Staring out at dewy baseball fields on cool mornings in Dunedin this past March, the single defining thought that guided most others this spring was: “They need to get off to a good start.”
By April 20, three weeks into the season, the Toronto Blue Jays were 13-6, with the second best record in the American League.
Funny how that now almost reads like fiction.
At this point on the baseball calendar, the phrase “it’s a long season” takes on a whole other meaning. There’s certainly sadness to see a season wind down, especially when it has been unsuccessful. At the same time, there’s some sense of relief, that mercifully, we’re almost ready to turn the page.
This said, as though “turning the page” hasn’t been the dominant theme of the 2018 season. It’s impossible to know how we’ll view this season years from now, but it almost certainly won’t be for the action on the field. At least not the big league fields.
This was a season of injury reports, from Josh Donaldson limping off the field in Dunedin Stadium, to Marcus Stroman defiantly pushing his recovery time in order to be ready for the first week of the season, and the seemingly perpetual issues with Aaron Sanchez’s fingers.
On the positive side, it was also a season of minor league updates, illustrated by grainy, shaky video of Vladimir Guerrero Jr.’s exploits. From his game-winning home run in Montreal – possibly the most indelible on-field event of the entire season – to his ascendance to the rank of the universally acclaimed best prospect in baseball, to the ongoing narrative of why and how he could be kept off the major league roster, Vlad Jr. was unquestionably the Blue Jays’ Newsmaker of the Year.
Given how the season turned out, you could make an argument that he would have been in the running for the team MVP if he’d had the chance to play this season.
But this was The Season That Wasn’t There, almost from that aforementioned point in April onward. The Blue Jays posted a 59-81 record from that high point onward, and seemingly we were left with a feeling of playing out the string before they were even tabulating the All-Star ballots.
Speaking of which, it seems perfectly emblematic of this season that the Jays’ lone representative at the midsummer classic was J.A. Happ. Even as he was named to the roster, it was clear to all Jays fans that his days with the franchise were numbered, and part of the drama was whether if he would make it to the celebrations in Washington in a Jays cap.
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Happ was just one veteran moved among many. Steve Pearce, Seung-hwan Oh, Aaron Loup, John Axford and Curtis Granderson were all sent packing for promising returns.
After much drama, Josh Donaldson also departed for a semi-mysterious return, ending a brief, storied stint in Toronto with a whimper. Or was that a whine?
And, in what will stand out as one of the all-time great disappointments for Blue Jays fans, the team was left with little option but to trad their young, still-promising closer. The disappointment being not in the return, but in the reasons why it became necessary in the first place.
Strangely, the in-season trade that was most significant to this year’s team was the March 21 acquisition of Sam Gaviglio for a player to be named later. Met with a collective shrug in the moment, Gaviglio would go on to make the second most starts for the team this season.
That’s a testament to the fact that, for all the discussion about its length, a baseball season is also incredibly dense. It takes a lot of players, games and moments to comprise a single campaign.
The overriding sense of the 2018 season is one that shouldn’t have been a surprise, given much of what we knew in the spring. Certainly, there was a sense then that if all went well, you could take the talent assembled and pry open the competitive window for one last shot at a post-season berth.
But if the hope was for all to go well, very little did in the end. In a season in which 63 players pulled on a Jays jersey, you could count on one hand the number who achieved above expectations this year.
This was undeniably a “transition year.” But if there is a reason for optimism, it is that most of the pleasant surprises that arose were from players who figure to be a part of the future of the franchise. If this season ends as a disappointment on the whole, at least it gave us a glance at a markedly-improving Lourdes Gurriel Jr., and a mature and productive Danny Jansen. And, after a lost April that prompted many to call for his release, Randal Grichuk appeared from June onward to be a reliable, middle of the order bat.
Take some of those players, and add Vladimir Guerrero Jr. to the mix, and 2019 can’t help but be a more compelling season on the field.
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