DETROIT, Mi – The Blue Jays’ shaky start to the 2013 season continued with a milestone-filled loss to the Tigers in their first road game of the season. Miguel Cabrera hit his first home run of the year, Melky Cabrera singled in the first inning for his 1,000th career hit and Torii Hunter’s third hit of the game was his 2,000th.
Here are three things that stood out to me about the loss that put the Blue Jays at 2-5 – the same record with which the St. Louis Cardinals started their World Series Championship season of 2011:
TABLE-SETTERS AREN’T ENOUGH
Jose Reyes and Melky Cabrera combined for five hits but the Blue Jays’ 3-4-5 hitters, Jose Bautista, Edwin Encarnacion and J.P. Arencibia, were 0-for-12. It should have been 1-for-12, though – Arencibia hit what should have been a home run leading off the second inning, but Tigers’ left fielder Don Kelly made an incredible leaping catch to pull it back for an out.
Bautista is coming off four days lost to a twisted ankle and Arencibia is off to one of the best starts of any Blue Jays hitter not named Reyes, but Encarnacion is in a pretty deep trough right now. He hit a big three-run homer against the Indians on Thursday night, giving the Jays a 6-3 lead, but hasn’t had a hit in his subsequent 18 at-bats, with two strikeouts in each of the last four games.
HITTING THE BALL REALLY FAR ONLY HELPS SO MUCH
Colby Rasmus belted his third home run of the season in the top of the ninth, a solo job with one out that was way gone down the right-field line. As of the end of the Jays’ game, the Blue Jays and A’s were tied for the American League home run lead with 12 each, but Oakland has scored 13 more runs in the same number of games.
In fact, 17 of the 22 runs the Blue Jays have scored this season have come via the long ball. Not that home runs aren’t nice – they’re quite lovely, actually – but they can’t be the be-all and end-all for a team that hopes to be successful.
At least the Blue Jays scored two of their three runs on Tuesday without benefit of the big fly. Emilio Bonifacio’s triple was cashed by a Jose Reyes single and Reyes would later single, steal second and score on a Cabrera base hit.
The Blue Jays do have power up and down the lineup, but they also have hitters who can do other things to help score runs. It’s just that not enough of them have been doing enough of that quite yet.
WHY CAN’T THEY MAKE IT EASY
The fact the Blue Jays have started the season 2-5 is really not a big deal, though many fans are shifting into panic mode. I have already gotten tweets in the last couple of days suggesting that John Gibbons should be fired, that Adam Lind should be released, that trading for R.A. Dickey was a huge mistake and asking who would take over should Paul Beeston and Alex Anthopoulos have to be replaced.
All of that is way too far over the top. In fact, it’s so far over it that you can’t even see the top from there. The last two World Series champs started 2-4 and 2-5, respectively, and there’s no team that doesn’t go through a stretch in which it loses five out of seven games – the fact that it’s happening right at the beginning of the season may be a little scary to some, but it’s thoroughly and utterly irrelevant.
That said, it sure would be a lot nicer if they’d started the season 5-2 or 6-1, and we didn’t have to go through the 2-5 stretch until June or July.
Then again, the 1985 Blue Jays – who still have the franchise’s all-time record with 99 wins – started 3-4, the ’89 team started 2-4 and wound up at 12-24 and the ’93 team was 7-7 through that season’s first 14 games. Those teams were all division winners.
The only successful Blue Jays team to really start a season like a house on fire was the 1992 squad, the first World Series champs, who won their first six games of the year, nine of their first ten and 21 of their first 30 (at which point they only had a one game lead on the Orioles).
Still, other teams in other cities seem to get off to great starts all the time, hit the ground running and never look back. We’ve been through a lot in Toronto over the past 20 years, in every sport, and beyond the Argos and Rock none of it has been all that good. Sure, there’s nothing to panic about, but it would be awfully swell not to have to talk people down off the ledge every once in a while.