ARLINGTON, TX. — The out-of-town scoreboard at Globe Life Field is difficult to miss: a tall, red column high above the batter’s eye in centre field cycles continuously through results and games in progress across MLB.
It was only Saturday’s second inning — not even 7:00pm local — when it displayed a seven-run Cleveland Guardians lead over the displaced Athletics, which, coupled with a Chicago White Sox victory earlier in the day, forced the Toronto Blue Jays to face an unfortunate proposition. Win to merely keep pace. Lose and fall even further behind.
Well, they lost, 6-2, falling three games back of the American League’s third wild card spot and three games under .500 for the first time since Sept. 1. And in the process, the limited scenarios that produce a Blue Jays post-season berth a week from now grew ever more improbable and far-fetched.
Yes, the math is getting awfully difficult. Sitting at 76-79 with seven games to play, the Blue Jays’ highest achievable win total is 83. Yet that’s only if they don’t lose again. Say they go 5-2. Then Toronto finishes with 81 wins, a total both Cleveland (80-75) and Chicago (79-76) are within striking distance of. The Blue Jays hold a tiebreaker over the Guardians; they don’t with the White Sox.
Technically speaking, the Blue Jays haven’t exhausted what slim margin for error remains in their season. But they’re uncomfortably close. They could be statistically eliminated as soon as Tuesday if they continue losing while Cleveland and Chicago carry on winning. And that’s to say nothing of the AL West teams, Texas (78-77) and Houston (77-77), which remain in the mix with more wins than Toronto has.
Going into consecutive bullpen days, a Max Scherzer outing, and a big ol’ question mark in Dylan Cease’s next turn on Wednesday — the Blue Jays are non-committal as to whether Cease makes that start after averaging the lowest fastball velocity of his career in a laborious Friday performance — things have looked better.
Days ago, any Blue Jays post-season path included winning the four games Cease and Soriano started. Now, they’ve lost the first pair in resounding fashion. Of course, prevailing in a wild-card series also includes winning Cease and Soriano days. And if the Blue Jays can’t win them now, what makes you think they could win them then?
For his part, Soriano wasn’t Toronto’s primary issue Saturday, pitching efficiently over five innings before hitting rocky waters in the sixth. He threw a surprising number of curveballs — typically a secondary offering, it was Soriano’s most-thrown pitch on the night — using it early and late in counts against both sides of the platoon.
The biggest adjustment Soriano’s made since joining the Blue Jays is vastly upping his sinker usage while deprioritizing his four-seam fastball, which hitters slugged .505 against through the end of July. It isn’t a coincidence that Soriano’s groundball rate has shot up in turn, sitting above 60 per cent through his first three September starts.
He’s traded in some strikeouts to do it, but Soriano’s found a way to get deeper into outings and give his team more innings. In June and July with the Angels, Soriano pitched into the seventh inning just once across 10 starts. Over his first eight outings with the Blue Jays, he’d already done it three times.
Yet, Soriano can pitch for days — it doesn’t matter if the Blue Jays can’t score. And MLB’s least productive offence (620 runs scored, last in the majors) has lived up to its billing so far in this series, scoring three times on 11 hits and three walks over 18 innings.
As they have in 35 of 59 games since the all-star break, the Blue Jays coughed up an early lead as Josh Jung sat on a first-pitch Soriano sinker and shot it 356 feet over the right-field wall in the first. An inning later, the Rangers added a pair without getting the ball out of the infield thanks to a walk, hit batter, throwing error, and wild pitch sequence that, trust us, was as painful to watch as it was to read.
The Blue Jays appeared to catch a break early when Rangers starter Cal Quantrill, who retired his first four hitters with a dozen pitches, left the game with one out in the second inning due to a lat issue he’s been managing since his last outing.
Quantrill’s been on a baffling run of strong results — he entered the night with six consecutive quality starts — that belie both the quantity and quality of contact he’s allowed, producing an ERA over a full run lower than both his xERA and FIP. But he put himself in the running for August’s pitcher of the month (1.45 ERA over six starts) by seldom walking anyone and off-balancing hitters with a six-pitch mix, which profiled as precisely the class of pitcher Toronto often struggles with.
So, all things considered, getting into the Rangers bullpen before the game was even 20 minutes old was a gift. But the Blue Jays had constructed the bottom half of their lineup for a right-handed starter and instead found themselves facing the left-handed Jordan Montgomery before most of their lefties even came to the plate.
That meant Nathan Lukes, Josh Smith, and Andres Gimenez all took their first plate appearances of the night with a platoon disadvantage. They all made outs. Then Brett Bateman, Toronto’s leadoff lefty, began the fourth inning with a soft groundout to second.
By the sixth, when Nathan Eovaldi took over from Montgomery, the Blue Jays remained hitless. Bateman and Alejandro Kirk finally broke the levee with a pair of hits in the inning to scratch across a run. But the Rangers immediately responded in the bottom half with two hits of their own, re-establishing their lead while chasing Soriano from his start.
Davis Schneider’s first-pitch homer in the seventh was a nice moment for him — his first in the majors since June 16 — that changed little other than a lone number on that tall, red scoreboard column high above the centre field batter’s eye. The one that was difficult for the Blue Jays to miss on Saturday for more reasons than one.