Jays wasting a season of great promise
MANAGEMENT MADE RIGHT OFF-SEASON MOVES, BUT IT’S NOT PAYING OFF
If the baseball season ended Sunday, Robbie Ray would be and should be on every Cy Young Award ballot. Not necessarily the winner — something no Toronto Blue Jays pitcher has done since the late Roy Halladay in 2003 — but indication of the incredible season Ray has pitched for the Jays.
And if the season was over today, Marcus Semien would not win the MVP Award in the American League — that’s for Shohei Ohtani — but he should be listed up high along with Vladimir Guerrero Jr. on most ballots.
And with all that brilliance through five months of this major league schedule, the Blue Jays have squandered this great opportunity of a season, trapped in a wild-card race they cannot win, wasting some of the greatest individual seasons in franchise history with a team that seemingly has no clue how to win.
What a lost opportunity this has been for the Jays and it must be incredibly frustrating for the front office of Mark Shapiro and Ross Atkins, who went out and signed Ray and Semien in free agency. They paid huge money for the occasionally healthy difference-maker George Springer. Getting Ray for US$8 million turned out to be a ridiculous bargain when pitchers of his ilk are making closer to $30 million.
And yet, they will have nothing to show for it, trapped behind Boston, Oakland and Seattle, four teams battling for one remaining wild card position.
And every game the Jays win, they need help from the Red Sox, the A’s and the Mariners. If any one of those teams wins on the same day, the Jays pick up no ground in the standings.
They are stuck paddling in circles, and with their roster and with their high end talent and with their unusual propensity for discovering new ways to beat themselves, this year will go down as one of the great failures and lost opportunities in franchise history.
THIS AND THAT
On June 1, the Blue Jays were six games ahead of the Detroit Tigers. After Sunday’s Jays win, the no-name Tigers have gone 39-36. The Blue Jays have gone 39-36. So you wonder — or at least I do — how much different the Jays would be with A.J. Hinch managing them instead of the blind optimist, Charlie Montoyo? ... Dan Petry, better known now as Jeff’s father, misses the Blue Jays-tigers rivalry. It used to be one of the best in baseball. With Detroit in the Central Division now and the Jays in the East there is no rivalry anymore. At the height of the Jays-tigers rivalry, where Ontario had to choose which team to cheer for, that rivalry was fierce and among the best in baseball ... Blue Jays Cy Young Award winners: Roger Clemens, two. Halladay and Pat Hentgen, one apiece. Mysteriously in the pre-analytics days, Dave Stieb never finished higher than fourth in Cy Young voting ... Jays management wondered how the results of a 60-game season a year ago would translate to a 162-game season this year: They’re seeing it now. Heading into Sunday, Bo Bichette was hitting .217 in August with an OPS of .538. Guerrero, who has an OPS of between .993 and 1.217 in the first four months of the season, had a .703 mark in his least powerful month. Yes, Springer is out, and yes that matters a lot, but with Guerrero and Bichette not hitting and Teoscar Hernandez turning into a strikeout machine of late, the once powerful Jays offence has gone missing ... When Canadian Alex Anthopoulos ran the Blue Jays, he tried to hire fellow Canadian Farhan Zaidi as his assistant. He didn’t get permission to do so. The two later wound up working together with the Los Angeles Dodgers. Today, Zaidi of Sudbury, is GM of the San Francisco Giants, who happen to have the best record in baseball. Anthopoulos’ Atlanta Braves are in first place in the National League East ... And more Canadian baseball content: Etobicoke’s Joey Votto, who turns 38 next month, is an MVP candidate in the National League as the Cincinnati Reds look to be on their way to the post-season. Votto has one MVP in his career, one second place finish, one third place finish, which will eventually get him to the Baseball Hall of Fame ... In Babe Ruth’s greatest seasons, he hit 60 and 59 home runs. In his best pitching seasons, he won 24 and 23 games. But he never did them at the same time, the way Ohtani is hitting 40 home runs with an earned run average of 3.00 with the Los Angeles Angels.