National Post (National Edition)
Blue Jays reduced to spoiler role
Goal is to finish season on a positive note
The Toronto Blue Jays limped into Fenway Park on Monday feeling bruised and beaten after dropping two extra-inning games in Baltimore, which gives them 13 walk-off losses this season. They had eight all of last year.
Heading into Monday, the Jays had won just four out of their last 16 games. And as if they couldn’t feel any lower, a local newspaper took a shot. The Boston Herald described Toronto’s team as “the going-outof-business Toronto Blue Jays,’’ though Jay Stenhouse, the club’s VP of Baseball Media, assured Postmedia that Rogers has not declared bankruptcy. In the same article, the writer let his readers know that “the Sox likely will make short work of the Jays (this series), thereby allowing manager John Farrell to do some more struttin’ about a threegame sweep.”
To his credit, Farrell had his Red Sox sitting three games ahead of the New York Yankees in the AL East after the Yankees beat Baltimore 7-4 on Monday afternoon. The Jays were 14 games out heading into the Monday night game, and 8.5 games out of a wild-card spot with seven teams to leap frog. The baseball website Fangraphs list the Jays’ chances of making the playoffs at 0.1 per cent.
In other words, it’s over. Despite that, nobody inside the visiting clubhouse at Fenway was ready to throw in the towel. DeMarlo Hale, filling in for John Gibbons, said that two walk-off losses in Baltimore proves there is no quit on his team, that they’re still playing hard and they’ll fight to the very end.
“It’s about competing every day and winning as many games as you can,” said Hale. “This team is going to compete to the end and we’ll see where it falls.”
Hale said the plan is to start some September callups in the final month, but always with the goal of winning the game that night and not just to play young guys for the sake of giving them a look at the MLB level. “It’s a balance,’’ he said.
Jays’ slugger Justin Smoak doesn’t appreciate the idea of his club becoming doormats at this point of the season for teams like the Red Sox, Yankees or Orioles.
“Yeah, we’re not just going to quit,” he said. “That’s what we’re paid to do. If we play good, we’ve got a chance to beat anybody and that’s the end of it.”
In reality, the Jays have now reached spoiler status. But Smoak said it’s important for everybody in the clubhouse to finish the season strong, as a team and individually. “It doesn’t matter if we’re 50 games back or 10 games ahead, we just try to go out there and win,” Smoak said.
“At this point, we feel like we should have won more games this season, no doubt. But you can’t control that now. All you can do is control what happens to today. And we want to win.”