CHICAGO – The missed opportunities, the losses are only going to hurt more and cut deeper from here on out for the Toronto Blue Jays, especially as their margin for error dwindles and the gap between them and the post-season leaders grows.
Lost weekends like the one they endured at U.S. Cellular Field against the Chicago White Sox will be high on the regret list should they ultimately fail to resuscitate their fading post-season dreams, dropping two of three including Sunday’s 7-5 setback to an inferior opponent ripe for the picking.
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An offence that’s starting to become a presence once again managed to make things interesting after Drew Hutchison buried his teammates in a first-inning 6-1 hole, but the Blue Jays left this one on the table after loading the bases with one out in the ninth only to come up empty.
An 11th loss in 15 outings leaves the Blue Jays (64-61) a long 7.5 games behind the AL East leading Baltimore Orioles, and four games behind the Seattle Mariners for the second wild card, with the Detroit Tigers and New York Yankees ahead of them.
For this season to have the happy ending they want, they’re going to need some help.
“Obviously it’s not the most comfortable feeling because you’re not at the top and you’re not in that comfortable position,” said Jose Bautista. “But even if we were, are we going to just relax and play in a nonchalant way the rest of the season? No. We’ve got to play the same way we would if we were in first place, we’ve got to come out here and try to win every single game, and hope the guys that are ahead of us lose enough games that we gain that ground.
“That’s pretty much all you can control, the way you play, and then hope for everyone else to lose some games. That certainly can happen, it happened to us, we were at the top not too long ago, and now we’re six, seven games back. And it’s not like it’s a crazy amount of games to try and make up.”
The Blue Jays must buy into that with heart and soul, and do what they can to salvage what’s thus far a 1-5 road trip that started with a deflating three-game sweep in Seattle and followed with them dropping to 2-5 this year against the White Sox (59-65).
They play two in Milwaukee starting Tuesday against the NL Central leaders, and they can cling to the way they nearly rallied Sunday.
“You’ve got to battle and you’ve got to fight to try and come back,” said Edwin Encarnacion, who hit his first home run since returning from the DL on Friday. “It didn’t happen but we’ve got to do it next time. Come Tuesday it’s a new day and [we must] try to do the best we can to win games and find a way.”
Hutchison found a way to last seven innings after surrendering six runs, all with two outs, in the first on Conor Gillaspie’s grand slam and Jordan Danks’s two-run homer. He gave up nothing but a sacrifice fly to Danks in the sixth inning from then on, a crucial recovery given that Marcus Stroman lasted just two-thirds of an inning Friday and Mark Buehrle only 5.1 innings Saturday.
Stroman was pulled after 38 pitches and Hutchison would probably have been done at 39 in the first had he not struck out Adrian Nieto to end the first.
“When they start throwing a lot of pitches in one inning and you have those young arms, you don’t want them blowing out,” said manager John Gibbons. “[Hutchison] wasn’t too far off from coming out of that thing, which would have been a disaster.”
The young right-hander, who gave up six runs in 5.2 innings his last time out, needed just 59 pitches in his final six innings. The swing from brutal to brilliant was just that jarring.
“I did a better job of driving the ball down,” he explained. “I felt like I had a better sinker after that, I was able to drive the ball down, get some ground balls and quick outs to stay in there as long as I could.”
With Scott Carroll on the mound for the White Sox, the Blue Jays had reason to believe they could rally and they nearly did.
After Bautista’s RBI fielder’s choice had opened the scoring in the first, the Blue Jays scored three in the fifth on Bautista’s double play grounder with the bases loaded and Encarnacion’s two-run homer.
Dioner Navarro’s pinch hit RBI single in the sixth made it a 6-5 game, but they got no closer, loading the bases with one out in the ninth against Jake Petricka before Colby Rasmus flew out and Nolan Reimold grounded out to end it.
“[Hutchison] gutted it out and gave us a chance to win. We had many opportunities, now, it wasn’t like we didn’t have any shots. We just couldn’t get that big hit. We had them on the ropes,” said Gibbons.
“We’ve been beaten up a little bit on the staff in certain starts, but we’ve had the right guys up at the right time, we just couldn’t cash in that big one.”
If the Blue Jays don’t get on a significant run soon, the same will apply to their season as a whole.