ST. PETERSBURG, Fla. – Remember Sunday, after the Baltimore Orioles scored five times in the 11th inning for an 8-3 win over the Toronto Blue Jays, when John Schneider said “enough is enough” about his slumping hitters afterwards?
“It wasn’t like, ‘Hey, you guys figure it out,’” he explained Monday afternoon inside the visiting manager’s office at Tropicana Field. “It was kind of (Sunday) in a nutshell, like, damn, all right, it’s going to turn, like, what else can happen?”
Plenty, it turns out, as hours later, his team’s bizarre period of struggle continued against the Tampa Bay Rays, a pair of Vladimir Guerrero Jr. errors leading to four unearned runs that both ended Chris Bassitt’s shutout innings streak at 28 and provided the difference in a 6-4 loss.
First, Guerrero dropped a low Whit Merrifield relay after the second baseman scooped Christian Bethancourt’s grounder up the middle, allowing a run to score and the second inning to continue, with Jose Siri hitting a two-run homer right after.
Then in the third, Wander Franco’s 96.1 m.p.h. smash short-hopped Guerrero and hit off the heel of his glove right to Bassitt, who relayed the ball back to the first baseman, who scrambled to his feet, never got set on the bag, dropped the throw and had his foot clipped by Franco.
A two-out RBI single by Isaac Paredes reinforced how, right now, no Blue Jays error goes unpunished, opening up a 4-0 Rays lead that was far too much for a struggling offence to overcome.
“We’ve got to be better at everything,” Guerrero said through interpreter Hector Lebron. “It doesn’t matter the results, I always tell my teammates, don’t put your head down, stay positive and we’re going to be fine. Things are going to turn around. We’ve just got to keep on working on everything ’til we get where we want.”
The mistakes stood out most as the Blue Jays lost their fifth straight game, and seventh in eight outings, dropping them to 25-23 amid a stretch of 11 straight games against AL East rivals.
They played crisp, tight baseball when the AL East rivals first met in Toronto back in April, the Rays suffering their first two losses of the season there, a sharp contrast to how they’ve rolled out during the current skid.
“You can’t give multiple outs to a really good team and expect to win. We’re just playing not good baseball right now,” said Bassitt, who allowed six runs, two earned, in 6.1 innings. “We’re in the heart of the toughest part of our schedule and to play the baseball that we’re playing right now, we can’t expect to win games. I think tomorrow we’ll definitely clean everything up, just play a clean game, play our game, hope for the best. But we’ve just got to clean everything up.”
At times Monday, the Blue Jays did play clean before a crowd of 8,857, starting with Alejandro Kirk catching Franco stealing in the first. There was George Springer’s diving catch to rob Luke Raley to end the second, the right fielder’s leaping grab against the wall to steal extra bases from Randy Arozarena in the third and Kevin Kiermaier, making his return to the Trop, throwing out Franco at home after catching a Brandon Lowe popper to end the fourth.
The impact of those plays, however, was muted with the offence grinding through another dry night at the dish.
“As crazy as it is, I think those plays are standard for us, I really do,” said Bassitt. “The Vladdy picks are standard for us, we expect Vladdy to do that. The great defensive plays by (Matt Chapman), we expect him to do it. That’s the calibre of player that we have around every position, essentially. So to see a great play like KK’s, he’s got a Platinum Glove, running on KK, you know the risk, especially the Rays. We expect our guys to do this. Great players make great plays. It’s great players making mental mistakes (that’s an issue). That’s basically it.”
A two-out Guerrero double was stranded in the first and then in the second, in a play symbolic of the club’s recent woes, Merrifield ran into the third out at third base when a Danny Jansen dribbler arrived at the bag at the same time he did, leading to a Paredes tag.
Merrifield broke through against bulk pitcher Josh Fleming in the fourth, cashing a leadoff Matt Chapman single with a two-out homer, but a Springer single in the fifth and walk in the eighth were both followed by Bichette double-play balls, any inning they began to build immediately crumbling apart.
They didn’t really look dangerous until the ninth, when Daulton Varsho went deep and Brandon Belt added a pinch-hit RBI single, but by then, it was too little too late.
“I feel like everything that could go wrong for us lately has and that’s the way baseball goes. At the same time, we create luck for ourselves and we’ve got to be better, plain and simple,” Kiermaier, who was feted with a videoboard tribute after the first inning, said before the game.
Turning things around is “easier said than done,” he added, “but just try to get confidence back. We don’t have a whole lot of guys playing with the greatest confidence right now. And that happens. … We’re pressing a little bit right now, putting a lot of pressure on ourselves because we know we’re better than what we’ve shown as of late. But it seems like we’re facing a nasty pitcher day in, day out. This game is so hard. People forget that. And we’ve just got to have one of those offensive outbursts to really get us going. Hopefully that can happen soon.”
If ever it seemed like it might, Monday certainly felt like the day for it, with the Rays starting opener Trevor Kelley, the funky-throwing righty cropper, ahead of the lefty Fleming against Bassitt, who’d ended Blue Jays losing streaks the past three times he’s started.
Instead, they kept struggling, the good vibes from a sweep of Atlanta replaced by the pain of an extended slide that one swing different here and there could easily be a steadying run.
Only it’s not, a pair of miscues digging a hole and solo shots by Arozarena in the sixth and Raley in the seventh helping to push the game out of reach by the time the Blue Jays rally fell short in the ninth.
“It’s not a lack of effort or anything,” said Schneider. “These guys want it and they’re battling their asses off. You look at the ninth inning, there’s no quit, there’s no anything except trying to get the job done. And I think that’s what gives you a lot of confidence going forward. … You look at the ninth inning and it’s all right, here we go. Just carry that over into tomorrow a little bit, but it’s going to come. It’d be different if it was a different effort level. And it’s just not. These guys want it and it’s coming.”
The wait continues.