TORONTO — At a time when the Toronto Blue Jays need to be finding answers and stability, they are instead accumulating questions and uncertainty.
Is Max Scherzer ready to leave a recent rough patch behind and become the post-season starter the team needs him to be? What will the rotation around him look like after pushing Shane Bieber back a day, especially if they end up in a wild-card series — suddenly an increasingly real possibility? What are the spin-off effects of how they set up? And how do they pull an offence that really misses Bo Bichette out of its current skid?
All of those questions have really coalesced over a pair of loses to the Boston Red Sox that have eroded what little margin for error the Blue Jays had in trying to secure the American League East, after clinching a post-season berth over the weekend. Wednesday night’s 7-1 loss dropped them into a tie with the New York Yankees, 8-1 winners over the Chicago White Sox, while keeping their magic number at four with four games to play.
Since the Blue Jays hold the tiebreaker, they still control their fate — win out and they own the East – but one glitch and they’ll need help from others to win the division for the first time since 2015.
"It feels like the sky is falling right now and it's (expletive) not,” manager John Schneider said during a calm-the-waters, deliberate-in-messaging post-game availability. “I mean, we've got 90 wins and we're in the playoffs and if the season ended today, you're winning the AL East. So, I want them to come out and not press. I want them to come out and play confident, play fast, play loose. When we're doing that, we're really good. I don't want them to get caught up in, ‘the last six days have been tough,’ because this season has been really, really good.”
Certainly, but winning four straight the way they’re hitting right now won’t be easy, and frustration boiled over in the seventh inning, when home-plate umpire Gabe Morales rung up Vladimir Guerrero Jr. on a borderline inner-edge heater from a dominant Garrett Crochet.
The superstar slugger gestured to where he thought the pitch was and that got him ejected, with Schneider running out to take up the case strategically enough to ensure he remained in the game. Hitting coach David Popkins, on the other hand, was tossed after a first-pitch strike to Alejandro Kirk immediately after.
Combined with Scherzer giving up runs in the first inning for the fifth consecutive start – this time a three-spot keyed by Masataka Yoshida’s RBI double and Romy Gonzalez’s two-run single amid five straight hits – and the offence scoring two or less runs for the seventh time in nine games, there was little good to take from a sixth loss in seven outings.
Still, on the heels of Tuesday’s frustrating loss, during which a pivotal and controversial foul ball and third-strike call went against George Springer with the bases loaded, Schneider was quick to both accentuate the positive – “We've been at the top of a lot of offensive ranks the entire season with four games to go, that is a good thing,” he said – and shut down the umpire discourse.
“First and foremost, we're not losing because of umpires. Let's get that out there. We’re losing because we’re not scoring enough runs,” said Schneider. “It’s a borderline pitch. I think Vladdy's frustrated. I think a lot of guys are frustrated. But again, man, it's not about a call here or a call there. It's about stringing together good at-bats and stringing together productive innings. … I don't want to feed into the narrative that the umpires are screwing us, because they're not. We're not scoring enough runs.”
Said Guerrero, speaking through interpreter Hector Lebron: “We've just got to win games. Obviously we haven't been playing like we were playing, we haven't been hitting the way we were hitting. So got to get back to where we've been and start winning games.”
Not even Anthony Santander’s first start since May 29 – he went 0-for-3 – nor Jose Berrios’ first appearance since being moved to the bullpen – he threw a clean seventh before giving up a Carlos Narvaez three-run homer in the eighth, not long after jawing with Gonzalez at second – helped much on that front Wednesday.
And there’s precious little runway left to get right and optimize for the post-season, with several moving parts in play.
Bieber getting pushed from Thursday to Friday means the Blue Jays are TBD on the mound for Thursday’s finale, although Berrios’ relief appearance seemingly positioned Eric Lauer to do some bulk work behind Louis Varland, the former starter turned leverage arm.
That also means Trey Yesavage will start Saturday versus the Tampa Bay Rays, but how deep he goes will determine when he’d potentially be available for a wild-card series. If Sunday’s regular-season finale is relevant to the standings, Kevin Gausman will start, although that’s also risky as it could leave him unavailable for a potential wild-card outing, should the Blue Jays end up there.
Should the Blue Jays win the East and earn a bye, they will be able to line up as they see fit. But if they do end up in a wild-card series, as long as Gausman doesn’t start Sunday, they’re essentially locked into using him in a series opener, with the ability to go Scherzer or Bieber for Game 2, with the other and Yesavage available for a Game 3.
Scherzer, coming off a seven-run, two-thirds-of-an-inning outing at Kansas City that was the shortest start of his career not ended by injury, was better against the Red Sox, although he was frustrated that “the first inning got away from me again.”
“I made some pitches in the middle where they got some singles and also made some good pitches where they got singles, as well, and that led to the three-spot,” he continued. “But feel like I found some rhythm, was able to execute a little bit but unfortunately Crochet threw the heck out of the ball and kept us from scoring. Tough pill to swallow when you're going up against somebody like him. You've got to match him.”
No matter how they set up, they need to get the offence right, stat, as they managed just four hits Wednesday, including Isiah Kiner-Falefa’s ninth-inning solo shot, the sixth time in the past nine games they’ve had four hits or less.
Before the game, Popkins described the recent slide as “natural variance in baseball,” which may be true, but is especially ill-timed. Advanced scouts from post-season-bound clubs have been following the Blue Jays around for a couple of weeks now, with both the Rays and Royals providing a blueprint for how to pitch to them.
Popkins feels the blue Jays haven’t seen anything that they haven’t already seen this season, and added that “any time at the end of the year when you're playing meaningful games, you're going to have some times where guys are pressing and trying to do more.”
“You see it with teams that are ahead, they're trying to hold on, those teams tend to really want to get it done, so they tend to have a little bit more effort and attention and focus to get it done and really it takes them out of that relaxed mindset they've had all year,” he continued. “So it just seems like we've been playing meaningful games, ran into some days where it was bad luck, some days that just weren't very good and it happens throughout the year. It's just another challenge we'll overcome this year.”
The late-season test is on and time is beginning to run out.
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