TORONTO – Batting order No. 26, like the vast majority of the previous 25, produced no magic for the Toronto Blue Jays on Thursday night, and the search for a lineup combination that will be equal to or, dare to dream, greater than the sum of its part continues to elude John Gibbons.
The emerging truth, 29 concerning games into an increasingly worrying start to this season of promise, is that waiting for the law of averages to balance out may not be the cure-all potion the manager is so desperately seeking.
Even on their good days, everything is hard right now for the Blue Jays, and a 3-1 defeat at the hands of the Boston Red Sox that resulted in a seventh series loss in nine attempts was another in what feels like a relentless stream of bad days.
“You know what? If we keep beating ourselves up it’s going to be a long year,” said Brett Lawrie, his leadoff homer one of the few bright spots. “It’s time we start putting stuff behind us, just come here and play baseball, that’s what we all got here doing, and that’s important.
“It’s time to get out there and have that mentality of, ‘Let’s go.’ We’re hesitant on that point right now. We know it’s there, we have strengths, but at the same time we didn’t get our jobs done tonight.”
The agony on this night included a strikeout that helped the Red Sox manufacture an insurance run in the sixth, as Stephen Drew reached after swinging through a wild pitch to put runners on first and second, and David Ross promptly scored on a single Jacoby Ellsbury dunked in front of Melky Cabrera.
For fun, in the ninth inning the Blue Jays ended up on the wrong end of two safe calls by first base umpire Paul Emmel that could easily have gone the other way, although Esmil Rogers cleverly worked his way out of the jam.
While that was yet more salt in the wounds, you’re not going to win very often when you score a single run, and no matter what Gibbons does, nothing works.
The lineup twist Thursday was Adam Lind back in the two-spot with Lawrie at leadoff and J.P. Arencibia batting fifth behind Jose Bautista and Edwin Encarnacion, a combo Gibbons plans to run with for an extended stretch after “juggling it a lot more than I ever wanted to.”
That switch comes a day after Gibbons discussed how much the coaching staff liked what Colby Rasmus did in the two-hole last year, but like everything in Blue Jays land, the solution remains a moving target.
How long this lasts is anyone’s guess, but there are only so many ways to try and wring water from a stone.
“You never want the back-and-forth, things like that, even though I don’t necessarily think it’s a big deal, sometimes it can be,” Gibbons said before the game. “You want to create some stability but we’ve been going through our struggles and you want to try something that will spark something.
“But we’ll run with this for a while and see what happens.”
It looked good early when Lawrie opened the game with his third homer of the season, but the well dried up in a Gobi minute, an erratic J.A. Happ gave back a pair to the Red Sox in the top of the second, and over the course of three hours 22 minutes, they travelled the road to 10-19 before a crowd of 25,851.
“There’s a line between not giving in and making quality pitches and I was constantly on the wrong side of that line,” said Happ, who walked seven in 3.2 innings, leaving the bases loaded behind him for Brad Lincoln to clean up. “I made it tough on myself. Our bullpen came in and did an awesome job, kept us right in the ballgame and we were in the ballgame the whole time.”
At some point, however, the Blue Jays need to start translating keeping things close into victories.
This one might have turned in the third, when Encarnacion hit into a 6-4-3 double play after swinging at an awful 2-0 pitch after Ryan Dempster walked the bases loaded, or in the seventh, when Lind struck out on a prime fastball from Junichi Tazawa with the sacks full in the seventh.
Other chances were few and far between for the Blue Jays, who dropped nine games under .500 for the first time this year. Ricky Romero returns to start Friday in the opener of a three-game series against the Seattle Mariners, and as luck would have it, Felix Hernandez just happens to be pitching for the visitors.
“It’s just a matter of coming in, doing a job and coming away with a win,” said Lawrie. “Wins are tough for us right now, but we’re all going to keep grinding, go play for one another, and try to get this thing done.”
No lineup concoction, no matter how clever, will create an easier way out of their mess.