They survived.
As the Blue Jays limped into the all-star break, shut out by David Price and the Tampa Bay Rays and losers of 24 of their last 35 games, that’s about the best thing one can say about the team. They made it to the break still in the playoff race.
A team that was as close to unbeatable as any team ever has been for the better part of a month hit a Mount Logan-sized speed bump in the first week of June and pretty much stopped hitting. We’re still waiting for the offence to kick back into gear, but when the Blue Jays emerge from the break, the line-up will still be missing Edwin Encarnacion, Adam Lind and Brett Lawrie, not to mention “found money” outfielder Nolan Reimold, who was 4-for-12 with three doubles in his four games as a Blue Jay before hitting the disabled list with a left calf strain.
When a team is as short-handed as the Blue Jays are, when the back-ups to the back-ups are getting serious playing time, one can’t reasonably expect that it’s going to play well. I don’t think it’s unfair to expect it to win more than one-third of its games, but it’s certainly not going to play well, and that’s what we’ve seen out of the Blue Jays on the just-concluded 2-8 road trip – one on which they lost Encarnacion, Lind and Reimold and didn’t have Jose Bautista playing the outfield but for the final game.
They’ll continue to be short-handed once the break is past, but the four-day breather should mean that the relatively healthy players like Bautista, Jose Reyes, Melky Cabrera, Colby Rasmus and Dioner Navarro get a chance to recharge their batteries and come back relatively close to peak efficiency. With those five plus Dan Johnson, that’s a group that should be able to score some runs.
The Blue Jays get three games against the worst team in the majors right out of the break. The Texas Rangers have lost eight in a row and sit 19 games under .500, and they’re hoping to recharge their batteries just as much over the four-day break. While that happens, the first-place Baltimore Orioles open their “second half” with a 10-day run up and down the west coast, from Oakland to Anaheim to Seattle. In fact, the Orioles play their first 16 games out of the break against the A’s, Angels and Mariners – that’s the two best teams in the majors right now plus a third that would also be in the playoffs if they started today.
While the Orioles, winners of 10 of their last 13, are running that gauntlet, the Blue Jays come out of the Texas series with 10 straight against the Red Sox and Yankees.
When all that is done, the Blue Jays and Orioles meet up for a three-game series at Rogers Centre starting on August 5th, with the Jays presumably getting healthy by then. It’s possible that Encarnacion, Lind and Lawrie will all be back and it will be very interesting to see if that series, right after the non-waiver trade deadline, will still pit the top two teams in the American League East against one another, and what reinforcements they might have made.
It’s been a long time since we’ve been through a pennant race around these parts, and with the Blue Jays just four games out of first place at the break, they’re very much in one despite how badly the last five weeks have gone. One can say that if you take out the 20-4 run from mid-May through early June, this is an awful team, but one can also say that if you take out the 4-11 run they’re currently on since winning two of three against the Yankees at home, this is a very good team. The thing is, they all count, and when the hitters have been healthy, it’s been a good team far more often than it hasn’t.
A team banks wins during a hot streak so that it can survive when things get rough, because things always get rough. It’s not easy to lose ten games in the standings in just over five weeks, but the Blue Jays have done it. The San Francisco Giants did the same thing, but it only took them three and a half weeks, a stretch over which they went 5-17.
Last season, the Blue Jays won eleven straight, but that hot streak only got them to two games over .500, and when the streak was over, they were farther away from the division lead than they are now. They followed up the win streak by losing 19 of 26, which left them ten games under .500 and 14 ½ games out of first place.
This year’s edition has lost 24 of 35, but is still above .500 and only four games out. As hard as it has been to watch over the past five weeks, that’s a good thing. There’s a light at the end of the tunnel, and in what would definitely be a change of pace for Toronto sports fans, it might actually not be an oncoming train.