CHICAGO – A parachute demo team owned and operated by a group of American military veterans descended flawlessly into U.S. Cellular Field before the first pitch Friday night, touching down right by their target in centre field.
The Toronto Blue Jays’ attempt at a soft landing from their own free-fall down the standings didn’t go nearly as well, the activation of Edwin Encarnacion from the disabled list after a 33-game absence doing little to slow their plunge in an 11-5 clobbering from the Chicago White Sox.
Given the anticipated boost the all-star slugger was expected to provide, this one very much felt like a hard crash into the ground. All that pre-game optimism didn’t last very long.
“We’ve got a chance,” Adam Lind, himself just back from the DL, said in the afternoon. “We’re definitely good enough to be in the playoffs, but that doesn’t mean anything.
“You’ve got to go out and win games.”
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They haven’t done that often of late, and are now four games behind the Seattle Mariners for the second wild card spot, and remained 7.5 games behind the AL East leading Baltimore Orioles.
Encarnacion went 0-for-4 in his first big-league game since July 5, when he strained his quad racing to first base, but the culprit in this one before 22,739 was a dreadful start by Marcus Stroman, and some similarly dodgy relief work from Todd Redmond, the second of six Blue Jays relievers.
Even with the slumping Blue Jays (63-60) managing to put up five runs – one more than they did during a three-game sweep at the hands of the Mariners in Seattle earlier this week – they never had a chance in their fourth straight loss and 10th defeat in the past 13 contests.
“We just need to win games,” Encarnacion said of the team’s fading playoff hopes in the afternoon. “Everybody’s close so it’s going to be very fun to play the next two months here and see how we’re going to finish. I hope we finish [in] the playoffs. That’s our goal, to make the playoffs.”
Lind, in his third game since returning from a broken foot, hit a two-out RBI single in the first inning to give Stroman an early lead, but the rookie right-hander gave it back just three batters into the bottom of the frame, and he’d surrender four more before being removed with two outs and 37 pitches.
He angrily slammed his glove into the bench after retreating into the dugout.
“It’s tough, when you don’t make it through the first, you’ve got a lot of emotion that goes into this game, you want to do everything in your power to put your team in a position to win, and I did everything but that,” said Stroman. “I let that out a little bit, but tomorrow is a new day.”
A three-run rally in the second on a Jose Reyes sacrifice fly and Melky Cabrera two-run homer made it a 5-4 game, but Chad Jenkins surrendered an RBI single to Dayan Viciedo in the bottom of the inning and the White Sox blew things open with another five-spot off Redmond in the fifth.
A bad White Sox (58-64) team that batted just .208 in its previous eight games reeled off six straight singles off Redmond, putting the game away in the process.
“They take that 5-1 lead then all of a sudden we strike right back and you’re feeling pretty good, and we’re right there until the fifth and they open it up,” lamented manager John Gibbons. “Bad night.”
The Blue Jays attempted another rally in the sixth when they loaded the bases with none out, but Danny Valencia hit into a double play, scoring a run but killing the rally in the process.
The most frustrating part of the night for the Blue Jays is that all too often during their current wretched run five runs would have been plenty for the win, and a frightful thought for them is that now their pitching falters.
“We haven’t scored a lot of runs lately and we’ve actually been pitching pretty good,” Gibbons said beforehand. “That’s the key. Even earlier in the season when we were winning a lot of games we were scoring a bunch of runs. We were still pitching pretty good. We’ve got to score for our pitching staff. There’s not a lot of season left. [Encarnacion and Lind] are a big part of our team, so now we’ve got them back. So we’ll just see what happens.”
What happened Friday night wasn’t very good. The ground is rising on the Blue Jays awfully quick.
NOTE: Chad Jenkins was optioned after the game, with a corresponding move for another pitcher to come. “We need a body,” said manager John Gibbons. Brett Cecil is the only reliever that didn’t pitch Friday.
