Baseball doesn’t have a clock, but that hasn’t stopped time from rushing in on the 2016 Toronto Blue Jays.
With Tuesday night’s wild-card match-up against the Baltimore Orioles at Rogers Centre, the deadline has arrived. We knew it was coming, we just didn’t know what form it would take. On Sept. 1 when the Blue Jays had a two-game lead on the Boston Red Sox for first place in the AL East, it looked like their make-or-break moment would get pushed further into October.
On Friday, as the Blue Jays lost for the fourth time in five games, it appeared the reckoning might come even sooner. Two big wins in Boston and everyone can breathe again, if only until the first pitch Tuesday night.
But as far back as February with the Florida sun still struggling to dry the dew from the grass at Spring Training — the moment on the schedule that moves most lightly, at the farthest remove from the daily grind — this season has felt like a time bomb, the tick-tocks getting ever louder.
Jose Bautista lit the fuse with his heavily scripted February public address regarding his pending free agency. In a calculated move to put pressure on new Blue Jays president Mark Shapiro, the business-minded slugger cited the jump in the share price of Rogers Communications Inc., he tied to the club’s magical 2015 campaign as reason he was deserving of a new, long and rich contract.
It was a feel-good moment if being reminded that sports is a business — and one for mercenaries at that — makes you feel good.
In a far more understated way, fellow free agent slugger Edwin Encarnacion nudged the clock along simply by refusing to discuss a new contract once the regular season started. The season opener arrived without a contract and the clock ticked a little louder.
In normal circumstances, a season like the Blue Jays and their fan base enjoyed the summer before — a miraculous collision of events that turned an under-achieving .500 season into a three-month joy ride, providing as much pure pleasure shared by more Canadians, arguably, than any sports event in the history of the country — would cast a glow that would stretch well into June of this year.
But from the moment Bautista put ownership on notice, the 2016 season has felt like there’s been a deadline looming.
And as the season unfolded in herky-jerky fashion, with electric starting pitching being undone by a woeful bullpen and a solidified late innings corps being undermined by long stretches of stagnant offence, there seemed less joy and more angst in Hogtown.
The crowds filled the Rogers Centre in massive numbers and travelled spectacularly well. The television ratings proved that the Blue Jays were a national phenomenon. But it was a hard season, one that didn’t allow many weeks where everything seemed to be unfolding without incident. It was more ‘see it while it lasts’ than the beginning of something lasting.
Even when things were finally flowing in August, there was the Aaron Sanchez innings watch, the joys of watching the emergence of a cornerstone ace tempered by the monitoring of his pitch count like grains of sand falling through an hourglass.
Timeless? How about time’s up?
Teams are constantly evolving, changing organisms. Even the early 1990s Blue Jays World Series teams turned over significant chunks of their core, year over year, as every Blue Jays fan knows.
But rarely has the inevitability of change hung over a good team — perhaps even a championship team — the way it remained a low-lying cloud over the 2016 season which has had a ‘win-or-else’ feel since February.
So it’s fitting that this season — this troubled, tortured, tense sequence of 162 games, capped by an excruciating month of September — comes down to one game, win and move on, lose and step in the great unknown.
A year ago, the Blue Jays season ended painfully, with Ben Revere, Dioner Navarro and Josh Donaldson failing to cash in Dalton Pompey from third in the top of the 9th in Game 6 of the ALCS. Bautista, with two home runs in his pocket already, was left on deck.
But even in the disappointment of that moment, 2016 seemed like a season to look forward to with dollops of optimism. A whole year of Troy Tulowitzki; the return of a healthy Devon Travis; another year of 100 home runs and 300 RBIs from Bautista, Donaldson and Encarnacion; The pitching promise of Sanchez and Marcus Stroman and the likely return of the revelation that was Marco Estrada.
And that was before J.A. Happ turned into Roy Halladay.
Had we known that it would only be reasonable to predict an AL East coronation.
It was far from that. And as the Blue Jays head into their do-or-die wild-card game it’s already certain, regardless of the outcome, that this era of Blue Jays baseball is almost over. It doesn’t mean that the future isn’t filled with promise. The Blue Jays’ five current starting pitchers (less pending free agent R.A. Dickey, who is out of the rotation in any case) won the AL ERA title and are all under team control next season. Donaldson remains in his prime and Tulowitzki and Russell Martin appear to be extending theirs nicely. Travis is better than realized.
But no one envisions Bautista returning, and injuries aside, the fact that he was able to pull together a 1.051 OPS in the middle of a sputtering Blue Jays lineup in their final 13 games exclusively against teams in the midst of playoff races suggests he may have some life in his bat yet as he gets set to turn 36. And Edwin? It seems wrong that the Blue Jays will let him walk, but after he put up 42 home runs and 127 RBIs in a contract year it seems impossible that they’ll scrounge around for the $150 million or so it would likely require to keep him around. Dickey — as much a symbol of the since-departed Alex Anthopoulos era as anyone — will take both his 200 innings pitched and his quote machine elsewhere.
John Gibbons? Win or lose, he’s so closely tied to the past that it’s hard to imagine Shapiro will have him manage the future he’s planning, but who knows, for sure. Winning can change a lot of things.
But the one thing that is certain is that the Blue Jays’ clock that has been ticking all season long will strike midnight on Tuesday in a wild-card game they would have turned their nose up at on Sept. 1 but can only welcome now that it’s here.
Win and time stops. The season continues with renewed life. Lose and the present that was foretold as far back as spring training arrives fast and loud and with an ominous thud.