The Jays are certain only in their unpredictability
After the Toronto Blue Jays survived a ninth-inning blown save on Sunday afternoon with a rally that featured two failed bunt attempts that led to a hit, another bunt in which the batter reached base, and a game-winning hit from a slugger who knocked an infield dribbler the other way, manager John Gibbons remarked on his team’s swell fortune.
“A lot of good things happened today,” he said. “Who knows what that does for you?”
If the 2016 season for the Blue Jays so far is any indication, what a big, emotional win, and a little streak, does for them is this: nothing. Or, possibly: something.
This team is a study in the unpredictable. It’s been true in the macro sense, when they came out of the gate with a fearsome lineup that suddenly couldn’t put bat to ball. The hitting eventually came around but the offence has never reached the heights expected of it, and all the while the starting pitching, thought to be a question mark, has been mostly excellent.
The unexpectedness has been true in the micro sense, too: every time it has seemed like the Blue Jays are about to bust out, they have instead busted. And, when it has seemed like a tailspin might be upon them, they have quickly pulled out of the dive.
With a series beginning on Tuesday against the Baltimore Orioles, where a couple of wins would all but salt away some kind of wild-card berth in the playoffs, one prediction is obvious: don’t make any predictions.
Before the series closer against the New York Yankees on Monday night, after three straight Toronto wins pushed the one-time AL East power to the brink of missing the post-season, Gibbons was asked if he had an explanation for why, for all of the Blue Jays’ obvious talent, they hadn’t been able to rip off a sustained win streak like those of last year. This team won seven games in a row in early July; last season Toronto won 11 in a row in June and again in August, when they went 21-6 for the month.
“I’ve thought about that, too,” Gibbons said of the lack of a long streak that could have allowed the team to survive its early-September wobbles without surrendering the AL East lead.
Not that thinking about it led him to any kind of conclusion.
“I can’t put a finger on it,” the manager said, leaning back in his office chair. “Nobody knows why.”
That’s pretty much baseball in three words, right there: nobody knows why.
The Blue Jays of September alone have been a stark example of how trends are unreliable.
But this has been the case all season: Tuesday will bring Game 157 of 162, there is not much runway left for the Jays to unleash the offence of 2015, when they scored 891 runs. (They had 738 runs through Sunday’s games this season.)
Gibbons, though, knows that none of that will matter if they do make the playoffs. Last season’s team rode euphoria into the postseason, then promptly dropped two home games to Texas. They flipped that series around, then got The Bat Flip for the biggest franchise win in 22 years, and turned that into ... two losses to Kansas City.
Maybe entering the playoffs amid something of a lull would work for them. Or maybe not.
“Maybe we’re on that win streak right now,” Gibbons said.
It looked like it for a while on Monday night, when J.A. Happ cruised into the eighth inning with a 3-1 lead.
But with closer Roberto Osuna on a rest day, the bullpen imploded, giving up five runs in the ninth of a 7-5 loss after a Toronto rally fell short in the bottom of the inning.
Streak over. But you can’t blame the manager for hoping.