TORONTO – In some ways, a baseball season requires a leap of faith. Players work throughout the off-season and spring and trust that it will show on the field. Coaching staffs build game-plans and strategies believing they will effectively leverage the available talent. Front offices make projections and wait for reality to match the forecasts. Everyone’s conviction gets tested by the grind of 162 games, which in small and medium samples invariably creates divergence between expectations and results. Faith well-placed is rewarded with a soft landing.
Through 81 games, at 44-37 after a 6-1 victory over the San Francisco Giants on Wednesday night, the Toronto Blue Jays are in the air and there’s no certainty how they ended up hitting the ground.
So far, they’ve “consistently been inconsistent,” as manager John Schneider so aptly put it. In spurts, they have played inspired, crisp, complete baseball, looking like a team capable of winning in whatever fashion a given game demands. In other spurts, they have looked like a lesser version of who they were the past two seasons, lacking the big-blow offence that bludgeoned opponents time and again.
Despite that, they are in the thick of a wild-card race that should run at least five teams deep in the American League, with a significant gap that will be very difficult to make up between them and the AL-East leading Tampa Bay Rays.
“I feel very good about the potential of this team playing even better,” general manager Ross Atkins said during a 22-minute pre-game meeting with media. “Obviously you’d love to be at the top of the division and have a better record, but I feel like we’re standing in a solid position.”
Depending on your level of faith, there’s both reason to doubt and reason to believe.
First and foremost is the offence, which has regularly built innings of opportunity and routinely struggled to fulfil them. A running theme this season has been their problems hitting with runners in scoring position and through the first 80 games, the discrepancy between their numbers with the bases empty has been a major head-scratcher.
|
|
Bases Empty |
With RISP |
|
PAs |
1,658 |
820 |
|
BA |
.267 |
.237 |
|
OBP |
.334 |
.313 |
|
SLG |
.437 |
.373 |
A 4-for-6-with-runners-in-scoring-position first inning Wednesday, and a 6-for-13 game overall, is a step in normalizing that, underlining the ability that’s there. They ambushed a quality starter in Logan Webb, going George Springer double, Bo Bichette RBI single, Brandon Belt run-scoring double right out of the gate. RBI doubles by Daulton Varsho and Whit Merrifield, plus an RBI single by Danny Jansen later in the inning made it, at 5-0, the Blue Jays’ most productive first of the season.
With the club running a third bullpen game since the demotion of Alek Manoah, advanced from Saturday to buy an extra day of rest for Chris Bassitt, Jose Berrios and Yusei Kikuchi, the early outburst was well-timed.
Trevor Richards, one of the club’s most unheralded contributors this season, threw three shutout frames, bulk-arm Bowden Francis followed with four innings of one-run ball while Trent Thornton and Yimi Garcia mopped up the final two frames.
It really couldn’t have gone much better before a crowd of 36,685.
But the key was the offence, which included a Springer RBI single in the seventh, coming through, employing a strong approach that has been a consistent talking point for Schneider.
“Guys forget, when you’re in that situation, the pressure’s on the pitcher and they’re going to default to what they think you’re going to chase,” he said. “A walk in that situation is just as good if you know the next guy behind you is going to have the same approach. So some of it is pitchers executing and some of it is us not executing an approach. That’s going to happen. But every pitcher in this league is good.
“I always go back to Marcus Semien saying pitchers drive nice cars, too, you know what I mean? They’re doing their job. And our job as an offence is to try to counteract what they’re doing. That’s what gives us a lot of confidence going forward. When that does happen, we have a very capable group of guys to do it.”
