them storming the field and having a little dog pile on the mound, that’s tough to watch,” said Toronto right-hander Chad Jenkins, who provided 3.1 shutout innings in relief of Esmil Rogers. “That’s what you play for every year, and then seeing a division rival do it when you’re playing them makes it harder. It definitely makes you hungry, you want to be the ones dancing up and down, having fun, instead we’re just grinding away, unfortunately.”
That’s the Blue Jays’ lot in 2013, capped off by being reluctant guests at somebody else’s party.