IS IT THE END FOR THESE JAYS?
Team faces big off-season changes
End of a game, end of a series, end of a season. But the end of an era?
The Toronto Blue Jays lost Game 5 of the American League Championship Series 3-0 on Wednesday night, which was bad enough. It means Cleveland will go to the World Series and the Blue Jays will go home.
But after another rally fell short in the ninth inning, after the loud chants for Jose Bautista and Edwin Encarnacion, and then for the whole team as 49,000-plus broke out in a funereal “Let’s Go, Blue Jays,” the question looming over the team was: How many of them will be back?
Encarnacion said Toronto is his first choice in free agency.
He also said he was “really sad,” because he “doesn’t know what’s going to happen.”
Bautista said much the same thing. Manager John Gibbons said of his two sluggers: “They’re good guys.” He was talking slowly and deliberately, like you do when you are trying to avoid tears. “I hope they’re back,” he said.
As Josh Donaldson stood in front of his locker, Jason Grilli came up and wrapped him in a big bear hug. “We’re going to get it,” he said. “We’re going to get it.” Then he slapped him on the chest. For some, at least, there are no thoughts of regression.
“I’m obviously disappointed in the result,” Donaldson told reporters. “But I’m not disappointed in anybody in this clubhouse.”
He said he would love to have everybody back. It would have been a shock if he said otherwise.
Wednesday’s game was as perplexing as it should have been, seeing as how it was part of this series. Cleveland started Ryan Merritt, a rookie making his second major-league start. A soft-tossing lefty who looks like he has never had need of a razor, Merritt stifled the Toronto lineup for four-plus innings, surrendering just one hit, a bloop single at that. Marco Estrada was good but not great, and with the offence mesmerized by a kid whose own manager had described him pre-game as “justifiably a little nervous,” Cleveland’s three early runs — two of them via ringing solo homers — were enough to set the Rogers Centre on edge.
It was a bleak end to an ALCS that was all kinds of odd. Cleveland, 10th in the American League in home runs during the regular season, hit six in four games to Toronto’s two.
Cleveland started ace Corey Kluber in Game 1, then an assortment of hobos and drifters — or thereabouts — and yet they still managed to keep the Toronto offence church-mouse quiet.
In a season that never quite lived up to expectations, this was a particularly dispiriting way to finish.
Despite the obvious sense of disappointment, it remains that the Blue Jays accomplished the key goal: they made the postseason, after which a team’s fate is subject to the whims of a sport that is married to randomness.
Toronto got all the big hits against Texas in the American League Division Series and almost none against Cleveland. They fell down 0-3 in the ALCS after three games in which they had the exact same number of hits as their opponents, but the poor fortune not to string enough of them together or lift many over the fence.
As much as there will be carping about players who slumped drastically in the playoffs (hello, Russell Martin) or managerial moves made or not made, trying to explain the baseball playoffs is best done with a series of shrug emojis.
Sometimes a power-hitting team suffers an outage. Sometimes a pitcher hurts himself fixing a drone and the wide-eyed rookie replacement making his second career start pitches his team to the World Series.
How goofy and unpredictable are the MLB playoffs? The Atlanta Braves won their division 14 times in 15 seasons, had three Hall-of-Fame starters and won the World Series just once over that period.
October baseball: Where weird happens.
All of the preceding would make Blue Jays fans feel better if there wasn’t the sense of doom hanging over the off-season. When the former GM got all frisky after the 2012 season and started dealing blue-chip prospects like they were on fire, there was a recognition that the Jays were built around an older core that might not be long for Toronto. And now, with Bautista and Encarnacion no longer under contract, Toronto’s new management — president Mark Shapiro and GM Ross Atkins — will be forced to reveal their long-term intentions for the first time since they arrived last winter.
Both have talked a good game about wanting the team to remain competitive, but what they do this off-season will signal how serious they — and ownership — are about keeping this roster good enough to challenge for the playoffs again.
It would seem patently insane to set off on a major reconstruction of a team that just made the playoffs two straight seasons after missing them for the previous 21, but it seemed at least a little mad to let the guy most responsible for assembling the squad that broke the streak to walk last winter.
Gibbons, before Game 5, was asked about baseball’s resurgence in Toronto and his answer could have been aimed at the Rogers corporate suite, though it almost certainly wasn’t: “If you’ve got a good team, (fans) are going to show up. If you don’t, probably not, because it’s not cheap entertainment by any means.”
There were two grand lessons of the Toronto Blue Jays of 2015-16: put a good team in the city, and it will go bananas for baseball, dragging much of the country along with it.
The second lesson is that playoff baseball can be excruciating. It’s the downside of being good enough to make people care again.