TORONTO — The Toronto Blue Jays completed a homestand in which they went undefeated, which is quite a feat indeed. Granted, it was their shortest homestand of the season — only two games — but a sweep is a sweep, even if it’s just a mini-sweep.
Here are three things that stood out to me about the Jays’ season-high fourth straight win:
THESE GUYS WERE THE WORLD SERIES CHAMPIONS?
The San Francisco Giants brought back memories of the Blue Jays’ first couple weeks of this season, looking just awful right from the get-go, leading to five unearned Toronto runs in the very first inning.
Ryan Vogelsong, who brought a brutal 7.78 ERA into the game, should have had a perfect frame. He got leadoff man Melky Cabrera to hit a line drive to right field that Hunter Pence had a hard time with but hauled in with a leap. Jose Bautista followed with a pop-up behind first base, Edwin Encarnacion walked and J.P. Arencibia hit a line drive right to centrefielder Angel Pagan.
And yet, when Adam Lind followed Arencibia to the plate, there was still only the one out. That’s because Marco Scutaro dropped Bautista’s easy pop fly and Pagan had Arencibia’s line drive tick off the end of his glove. Lind made the Giants pay for those mistakes by belting his third home run in just over a week, and the rout was on.
SERIOUSLY, IT WAS THESE GUYS?
The Giants’ miscues had a whole lot to do with most of the half-dozen runs the Blue Jays scored after the first inning, as well.
In the second, Pence again misplayed a Cabrera line drive, but this time couldn’t haul it in and it went for a double, and Bautista then hit a hard grounder pretty much right through Scutaro at second for what was scored an RBI single.
The next inning, Chad Gaudin came on to replace Vogelsong and, after getting a first-pitch out on a fly ball, issued back-to-back walks. Both those walks came around to score — one on an absolute rocket double by Bautista into the left-field corner, the other on an Arencibia sacrifice fly.
In the sixth, the Blue Jays tacked on an extra run as, with Brett Lawrie on first, Colby Rasmus hit a ground ball down the first-base line that kicked off the glove of Giants first baseman Brandon Belt and went almost all the way down into the right-field corner.
Giants’ coaches talked before the game about how playing on turf for the first time had a detrimental effect on the team defence in the series opener, but you can’t blame turf for dropped pop flies and misplayed line drives.
REGRESSION TO THE MEAN IS FUN:
For the first month and change this season, pretty much everything that could go wrong did go wrong for the Blue Jays, but things were bound to turn around and they have — in rather a big way.
The Jays have now won seven of their last 10, and have scored in double digits in three straight games.
Their offence, dormant in April to the tune of a .231 team batting average and .294 on-base percentage, is at .271 and .344 in those categories, respectively, in the month of May. They’ve gone from the bottom three in the major leagues to the top 10.
Along with all the Giants’ mistakes early in the game, the Blue Jays had a pair of broken-bat hits in the first inning. They’re catching breaks that didn’t come their way early on, and they don’t seem to have as many bloops and bleeders falling in against them as they did in April.
More importantly, while they’re still making some mistakes in the field, they’re not making as many of them, and the ones they are making aren’t nearly as costly both because they haven’t been opening floodgates as they did before and because they’ve actually been scoring some runs to give their pitching and defence some margin for error.
As much as many fans threw in the towel on the Blue Jays in the first few weeks of the season out of sheer disappointment and frustration, they were never as bad as their record.
This is not a 52-win team, which is the pace the Blue Jays were on after R.A. Dickey got roughed up on Star Wars Day (May 4). Since then, the Jays are 7-3, which is a 113-win pace over a full season. Quite obviously, they’re not that good, either. But the truth is closer to 113 than it is to 52, and I’m confident that will be borne out over the course of the rest of this season.