On June 6, top prospect Marcus Stroman threw six innings in his second start of the season, striking out seven and allowing one earned run, while José Bautista and Brett Lawrie hit homers and Casey Janssen secured his 11th save, keeping his season ERA at a perfect 0.00 as the Toronto Blue Jays beat the St. Louis Cardinals 3-1.
The Blue Jays ended the night at 14 games above .500, with a six game lead in the American League East. On both counts, it was the peak of the team’s season.
I remember that evening, because I was on a back porch, celebrating an odd concurrence of birthdays within a few days of each other amongst our group of friends and acquaintances. Throughout the night, I’d keep an eye on my phone to track the action, and impolitely wander inside to see if I could catch a few moments of the game on the TV in the living room.
Throughout that night friends congratulated me on the Blue Jays season, and I found myself caught uneasily between pride and apprehension. I wanted to accept the felicitations, but I also didn’t want to get too far ahead of myself, what with four months remaining.
I’ve thought back to that night often, wondering if I was enjoying the moment too much, or maybe not appreciating it enough.
Headed into the final weekend of the Toronto Blue Jays’ 2014 season, it’s hard to think of a campaign that has been more emotionally confounding.
There were 61 days in first place in the division. There was a historically outstanding May, in which the team went 21-9 and surged from four games under .500 to the top of the standings, powered by an offence that averaged 5.5 runs per game with Edwin Encarnacion’s 16 homers leading the way.
And then there was the month of August, in which the Jays offence eked out just 3.3 runs per game while the pitching and defence allowed 132 runs, or just over five per game as the team lurched backwards to a 9-17 record. Before that slide, the Jays were still three games up in the chase to be the visitors in the wild card game, and anything resembling a respectable outcome for that month would have allowed them to play meaningful baseball on this final weekend.
In some ways, what has made this year so hard to parse is that it’s hard to tell if this was a good season that was undermined by a terrible month, or a lousy season that was buoyed by a good one. Even if you take out the highest of highs and lowest of lows by removing those two months from the equation, the Blue Jays have had a 51-51 season.
Ultimately, it will be hard for any Blue Jays fan to walk away from this season with much satisfaction. The aggrieved will remain aggrieved as the franchise’s playoff drought extends by another year — the longest in professional sports should the Kansas City Royals make their way into the coin-flip game.
There have been many positives this year, to be fair. José Bautista continues to establish himself as one of the greatest offensive players in the team’s history, while Edwin Encarnacion makes steps towards the same. When they’ve been healthy and prosperous in the lineup together, they’ve offered the greatest lineup combination since Carlos Delgado and Shawn Green were mashing together 15 years ago.
Melky Cabrera re-emerged from a year of profound injury to make himself a key piece of the team’s relative success, while old greybeards R.A. Dickey and Mark Buehrle gave the Jays more than 400 innings of reliable mid-rotation quality innings.
The emergence of young players from the system like Stroman, Aaron Sanchez, Daniel Norris and Dalton Pompey also gives reason to raise the expectations of what might come from this team in the future.
But even the optimistic among the fanbase will admit that this was a season where the rest of the wild-card contenders hung back and waited for the Jays to keep pace, and even that plus extra berths in the playoffs hasn’t been enough to sneak the team into the post-season.
Some of the weaknesses of this team remain the same ones that were assessed from the outset of the season. The second basemen collectively managed a .631 OPS with seven homers and four stolen bases amongst them, and a repeat of that output can’t happen next season if the Jays are to contend.
Maybe more problematic for this season was the output from the Blue Jays’ centre-fielders, who collectively tallied a .639 OPS, including a .276 on-base percentage. With Colby Rasmus likely departing, this is a position that will need to be addressed for next year, and it seems like a reach to think that Anthony Gose or Kevin Pillar are the players to do so.
In the end, I’ll remember many things from this season fondly. The walk-off wins, like Encarnacion’s July 2 three-run dinger to beat the Brewers and keep the Jays ahead of the surging Baltimore Orioles. Or the 19-inning marathon on Aug. 10 that might have kept fans from falling off the bandwagon for a few more weeks.
Mostly, I’ve appreciated that even if their chances were remote, I’ve checked the standings every day through the month of September. It’s a start.
But with all that said, this is certainly not a season on which anyone should rest their laurels. The Blue Jays need to be better next year. Not just picking up a game here or there that might help them back into the playoffs, but 10 to 15 games better to give themselves a realistic shot at the pennant. This weekend’s opponents from Baltimore have built a team for future success, and no one should bank on consecutive down years from Boston, New York or Tampa Bay.
I’m happy to have been here, to have seen this team and this season. I can’t be all that mad about how it’s played out. I’m hopeful that the positives coming out of this year will in the long run outweigh the negatives or the inevitable erosion that happens to talent.
But I can’t say I’m satisfied. I’m an optimist, but not a chump. In 2015, the Blue Jays need to be better than this.