TORONTO – For Toronto Blue Jays fans, the grind of living through a rebuild starts now. Over the course of disappointing 2017 and ’18 seasons, they had to come to grips with the end of the brief renaissance in 2015-16. Venerated stars like Jose Bautista, Edwin Encarnacion and Josh Donaldson departed. Slowly, methodically, the team they fell in love with was picked apart.
The Blue Jays started near the top and now they’re here, facing an unpredictable number of growing-pain years their players must live through, and the fans who’ve stuck around must endure. Thursday’s Opening Day 2-0 loss to the Detroit Tigers in 10 innings before a crowd of 45,048 was, in some ways, a preview of what’s to come in this sifting-through-the-sand season.
There was Marcus Stroman shimmying his way through seven outstanding innings of shutout ball, beginning what is essentially a showcase period ahead of the July 31 trade deadline. The right-hander is among the few remaining aging-out assets the Blue Jays can still convert into future capital. Aaron Sanchez and Ken Giles are in similar boats in that regard.
“I’m back to throwing whatever pitch I want in whatever count,” said Stroman, who made his second Opening Day start as he seeks to bounce back from what he described as a “pretty bad” 2018. “Last year I’d go into games and throw one pitch, two pitches. I have six pitches. My body feels good. My head feels good. I’m back to doing whatever I want out there.”
Then, there were 11 players experiencing a big-league Opening Day for the first time, with the batting order featuring four players essentially still getting their feet wet: Teoscar Hernandez, the leader at 203 career games played; Lourdes Gurriel Jr.; Rowdy Tellez, called up in place of the just-traded Kendrys Morales; and Danny Jansen.
Hernandez, after making a series of changes over the winter, ended Jordan Zimmermann’s perfect game bid with an infield single two outs into the seventh and played a clean left field. Gurriel, positioned to win the everyday second base job, failed to complete a couple of double plays after taking relays from Freddy Galvis. Tellez worked a walk in the eighth, while Jansen threw out Niko Goodrum trying to steal second base in the second and did a nice job of handling Stroman, whose movement can be tough to catch.
“That’s been a big thing for me, receiving, cleaning it up,” said Jansen, who drew praise from Stroman for the game he called. “Last year and the years prior I was kind of arm-barred and I decided to keep my glove closer to me so those guys like Sanchez and Stroman with a lot of late sink, I’m able to just be an athlete. That’s gone a long way for me. Happy with where it is.”
Finally, there was Daniel Hudson entering the game in the 10th and buckling, allowing a leadoff double to Niko Goodrum and two-run homer to Christin Stewart, an inauspicious beginning for the veteran signed in a pinch Sunday. If he performs well, he’ll become July trade fodder, too.
“I like my chances when I go out there with the stuff I had – I just didn’t execute an 0-2 pitch (to Stewart),” said Hudson. “I was trying to get that slider more backfoot and I just hung it there middle-in for him and he made me pay for it.”
All of it is inherent to the process now underway.
As Charlie Montoyo, making his debut as manager at the age of 53, said before the game, “the future is here, and the future is coming, also.”
This Blue Jays rebuild comes at a weird time for the sport, with technology changing the way everything is done, the market norms for free agents being rewritten on the fly and the burgeoning of a new player activism as they awaken to the sea of change.
Add in the incongruity of the dispassionate analysis of a passionate game that’s the new standard of front offices everywhere, and fans are left stuck in the middle, asked to use both their heads to understand what’s happening and their hearts to motivate their spending.
There’s push-and-pull everywhere.
The trade of Morales allows the Blue Jays to follow one recent trend in baseball, the one away from the traditional, one-dimensional designated hitter. Without one player eating up 500-600 plate appearances, Montoyo can spread the opportunity around, although that’s a mean, not an end.
“I’m a guy who likes to play everybody so I love what I have now – I can play everybody and everybody gets to rest,” he said. “But at the end of the day, we want to get to a guy that can hit 30 bombs and 100 RBIs in that spot. Who knows? It could be Rowdy Tellez. He’s going to get a chance to DH, too, and play some first, so we’ll see.”
Nowhere is “we’ll see” more apt than for the pitching staff, although Stroman’s strong debut offered a good starting point. Both Stroman and Sanchez are pending free agents after the 2020 season, and an opportunity to max out on them will come before the end of July.
But the problem in not extending one or both is that with a lag in the farm system’s pitching, the Blue Jays may very well spend the next several years trying to recreate what they already have.
And while the Milwaukee Brewers came up with creative ways to get 27 outs a night last year, even they understand that what they did in 2018 isn’t sustainable long term. Success for the Blue Jays this year is, in large measure, creating the structure of the 2020 and beyond pitching staff.
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“I’m old school. Believe me, if our five starters are good that’ll be awesome and we won’t have to use an opener,” said Montoyo. “Same goes for the bullpen. The better my bullpen is, the smarter I’m going to look making moves. That’s a fact. I’m hoping my five starters do well, and we don’t have to use an opener. If they struggle, we might have to go there, because I’ve seen it work, also.
“We’re going to be bold, we’re going to take chances and we’re going to do whatever it takes to win games. If we have to use an opener, we will.”
The likelihood is that this season will make the Blue Jays do all kinds of things not in their ideal. That’s part of the deal in a rebuild. And there are no promises it ends in a championship the way it did for the Chicago Cubs and the Houston Astros.
So, Blue Jays fans, this is what lies before you, taking a leap of faith that the long slog ahead will ultimately lead to a better place.
