And the lone consolation, salvaging a 7-2 win over the Texas Rangers on Sunday to avoid a sweep, is potentially too little too late. The Blue Jays already lost ground in this series to a direct contender in an American League wild-card race rapidly running from view. And they have no remaining games against teams ahead of them, meaning they can only do so much to reverse the once-surging post-season odds that have cratered at their feet:
That peak to the right was Sept. 4 after the Blue Jays took the opener of a series in Kansas City, 9-2, on a run of eight wins in 10 games. Above .500 for the first time since early April when the season was only 9 games old, Toronto held a share of the American League’s third wild-card spot (technically it was theirs alone thanks to possession of a tiebreaker over Cleveland) with fewer than 20 games remaining in the season and a run of exclusively sub-.500 teams before them.
That’s when the bottom fell out. The Blue Jays lost eight of their next 12, averaging 3.58 runs per game with a minus-14 run differential. And they were remarkable frontrunners along the way, with only one comeback win and one blown-lead loss. Since July 29, the Blue Jays are 18-3 when scoring first — the highest winning percentage in the majors.
That’s fine if you frequently score first. But what if you concede the first run, as the Blue Jays have in two-thirds of their games over the last two weeks? Then you need the resilience to battle back, which the Blue Jays have done only once over the 9 times they’ve fallen behind early since Sept. 4.
The good news Sunday was the Blue Jays got on the board quickly, as Brett Bateman drew a leadoff walk, aggressively took third on a Vladimir Guerrero Jr. chopper the other way, and scored on a Nathan Lukes sacrifice fly. They cashed another with two outs in the third when Lukes, who reached via single, took off in a 1-2 count and scored as Sean Keys laced a double over his head into right-centre.
In the fifth, Bateman walked again, reached second as Myles Straw singled behind him, took third on a Lukes flyout, and scored when Kazuma Okamoto bounced a base hit back up the middle. Similar story in the seventh, when Bateman doubled, Straw walked, and Lukes singled in a fourth run. Later in the inning, Charles McAdoo’s two-out, two-strike double brought in a couple more.
If the Blue Jays aren’t going to drive the ball consistently — Toronto’s .265 slugging percentage over the week of play entering Sunday was dead last in MLB — this is how they’ll need to generate offence. Working deep counts. Stringing together hits and walks. Starting runners in unusual situations. Running the bases aggressively.
It was particularly encouraging that the Blue Jays took such high-quality plate appearances against Rangers starter Jacob deGrom, who may be 38, but remains Jacob deGrom. His fastball’s still 97 m.p.h. with a ton of induced vertical break — its backspin fights gravity, making it appear to be rising as it approaches the plate — while his slider is tied for the 10th-highest run value of any single pitch in the majors this year.
But since reaching the post-season may take the Blue Jays going 6-0 over their final two series against the Baltimore Orioles and Cincinnati Reds — and even that may not be enough — they’ll need to find a way to scratch across runs no matter who they’re facing. That typically takes the combination of a measured plate approach, some calculated risk-taking on the basepaths, and a bit of energy all around. At least that’s what happened Sunday.
Meanwhile, Guerrero was lifted from the game following the fourth inning due to left lower back tightness, an issue he’s battled off and on throughout the season. Guerrero didn’t get out of the box well following either of his plate appearances on Sunday, carrying his bat halfway up the first-base line in a deliberate jog after hitting a groundball back to deGrom in the third inning.
Whether or not this impacts Guerrero’s availability for this week’s three-game set in Baltimore remains to be seen. Already, Dylan Cease has been bumped from his scheduled Wednesday start after flying to Toronto on Saturday for an MRI of his right shoulder, which he’s been battling fatigue in for weeks. That means Toronto’s pitching plan for the series is currently: bullpen day, Max Scherzer, TBD.
It’s a hell of a way to live following Sunday’s bullpen day and a Rangers series in which Toronto starters combined for 10.2 innings while relievers covered the remaining 14.1. But some stability came in the form of Spencer Miles providing the Blue Jays an excellent, needed three innings to open Sunday’s game, allowing only two hits while striking out four.
Of course, starting Miles reflected the urgency of this moment. He was originally being held for Monday to support Trey Yesavage, who will come off the IL to start vs. the Orioles but is capped at three innings or 45-50 pitches — whichever comes first. But following losses in the first two games of this series, while both the Cleveland Guardians and Chicago White Sox won on Saturday, the Blue Jays chose to bump Miles up and put everything they could into salvaging Sunday’s win.
Unfortunately, you can’t make the entire bullpen day out of Spencer’s Miles, and shortly after Spencer Arrighetti took over in the fourth, he was watching Jake Burger drive an elevated cutter 395 feet over the right-centre field wall to tie the game. But that was all the damage Arrighetti allowed, despite a couple walks and three hard-hit balls against over 2.1 innings, before a string of five relievers got the win over the finish line.