TORONTO — Sitting in the visitors’ dugout at Rogers Centre Thursday afternoon, Ron Washington reflected on the challenge of building a winning team.
Now 72, Washington has managed two clubs to the World Series but his current team — the last-place Angels — has no such aspirations this season. Success for the Angels means playing well between the lines, of course, but there’s also the mental side of the game. As Washington sees it, a young team must make progress on both fronts: on-field performance along with presence, the ability to navigate all that comes with being a major-leaguer.
“Winning is acquired,” he said before this late-August series against the Blue Jays. “This is not easy and we’ve got a lot of first timers that’s going through it. (But) you’ve to go through it to do it.”
Clearly, the same could be said about the 2024 Blue Jays. On Friday they beat the Angels 5-4 thanks to the back-to-back homers of two rookies. With the Blue Jays trailing by one run in the ninth, Joey Loperfido crushed a Roansy Contreras fastball over the left field wall to tie the game at four. One batter later, Addison Barger homered to right field for the first walk-off home run of his career.
When the season began, no one expected the Blue Jays to be in this position. Loperfido was on the Astros until the Blue Jays became summer sellers while Barger was still a minor leaguer. Yet it’s by challenging those players that the Blue Jays will get glimpses into what’s possible from their youngest players.
“You want to finish strong, but you want to see what these guys can do,” manager John Schneider said before the game. “You want to see what they can do while in the back of your mind, knowing that maybe in a different world, they wouldn’t be in those spots.”
In the fifth inning of Friday’s game, Loperfido made an impressive catch against the left field wall, robbing Nolan Schanuel of an extra-base hit. Meanwhile, in right field, Steward Berroa made a nice catch of his own and threw out Schanuel trying to turn a single into a double. Those plays don’t go unnoticed by team decision makers, but maybe more importantly they show the players themselves they belong.
While Alejandro Kirk isn’t a newcomer to the big-leagues anymore, he has been taking on a bigger workload ever since the Blue Jays traded Danny Jansen to Boston. So far, Schneider likes what he sees.
“He’s really done a good job of taking care of himself,” the manager said. “Using this as an opportunity to say, ‘okay, I can I can do this fairly regularly.’ So, it’s credit to him, really.”
Against the Angels Friday, Kirk singled twice while driving in two.
“He can hit,” Schneider said. “He’s not chasing as much — controlling the zone a little bit better. And when he’s not chasing, he’s usually hitting the ball hard.”
Now granted, it’s easier to find silver linings on a losing team than it is to assemble the combination of performance and presence that allows for division titles, first-round byes and deep playoff runs. These positives are just the beginning for a Blue Jays team with lots of work ahead, first internally and then this off-season.
If you ask Washington, young players are better off staying focused on the moment and letting the front office take care of those bigger picture concerns.
“In this business if you try to become a hero you become a zero,” Washington said. “Their heart beats so fast their nervous system is all over the place. They put themselves in trouble.”
On Friday, Loperfido and Barger did just the opposite.
