National Post (National Edition)
Get your defibrillator ready, the Jays are in the playoffs
Berth didn’t come easily
For an indication of what has been going on with the Toronto Blue Jays for the past few weeks, look no further than the fourth inning of Sunday’s game against the Boston Red Sox: Jose Bautista tried to bunt.
This is what it has come to for the Jays, a team built around a fearsome offence that seems to have been left somewhere in August. Where last year at this time Toronto was blitzing American League pitching with their deadly combination of power and patience, the Blue Jays have this time around, this month at least, become a team of scufflers. They scratch, they claw, they do weird things like have the cleanup hitter, in one of the most offence-friendly parks in baseball, tr y to drop down a bunt with a runner on base early in a tie game.
It was absolutely strange, which, as the Blue Jays eked out a 2-1 win in Boston to clinch their second straight playoff appearance after a two-decade absence, was absolutely fitting.
These have been some strange days, at the end of an odd month, to close the book on what has been a peculiar regular season.
Consider that Aaron Sanchez, who mowed down the Red Sox on Sunday and has been Toronto’s best starting pitcher all season, didn’t even win the job until the end of spring training. All Sanchez did was post the best earned-run average among starters in the American League, with a 152 record even as he skipped a couple of starts down the stretch because the front office didn’t want to overly tax his 23-year-old arm. He came in as the fifth starter, and he finished as the undisputed staff ace.
The Sanchez experience was indicative of the starting staff as a whole, which came into the season as a question mark and ended up being the unit that is most responsible for the fact that the Toronto season is not yet over. J.A. Happ and Marco Estrada, both mediocre starters who had the good timing to have career years in 2015, just before they became free agents, both signed in Toronto — which didn’t even try to retain David Price — and then had even better seasons than they did last year. The combination of Sanchez, Happ and Estrada helped the Toronto rotation have the lowest ERA in the American League.
This wasn’t supposed to happen, but it is a damned good thing for Toronto that it did, since everything else has gone wonky this month. The bullpen, which had been a disaster early in the season and then quite functional through the summer after the acquisition of veteran relievers Jason Grilli and Joaquin Benoit, is back to treating fires with gasoline.
Five times in the past week the Toronto starters turned a lead over the bullpen and saw it go poof.
With the Jays in rather dire need of wins at this point in the season, relievers blew saves in each of their last four games coming into Sunday, including Saturday night in Boston, when closer Roberto Osuna committed a rare gametying balk. Osuna and Grilli have struggled, and Benoit has been out with an injury suffered, off course, in the slow jog from the bullpen to join a melee in the middle of the diamond. Osuna finally managed an effective ninth inning on Sunday, preserving the narrow lead, though still allowing two base hits. It was tense and uncomfortable, which, again, has been something of a theme.
That the games have all been close enough to allow the bullpen hijinks to cost the Jays so dearly, though, is a direct result of the Great Disappearing Offence. They will need to find it quickly if the playoff run is to last. In the past two series, with the Jays playing division rivals Baltimore and Boston and with their postseason prospects on the line, all of Toronto’s vaunted firepower accumulated the following number of runs: five, two, zero, three, four, two.
And so, when Bautista came to the plate in the eighth inning with two runners on and the game tied, it seemed possible that he might try to bunt again. It’s been that kind of week. (He didn’t bunt, and hit into a double play.)
Troy Tulowitzki would later cash the go-ahead run anyway with a single up the middle, and after Osuna’s nervous-but-effective ninth, the Jays find themselves preparing to host the AL Wild Card game on Tuesday at the Rogers Centre.
With Baltimore also winning on Sunday, Toronto needed the victory to avoid starting the playoffs at Camden Yards.
Entering the eighth inning on Wednesday night against Baltimore, the Jays were six outs away from all but securing that homefield advantage. Then they couldn’t acquire a lead that they couldn’t subsequently blow.
The playoffs start Tuesday. Pack your defibrillators.