With the pre-season favourites’ playoff chances on life support, attention turns to next year—again
You don’t find a lot of folks outside the southern hemisphere who spend the dog days of August pining for March.
But so it is for fans of the Toronto Blue Jays during this strange, frustrating and now lost baseball campaign.
They’d love to be able to turn back the clock to the blissful days of spring training and take a mulligan. Or failing that, crank it forward, past that moment when their heroes were supposed to be playing meaningful games in autumn for the first time in two decades, right on through to the season of hope and renewal.
The twin series sweeps at the hands of the Tampa Bay Rays and Los Angeles Dodgers right after the All-Star break were the final straw, and also a pretty good representation of Toronto’s year in microcosm. The Jays weren’t crushed or outclassed by two very good teams, and during those six games, many encouraging things happened, but they found a way to lose every one of them, in the process eliminating even the bluest of blue-sky playoff fantasies.
It’s been a maddening year for the many who have come to care passionately about this team, in part because it’s tough to pin down exactly what went haywire.
Well, maybe not so tough—R.A. Dickey, Josh Johnson and Brandon Morrow, who were supposed to represent the dominant core of the Jays’ starting rotation, have been some combination of awful and hurt since day one.
The emergence of Esmil Rogers and the predictably competent season from Mark Buehrle weren’t nearly enough to compensate for the woes of the putative Big Three, and from there a chain reaction familiar to any baseball devotee took over: Bad, short starts wear out even the best of bullpens over the course of 162 games; little mistakes are quickly compounded, and larger mistakes are fatal; some eye rolling and selfishness naturally creeps into the clubhouse as another “ace” surrenders a bunch of runs and hits the showers early; the team tacitly acknowledges, long before its fans do, that they’re playing out the string.
To date, the Jays haven’t shown a lot of quit—and that’s in part a testament to manager John Gibbons, who may yet be made the scapegoat for this mess. Still, you could imagine the thought balloons in the dugout as Johnson left that late-July start after being thumped by the lowly Houston Astros.
This is what a lousy baseball team looks like, as everyone in these parts knows all too well.
But there has also been a lot of good mixed in with the bad.
Haven’t Edwin Encarnacion and Jose Bautista (minus his temper tantrums) been what everyone hoped they would be at the heart of the order, on pace for twin 40–home run, 100-RBI seasons? Hasn’t Jose Reyes been pretty much as billed since he came back from injury, a terrific, complete ballplayer and arguably the best leadoff hitter in Blue Jays history?
Colby Rasmus, whipping boy, has been one of the best centre-fielders in the American League this year. Adam Lind, even after cooling off, has had a bounce-back season at the plate. Utility guys Rajai Davis and Mark DeRosa have delivered nicely, and the pen, before wear and tear set in, had been superb.
Yes, it took Maicer Izturis a long time to look comfortable, and J.P. Arencibia’s struggles have been well documented, and Brett Lawrie, around two stints on the disabled list, has only shown flashes of his enormous promise. Melky Cabrera looks like a walking ad for the effectiveness of PEDs, and Emilio Bonifacio, the “hidden gem” in the big Miami trade, has proven to be nothing of the sort.
Still, it’s possible to imagine assembling exactly this same group, starting over, transforming that dreadful first month of the season into something merely mediocre, and the Jays at least being in the hunt.
It’s also possible to imagine almost this same roster reporting to Dunedin in 2014—contractual realities dictate that’s probably what’s going to happen unless Alex Anthopoulos pulls something major out of his hat—and with a little better luck and no World Baseball Classic interruption, watching a contending team emerge.
Could a solid five-man rotation be assembled from among Dickey, Johnson (the Jays will be stuck making him a qualifying offer, and he may be stuck accepting it), Buehrle, a healthy Morrow, Rogers, J.A. Happ and whoever might emerge from a group including Kyle Drabek, Drew Hutchison, Dustin McGowan, Ricky Romero and Todd Redmond? You don’t have to be a crazy partisan to think it’s at least possible.
That conversation, though, is a long, long way away, after the pennant race and the World Series, after the days grow short and the leaves fall and the hockey season starts and the snow flies and the Grey Cup and the Super Bowl and the Winter Olympics.
Begone cruel summer. The sooner, the better.
This story originally appeared in Sportsnet magazine. Subscribe here.