DENVER – You can’t expect good things to happen if you walk the 6-7-8 hitters on the NL’s worst team. Or if your defensive mistakes lead to four unearned runs. Or if you can’t take full advantage of a closer on the brink of collapse in baseball’s most hitter-friendly park.
And if all of that happens on the same night? As the Toronto Blue Jays can now attest, it doesn’t end well at all.
Facing an eminently beatable Rockies team, the Blue Jays got in their own way far too often Saturday. Add the resulting 8-7 loss to the collection of painful defeats they’ve endured this season. This one brings their season record to 74-62 and costs them a chance to gain a valuable game in the Wild Card race over Houston and Texas, both of whom lost.
The Blue Jays will now enter Sunday’s series finale 1.5 games behind the Rangers with 26 to play. With an early start awaiting them, they won’t have much time to dwell on this loss, but the typical ‘flush it and move on’ response doesn’t really fit anymore.
If the Rockies had simply outplayed the visitors, that’d be one thing, but that’s not what happened here. The Blue Jays had a 5-0 lead and they lost it. In doing so, they missed a chance to build some real momentum and push for a sweep.
So while baseball’s relentless schedule demands that the players move on by first pitch Sunday, this was no ordinary loss.
One day after homering and hitting a triple, Ernie Clement made two fielding errors leading to all four unearned runs. A perfect pick by Vladimir Guerrero Jr. might have saved Clement the second error, but regardless of how you score it, the defence let starter Yusei Kikuchi down.
That doesn’t mean Kikuchi was free of fault, though. He walked four hitters, including the first batter he faced and the last two. Of the 100 pitches he threw, only 54 were strikes. So even if he allowed just two earned runs, he wasn’t at his sharpest.
Still, Yimi Garcia had a chance to bail Kikuchi out when he entered with two on and two out in the fifth. Instead, Garcia walked the first hitter he faced before surrendering a bases-clearing triple to the second.
Again, not ideal. But if there’s any place where a three-run lead can be overcome it’s Coors Field. After Kevin Kiermaier’s second-inning home run, however, the Blue Jays’ offence slowed until the ninth when they scored two against a shaky Justin Lawrence before Spencer Horwitz struck out to end it. Notably, Guerrero Jr. went hitless in four at-bats while striking out and grounding into two double plays.
Before the game, the news wasn’t much better. The Blue Jays placed Jansen on the injured list with a fractured bone in the knuckle of his right middle finger. While Tyler Heineman took his place on the active roster, it’ll be Alejandro Kirk who takes the vast majority of the catching reps in Jansen’s absence.
Jansen will stay with the team for now, with plans to get a second opinion on Wednesday. That appointment will inform his next steps, so it’s still unclear whether he’ll be able to return during the regular season – a tough reality for the veteran of six big-league seasons to accept.
“I was definitely sad and disappointed. A whole lot of emotions,” Jansen said. “But at the end of the day it was a freak accident and something you can’t really control. That makes it a little bit easier to swallow, but it still stinks.”
An avid crossword puzzler, Jansen joked that he might have to learn to write left-handed while his finger’s covered in a splint. But perhaps more significant was the conversation he and Schneider had late Friday after the injury occurred.
As the Blue Jays learned the results of the x-rays, a disappointed Jansen told his manager he hopes to come back in time to win World Series MVP.
“Hopefully you miss the good parts, and you’re here for the great parts,” his manager replied.
That’s still the dream. And look, stranger things have happened. On nights like this, though, that vision sure feels pretty far away.
