NEW YORK – The solace for the Toronto Blue Jays after a disheartening three-game sweep at Yankee Stadium is in the cushion that they built during their torrid May, and how they retain a slim lead in the American League East despite how poorly they’ve played lately.
They can absorb this type of dip.
Still, after nine losses in 12 games including Thursday’s bizarre and plodding 6-4 setback to the New York Yankees, the padding is thinning out quick, and the gaping margin in how they were outperformed in the Bronx – where they’ve now lost 16 straight games – is flat-out concerning.
"It’s a big stage here, you have to perform here," manager John Gibbons said. "Whether you like it or not, whether you’re struggling or not, you have to be able to scratch out a win somehow because that’s what the great teams, the teams that go on to win do.
"The next time we come to town we have to change that around a little bit."
Crucial to that is a return to the strong fundamentals and attention to detail that made the Blue Jays so successful only a few weeks ago, as the cumulative effect of little misplays or mistakes combined to cost them big.
Things like Melky Cabrera inexplicably getting picked off at second base with one out in the first, and then getting an earful in the dugout about it from Gibbons.
Or Steve Tolleson’s mishandling of what should have been a double-play grounder by Carlos Beltran leading to only one out, and eventually a sacrifice fly by Kelly Johnson in the second that made it 2-0 Yankees.
Or Erik Kratz’s failure to squeeze Cabrera’s wide throw home before diving across to tag Jacoby Ellsbury, who would have been out had the ball been in the catcher’s mitt. Instead, Beltran’s sacrifice fly restored New York’s lead in the third after Cabrera’s two-run homer tied the game in the inning’s top half.
Or Jose Reyes’ weak grounder to first with one out in the fifth to leave Colby Rasmus standing at third base, after a leadoff double and a Tolleson sacrifice bunt. Rasmus ended up stranded, a sequence in stark contrast to the Yankees, who scored four runs on productive outs.
Or Steve Delabar, the third of four Blue Jays relievers, walking Yangervis Solarte with two out and the bases loaded in the seventh, helping to push the game further out of reach.
Better execution in a couple of those instances would have made the two-run homer crushed by Edwin Encarnacion in the eighth inning far more meaningful than the too-little, too-late poke it turned out to be, as the Blue Jays (41-33) watched their lead over the Yankees (38-33) cut to just 1.5 games.
"When you’re scrambling to score runs, everything is magnified, every little thing," Gibbons said. "When you’re scoring a lot, you can sometimes get away with that. But that’s kind of the way things are going right now."
The Blue Jays must salvage a 2-5 road trip over the weekend in Cincinnati against the Reds – Liam Hendriks will be called up from triple-A Buffalo to make a spot start, with J.A. Happ starting Saturday and R.A. Dickey bumped to Sunday – before returning home to host the Yankees for three more.
The sweep was by no means a definitive moment in the season, but it sure changes the look of things for both clubs.
"We’re all kind of bunched together, so there’s a lot of meaning to these games," said Yankees manager Joe Girardi, whose team is 5-1 versus the Blue Jays this season. "We understand that, and we know they understand it."
The three hour 47 minute grindfest took an odd turn in the fourth inning when Encarnacion was called out for interference while returning to the bag after he bumped into Mark Teixeira as the first baseman camped under Dioner Navarro’s pop up.
Though Teixeira made the catch, Encarnacion was sent to the dugout and Navarro, after initially being ruled out, was placed on first base. As best anyone in the press box could figure, he reached via, "What?"
Speaking to a pool reporter, first base umpire Chris Conroy explained that Encarnacion’s contact with Teixeira was "unintentional, but interference nevertheless, therefore he’s the one declared out."
Crew chief Jerry Meals added Navarro was awarded the bag because on a "fair batted ball he goes to first base. The ball is dead."
That didn’t make any material difference in the outcome, but it helped make David Phelps the latest mediocre or worse starter to have his way with the Blue Jays. As Jose Bautista noted before the game, it’s one thing to get shut down by the St. Louis Cardinals, another to lose to the likes of Kevin Correia, Chase Whitley and now Phelps.
"I don’t want to speak badly or worse about the Yankees or the Orioles, but it’s not the same," he said. "We faced much better pitching at home during the last homestand than we have on this road trip, except for (Masahiro) Tanaka, who did a tremendous job. So we should’ve won some of these games that we lost."
Offence continues to be a problem, although the two homers from Cabrera and Encarnacion represented a bit of a breakout. The Blue Jays remain heavily reliant on the home run – 151 of their 342 runs, or 44 percent have come via the longball – and while during their run they were able to augment the offence in other ways.
"Timely hitting," Reyes said before the game when asked about the difference. "We still have some people on base, but we’re not able to get the key hit. Men on third base, less than two outs, I think lately, we haven’t done a good with that. We were doing a good job two or three weeks ago scoring runs like that. The last two weeks it’s hard for us to score those runs."
Everything else has been hard for the Blue Jays, too.
Drew Hutchison struggled with the floating strike zone, walking four in 4.1 innings, while having his pitch count run up early by the Yankees. Adam Lind, seeing his first action since fouling a ball off his foot last weekend in Baltimore, pinch-hit with two on and two out in the sixth and grounded out weakly. Brett Lawrie sat out with soreness in his hand and still has some swelling that needs to go down.
These are testing times for the Blue Jays – are they built to hand the adversity?
"We’re finding out," Gibbons said before the game. "Everybody goes through good stretches and everybody goes through those down times, you know? … But the better teams minimize those. It’s always been that way."
In recent years for the Blue Jays, it hasn’t, and they need to change that in a hurry.