TORONTO – Back in the day, the Toronto Blue Jays had an executive who would shrug his shoulders whenever something went awry and drop a phrase that was heard fairly often. “Sometimes,” he’d say matter-of-factly, “you have to make chicken salad out of chicken [feces].”
The mantra so apt during some lean years then came to mind again on Thursday, as the Blue Jays played a home opener away from their Rogers Centre home for the second straight year, forced by the pandemic to take refuge in a minor-league park gussied up for the pomp and circumstance.
With Ontario back in lockdown for a third time, case numbers growing exponentially and hospital capacity alarmingly scarce, watching the Blue Jays fall 7-5 in 11 innings to the Los Angeles Angels at TD Ballpark was another reminder of just how far normalcy is from reach.
The overarching challenge north of the border is finding the determination to make the best of dire circumstances, which on a far less significant scale is also what the Blue Jays must do.
After all, the outlook they take on playing out of their spring home originally set for use by the club’s low-A club will play a large role in how things turn out for them. Last summer, when the Blue Jays left summer camp in Toronto unsure where they’d be playing and eventually settled for triple-A Buffalo’s Sahlen Field, they embraced the chaos, used the discomfort of visiting clubs and amassed a 17-9 record there.
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In all likelihood, they’re going to end up back in Buffalo in June, the Bisons set to clear out the place with a deal nearing for them to play out of Trenton, N.J., according to two industry sources. Sahlen Field is currently undergoing a series of upgrades that should be completed by the time the Blue Jays are ready to bail on the searing heat and regular rain of the Florida summer.
Their hope had been to go straight from Dunedin to Toronto, but now that Ontario has Florida’d the apparent homestretch of the pandemic, get ready for Buffalo redux.
Hence, the mantra, and the need to trudge through the dung and emerge with some salad.
To that end, the home opener before a crowd of 1,348 featured a terrific ballgame between two legit contenders, in which the bandbox dimensions of TD Ballpark, and its 353-foot power alley in right field, had no bearing on the outcome.
Home runs by Vladimir Guerrero Jr., in the first, opening up a 3-1 Blue Jays lead, and Mike Trout in the fifth, putting the Angels up 4-3, were rockets leaving any ballpark you could think of. Cavan Biggio’s game-tying homer in the sixth, a 395-foot drive to right-centre, was a legit drive gone at most places, too. Lourdes Gurriel Jr., had to shield his eyes in left from the setting sun in the early going but no misadventures followed. There were a handful of awkward jumps on balls in the air, but it’s not clear if that was related to night-time visibility issues.
Opposite the best player of this generation in Trout, Guerrero was a force at the plate, adding a go-ahead RBI single in the sixth and a two-out walk in the eighth.
Jordan Romano took over after Dexter Fowler’s one-out single off Trent Thornton in the seventh and after allowing a stolen base, surrendered a base hit to Shohei Ohtani that tied things up 5-5.
Randal Grichuk made his second diving catch of the game in centre field with two on and two outs in the ninth to rob Trout of a go-ahead run-scoring single. But the Blue Jays squandered chances to win the game in the ninth and 10th innings, before David Fletcher’s two-run single in the 11th off Rafael Dolis settled matters.
Ross Stripling delivered five innings of keep-the-team-in-the-ballgame work, getting burned twice more by tormentor Trout, who is now a career seven-for-10 against the right-hander.
Griffin Canning surrendered a two-out RBI single to Teoscar Hernandez in the first ahead of Guerrero’s two-run homer, and then retired 14 straight batters before Biggio’s solo shot in the sixth ended his night.
The proximity of the walls at TD Ballpark may tempt hitters into swinging big, a phenomenon Marcus Semien recalls experiencing at Houston’s Minute Maid park, “where left field is very short and in that first game you’re just a little bit more pull-happy than usual as a righty.”
“It’s hard to stay within yourself depending on the ballpark,” he added. “But I feel like Dunedin, if the wind is blowing out it’s a good place to hit, and if it’s blowing in, it’s a tough place to hit, similar to Wrigley Field, somewhere like that. Every day we pull up to the yard, we’ll see where the flags are going and do our best.”
For the moment, that’s really all the Blue Jays, and the rest of us for that matter, can do.
