Sale closes deal on Jays with authority
> WHITE SOX > BLUE JAYS 10 1
For R.A. Dickey, this underwhelming opening month of the season for the Blue Jays feels familiar. It certainly was the case in his first year in Toronto, when the overhyped 2013 campaign derailed before it left the station. But it was also true last year, when the Jays were a game under .500 after the season’s first month and went on to win the division.
“We’ve always been pretty much a slow-starting team,” the 41-year-old knuckleballer said Tuesday night, after taking the loss in a 10-1 drubbing from the Chicago White Sox. “It takes us a little bit to find our rhythm it seems — and that’s the same for me, in particular.”
Even if Dickey had been in midseason form on Tuesday night it would have been an uphill battle for the Jays against Chris Sale, Chicago’s spindly, snarling ace. But with Dickey’s traditional early-season strug- gles continuing — “I’m thankful April’s over, let’s put it that way” — it was a dreary rout and their most lopsided loss of the season.
“Nobody in here’s panicking at all,” Dickey said. “We’ve got the players in here to do it. It’s just a matter of being consistent, and I’m speaking about me more than anybody.”
The Jays have no doubt underperformed through the first month of the season, but Tuesday’s loss was the first time they were blown out this year and the rare game in which they were never really in it.
The bulk of their dozen losses this year have been blown leads late in the game or tightly contested affairs. They could easily be five games over .500 instead of two games under. That is, in a strange way, a good sign, though perhaps more frustrating.
That’s partly why Tuesday’s loss made Monday’s sting a little more. Up by four runs in the seventh inning, the Jays had a 96-per-cent chance of winning the series opener — according to baseball’s long-established win-expectancy charts — but the bullpen let it slip away. Knowing their prospects were dim the following night against Sale makes it more damning in hindsight.
The Jays’ offence, which had shown signs of heating up of late, ran into a wall in the form of Sale, the six-foot-six southpaw who held them to just four hits over eight mostly dominant innings.
Meanwhile, Dickey had limited the damage to just a solo home run through a tidy first four frames before the White Sox put up a three-spot in the fifth.
Dickey said he knew the margin for error would be slim against Sale, but he still has to find a way to “arrest those big innings,” which have hurt him this season.
“I thought I made some really good pitches tonight and it just seems like this first month, I’m getting every bad break and I need that one ball to be hit right at somebody or I need that third strike to be called in a 3-2 count. It’ll turn, it’ll turn. It’s no time to pout. “It’s a long season.” Manager John Gibbons echoed Dickey’s sentiment.
“It’ll turn for him, it’ll turn for the whole team,” he said. “We still have confidence in ourselves. We’ll get it going.”
The Jays finally got to Sale in the seventh when Edwin Encarnacion clobbered his first home run at the Rogers Centre this season into the West Jet “Flight Deck” in straightaway centre field. The ball travelled an estimated 434 feet and was a very tangible sign the Jays’ slugger is starting to heat up after his own typically slow start to the season. It was, along with a handful of dazzling defensive plays, a bit of a silver lining in an otherwise moribund affair for the home side.
In spite of Tuesday’s result, Gibbons said he remains confident his charges will yet turn things around.
“We got it in us.”
“It’ll turn for (Dickey), it’ll turn for the whole team. We still have confidence in ourselves. We’ll get it going.” JAYS’ JOHN GIBBONS