The road has hit back awfully hard as the Blue Jays sit seven-eighths of the way through the current trip that has taken them to Seattle, Chicago and now Milwaukee with only one win to show for it.
The Jays left home after taking down the Detroit Tigers in a 19-inning marathon that took over six-and-a-half hours to play and were thoroughly shut down by the Mariners pitching staff as the Jays were swept in Seattle. Since then, though, it’s been the Blue Jays’ starting pitching that has let them down hard.
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In the opener in Chicago, Marcus Stroman suffered a rare toe-stub, giving up five runs to the White Sox and not making it out of the first inning. In the series finale, Drew Hutchison gave up a pair of two-out homers in the opening frame, one of which was a Grand Slam, and though he recovered enough to wind up pitching seven innings and allowing just one more run, the early hole he’d dug was just too deep.
Just up the road in Milwaukee on Tuesday night, J.A. Happ gave up a double to the first two batters he faced in the game, and also to the first two batters he faced in the third inning. All four of them scored.
While the Blue Jays’ bats woke up and managed to close the gap to one run in those Chicago games on both Friday and Sunday, they didn’t do anything after Colby Rasmus’ second-inning double on Tuesday, thoroughly shut down by Brewers’ righty Mike Fiers and two relievers. And I mean “they didn’t do anything” quite literally. Not a single Blue Jay reached base after that Rasmus double – 24 in a row set down to end the game.
We have seen this movie before, though hardly at all this season – Blue Jays’ starting pitching gets lit up, leaving a deficit too great to erase. That it’s happening now, with the Jays looking for any sort of ray of sunshine in what’s been an absolutely abysmal month of August, just hurts that much more.
In this latest trip through the Blue Jays’ rotation, only Hutchison has thrown a pitch in the seventh inning – and that after giving up six runs in the first. R.A. Dickey is the only other one of the five to have even recorded more than one out in the sixth. The starters have posted an ugly ERA of 8.46 and 1.925 WHIP. That’s the thing that has to be fixed in order for this ship to get righted in time to get back to being a serious threat in the playoff race – something the Blue Jays still are right now.
The Jays have done a wonderful job of bouncing back from long droughts this season. They came out of a 5-11 slump by going on a five-game win streak that kicked off a 25-7 run. They lost 12 of 16 and exploded out of that with 11 wins in 13 games – a streak that wrapped up less than three weeks ago, though it feels so far away.
They’re now a major-league-worst 4-12 in the month of August, and while they’re only 4 ½ games out of the second wild card spot (a team that’s five games out on September first is very much in the playoff race), they’ve been trending the wrong way for a while now. It is, rather clearly, time to get things going in order for this team to have its first meaningful September of the 21st Century, something that appeared as though it was going to be the very least we could expect only a couple of weeks ago.