Gausman's dominance earns Blue Jays win as offence continues to struggle

ARLINGTON, Texas — To better understand why the Toronto Blue Jays continue to fluctuate within a narrow band on either side of the .500 mark, and whether they’re ever going to sustainably break free from it, keep an eye on their run differential.

While there are always anomalies, the number is generally a strong predictor of a team’s win-loss record and capacity for success. At minus-26 after Monday afternoon’s 2-1 win over the Texas Rangers behind Kevin Gausman’s eight brilliant innings, the Blue Jays are 26-27 because they haven’t been able to create enough separation between their run creation and run prevention. 

Until they either score more or give up less, if not ideally both, they’re destined to remain in the two-steps-forward, two-steps-back cycle that’s marked the first third of their 2025 season.

“That's a real thing,” manager John Schneider said of his team’s run differential. “When there's a big inconsistency, if you're down a lot, it's hard to sustain, you know what I mean? So if you're doing things every single day consistently, that’s where you can run into a hot streak, where you get into, OK, you're a plus-20, plus-30, plus-40.”

The Blue Jays have not, of course, been doing things consistently, which is also why so many of their games have been close, one way or another. 

Monday’s affair felt so familiar, as after Daulton Varsho’s first-inning solo shot opened the scoring, they squandered multiple chances to open the game up after getting only one run in the fourth on an Alejandro Kirk sacrifice fly when they put runners on second and third to open the inning. They then wasted first and second with one out in the fifth, second and third with one out in the sixth and two on and none out in the eighth. 

As a result, Gausman needed to be as dominant as he was, allowing just five hits with six strikeouts, since there was precious little room to breathe, especially after Wyatt Langford’s solo shot in the bottom of the fourth cut the Blue Jays’ lead to 2-1.

Gausman kept the game there until the ninth, when Jeff Hoffman locked it down for his 11th save, and has now allowed just one run on eight hits with no walks and 15 strikeouts over 15 innings in his last two starts. After surrendering six runs in 5.2 innings at home to the Tampa Bay Rays in the outing prior, he made an adjustment with his splitter grip, getting it set better in his glove, and tweaks to improve his fastball command have him back to top form.

“Even a couple of starts ago, I felt like the shape of my pitches was pretty good, but I was just missing,” he said. “If I was going up, I was missing belt and if I was going down, I was either too far down or too high. And so the command of the heater has been huge.” 

Now, there’s a pathway, albeit a particularly difficult and unlikely one, to winning consistently in such tight fashion, but as Schneider noted, “the margins of error a little bit bigger when you are creating some more runs, it makes margins of error bigger for our own pitchers and you're not in a one-run battle every single night where every little thing is a big momentum swing.”

To that end, all the elements that tie into run creation and prevention were a focus during the pre-game hitters meeting, in part because the Blue Jays followed a stirring sweep of the San Diego Padres by scoring twice while getting swept at the Rays. 

Sunday’s 13-0 loss, in particular, capped a poor weekend of play, which can happen, but is also why Schneider felt “there are certain parts of the season you really have to revisit it, which is kind of where we're at right now.” He described facing the Rangers trio of Jacob deGrom, Nate Eovaldi and Tyler Mahle this week as “a big test here” requiring “a complete offensive game, not just in the box, but on the bases.”

"This is a big series,” he added later. “I know it's May, but every game is important. The way we played in Tampa turned this into a little bit of a bigger series.”

They looked like a different offence in approach, if not necessarily in results, with 11 hard-hit balls against deGrom, who failed to strike out a batter for the first time in 229 career starts. Varsho, who added a double and bunt single, hit his eighth home run but first on a slider, turning on an offer at the bottom of the zone.

“I hit the mistake, which for him, that probably rarely happens,” he said. 

Yet the Blue Jays are still 11th in the American League with 207 runs scored and 10th in runs allowed at 233. Their run differential is 11th of the 15 teams in the league. The longer they remain within that band, the more it suggests they are what their record says they are. 

In contrast, take 2015, when the Blue Jays were 50-50 with a playoff probability of 34.6 per cent when they acquired Troy Tulowitzki and LaTroy Hawkins on July 28 to begin a stunning deadline buildup. At the time, their plus-95 run differential was the second-best in the majors and they were underperforming their expected record by nine wins. 

Correcting a few key flaws — Tulowitzki in the infield and Ben Revere in the outfield dramatically improved their defence, David Price was the ace they needed while Hawkins and Mark Lowe made the bullpen deeper — propelled them to a 43-19 finish.

For a similar scenario to play out this year, they need to find ways to alter their equation, with Schneider feeling the Blue Jays are capable of scoring more to accomplish that.

“When I look at an opportunity to get away from the ups and downs and, the sweep/get swept, it's how do you create runs? How do you how do you get a guy over? How do you get him in? How do you make a good read on the bases? How do you advance first to third?” he said.

“All those little things make everyone's job a little bit easier. … Not asking for one or two guys to do everything. Everyone has to understand where they fall in order of how we're built. It could be getting a bunt down. It could be hitting a home run with two outs and nobody on. It could be taking a couple of pitches to give your starter a breather. Just having some court awareness as to what is important now, not just for the individual hitter or baserunner, but what is important for our team in order to try to generate more runs.”