TORONTO – Just for context’s sake, last year when the Toronto Blue Jays won a wild card with 89 wins and eventually reached the American League Championship Series, they endured a 1-6 stretch May 11-18 along with an even tougher 1-7 run Sept. 2-9. The season before, when they won the American League East with 93 victories, they went through skids of 1-5, 1-7 and 3-9 en route to ecstasy.
That’s why it’s worth backing yourself off from the ledge and remembering that in baseball, extended losing streaks like the one the Blue Jays are grinding through are part of the deal. None of that makes the 1-7 well they’ve fallen into after Wednesday night’s 2-0 loss to the Milwaukee Brewers any easier to take – watching them hit is painful right now – but it doesn’t portend the end of days, either.
The measure of the moment for the Blue Jays is how they grind through the current misery as they wait for things to normalize, particularly how they correct what Josh Donaldson described as opposing pitchers feeling "too comfortable on the mound" and "dictating a lot of the pace of the game."
The way to do that, explained the 2015 AL MVP, is to do a better job with their swings on hittable pitches in the zone.
"With hitting it’s such a fine line – you want to have passive-aggressiveness," said Donaldson, back in the lineup at DH after sitting out Tuesday with calf tightness. "You don’t want to get too aggressive because then you get out of control and you start swinging at bad pitches. At the same time, you don’t want to be too passive because then you’re letting too many pitches go by that you could possibly hit. So it’s a fine line and I feel like we haven’t quite found that fine line yet, to be passive-aggressive. It’s something that hopefully with time is going to get better."
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It didn’t happen against a ripe-for-the-picking Brewers club, with starter Chase Anderson allowing just three hits and two walks, one of them intentional, over seven shutout innings. They’ll try to begin the correction Thursday when Francisco Liriano starts against Kevin Gausman and the Baltimore Orioles.
The Blue Jays certainly had a few chances in Tuesday’s 4-3 loss to the Brewers but the opportunities were far fewer against Anderson.
Their best chance to score came in the fourth when Jose Bautista singled and Donaldson walked with one out, but Jonathan Villar made a nice play on a fading Kendrys Morales liner at second for the second out, and after Troy Tulowitzki was walked intentionally to load the bases, Russell Martin fouled back two cookies before taking a called third strike that was well out of the zone.
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Cruelly, Martin ended an 0-for-20 slump out of the gate by lining a two-out double to right-centre field in the seventh, but he was stranded there when Steve Pearce ripped a liner to centre with an exit velocity of 98.4 mph right at Keon Broxton to end the inning.
Singles by Pearce in the fifth and Kevin Pillar in the eighth were both erased by double plays, while an impressive-looking Neftali Feliz closed things out in the ninth, erasing a one-out Donaldson walk by turning a 93.5 mph liner to the mound from Morales into a game-ending double play.
Slumps always find a creative way to get you.
"I will say some of our better hitters are missing their pitch," said manager John Gibbons, who described his players as being in between on the fastball and off-speed pitches. "There are some times, too, when I think we’re taking too many fastballs early in the count and we can swing our way out of it a little bit."
An example of the stuck-in-the-middle nature of things came in the sixth, when Donaldson took a 93 mph two-seamer inside for ball one, then checked his swing on a 79 mph curve to even the count. He then took a 93 mph four seamer that split the plate evenly, before fouling off an 83.1 mph change down and in and striking out on a 90 mph heater up and out of the zone.
"I end up doing a check swing on a ball that’s out of the zone, so now I’m being too aggressive, then he throws me a pitch right down the middle and I take it – that’s being too passive," says Donaldson. "So it’s that fine line and you have to be sharp mentally and your focus has to be in the right areas.
"Sometimes what’s happening is either we’re getting caught off-guard, or we’re not looking to do damage the way we need to as a team. Not damage in terms of home runs for that matter, but doing damage with a nice, aggressive swing on a pitch that’s in the zone."
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The lack of offence meant the second complete game of Marcus Stroman’s career went to waste. Doubles by Domingo Santana and Keon Broxton opened the scoring in the second while Villar’s solo shot in the sixth made it a 2-0 game, and that was it as he allowed seven hits and a walk with four strikeouts.
That’s a tough L to take, especially when he deserved better, but with the Blue Jays caught in no man’s land at the plate, all they can do is wait and work for the inevitable turn.
