This is what the Toronto Blue Jays should be doing. Actually, it’s what they need to be doing. If the club’s going to return to the post-season in a hyper-competitive American League East, it must significantly outperform the hovering-around-.500 outcomes it produced over the first 70-odd games of the season. It must win at something closer to a .585 or .590 clip over its remaining 89 games. It must go something like 52-37 the rest of the way, which would give Toronto 90 wins and a decent shot at a wild-card spot in a tight AL playoff race. It must get on a roll before long.
Because it isn’t early anymore. To this point, the untimely injuries, bullpen meltdowns, defensive miscues, and sputtering bats could be cited as extenuating circumstances for a meandering club. But that can’t continue to happen as the Blue Jays cross the season’s midway point a week from Saturday. With the hardest part of the schedule in the rear view, the time to spin wheels has passed. Now it’s time to beat up on the teams you’re supposed to beat up on and put some wins in the bank. Now it’s time to go.
And they’re doing it, damn it. With five straight wins over the Baltimore Orioles, Miami Marlins, and, in a 9-0 Thursday night drubbing at Sahlen Field in Buffalo, the lowly Orioles again, the Blue Jays are putting together the kind of run against inferior opposition they’ll need to make something of an undeniably promising season. They’re three games north of .500 now and they must keep building.
This club could be rostering as many as five AL all-stars bound to wear those atrocious uniforms, with baseball’s best hitter, a top-three second baseman, a top-five shortstop, and a pair of strike-throwing, sub-3.50 ERA left-handers atop its rotation. It’s a solid core that needs plenty of help in the bullpen, a bench upgrade or two, more reliable back-end rotation depth, and a return to health and form from its $150-million off-season signing. It’s a young, talented club that, with some attention paid to the fringes of its roster prior to the trade deadline, has every reason to be competing for one of the AL’s five post-season positions deep into September. But to do so it needs to beat up on the teams it’s supposed to. It needs to make hay right now.
That’s what was encouraging about the way the Blue Jays burst out of the gates Thursday, scoring 9 runs on seven hits and five walks over the first three innings against a 28-games-below-.500 club starting a 25-year-old rookie with a 6.20 ERA allowing 2.4 HR/9. That’s the type of performance a lineup this talented ought to be producing against opposition this meek.
And credit the Blue Jays, they’ve done that more often than not this season. After throttling the Orioles, Toronto is now 19-10 against teams below .500 and 19-25 against teams above. Taking advantage of the Baltimore’s and Miami’s of the world hasn’t been an issue. Beating top-tier competition has, as the Blue Jays are 2-5 against the Tampa Bay Rays, 4-5 against the Boston Red Sox, 2-4 against the Houston Astros, and 1-2 against the Chicago White Sox.
But Toronto can worry about finding a way to beat the good teams later. First it must put itself in position to make those late-season games matter. It must have nights like Thursday, when the top three hitters in the order each had an extra-base hit and a walk, while Teoscar Hernandez went 2-for-4 in the clean-up spot, Lourdes Gurriel Jr. drove in four from the No. 7 position, and Reese McGuire had three hits out of the nine hole.
With George Springer finally healthy — he had the night off after back-to-back nine-inning games in his return from a soft tissue injury followed by a wee-hours arrival in Buffalo Thursday morning — Toronto’s offence is one of MLB’s deepest, capable of putting up touchdowns on a nightly basis, particularly against uncompetitive clubs like the Orioles.
The other part of the equation would be pitching, and lately the Blue Jays have been doing that, too. Toronto has allowed one run or less in each of its last three games, taking advantage of two of baseball’s least potent offences. Thursday it was Anthony Kay’s turn, as he struck out eight over five scoreless starting in place of Steven Matz, who’s been sidelined for two weeks after contracting COVID-19.
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It was a fine outing to build on for Kay, who can be a difficult a guy to figure out. With a mid-90’s fastball from the left-side — often touching 96-97 — that he plays off of three distinct secondary weapons in a cutter, curveball, and changeup, it feels like he should be getting better results than he has. But he entered the night with a 6.43 ERA over six appearances this season with one peripheral pointing in the right direction (9.9 K/9) and another pointing in the wrong one (4.3 BB/9).
Of course, the cutter’s a new pitch that Kay’s been throwing for less than a year, and the changeup is his least-used offering, one he’s only comfortable utilizing against right-handed hitting. But he still ought to be able to be able to throw strikes and get plenty of outs with merely his fastball and curveball, considering they deviate in speed by 16-m.p.h. and that the spin direction on the two pitches almost perfectly mirror one another:
What that means is Kay’s fastball and curveball appear nearly identical as they come out of his hand on the same plane before suddenly moving in very different directions as they near the plate. That’s how Kay can get reactions like one from Austin Meadows, who thought he was going to get plunked with a fastball before a curveball landed perfectly over the inside corner:
Anthony Kay, Bowel Locking 78mph Curveball.
Austin Meadows. pic.twitter.com/X5fcwHlkBf
— Rob Friedman (@PitchingNinja) September 8, 2019
And while his new cutter features less movement and has been thrown with less consistency than his two primary offerings, you can see the pitch’s potential in the image above. It could give hitters a third direction to worry about as they try to think along with Kay’s game plan.
But Kay must be throwing strikes to tie it all together, and that’s been an issue to this point in his career. He’s thrown just over 47 per cent of his pitches in the zone over the last two seasons, often missing the plate by too wide a margin to tempt big-league hitters to chase. He began 55 per cent of his 2020 plate appearances with a ball and walked 10 through his first 21 innings pitched this season.
The Blue Jays have been encouraging Kay to pitch more aggressively — also to correct a persistent tendency to fall off to the third base side of the mound in his delivery, preventing him from working directly to home plate and locating his pitches consistently — practically since the day he joined the organization as part of the 2019 trade deadline return for Marcus Stroman. But old habits die hard.
Take Thursday’s second inning. After the Blue Jays ambushed Orioles starter Dean Kremer with a six-run first, most of the damage crossing the plate on Gurriel Jr.’s first career grand slam, Kay took the mound to face the bottom of Baltimore’s lineup with a huge lead. But after striking out Freddy Galvis, he surrendered back-to-back singles, spurring a mound visit from his pitching coach, Pete Walker.
That got Kay back in the zone temporarily, as he struck out Pat Valaika on five pitches. But then he fell right back out of it, issuing a two-out walk to Cedric Mullins. By the time he got out of it, Kay had thrown 32 pitches in the frame to six hitters as Anthony Castro began loosening up in the bullpen behind him.
Now, to be fair, the BABIP Gods were not on Kay’s side in this one. Through those first two innings he allowed four balls in play, all of them soft singles that came off bats at 69, 72, 80, and 91-m.p.h. But he also started five of the 11 batters he faced with a ball, using 51 pitches to get six outs, continuing a season-long trend of inefficiency that had him enter the night averaging 19 pitches per inning.
And naturally, his third frame began with a first-pitch ball and a lead-off walk. But that also proved a settling-in point for Kay, who retired the next three batters on seven pitches before cruising through a three-up, three-down fourth on 9. The fifth was less tidy, as Mullins led off with a single. But Kay worked around it to complete five innings for only the second time in seven career starts.
Ultimately, Kay threw 62 of his 95 pitches for strikes, earning 15 whiffs, including eight with a fastball sat 95 and touched 97. He landed his curveball in the zone and got five swinging strikes with his changeup. His stuff was undeniably effective when he was locating it on the plate. It was an outing he can take some positives away from. But also one that demonstrated where he still needs to improve if he’s going to establish himself as a big-league starter.
