BLUE JAYS ON VERGE OF A BREAKOUT — OR MAYBE NOT
Unpredictable 2016 season winds down with club’s 2015 offence yet to show up
After the Toronto Blue Jays survived a ninth-inning blown save on Sunday afternoon with a rally that featured two failed bunt attempts that led to a hit, another bunt in which the batter reached base, and a game-winning hit from a slugger who knocked an infield dribbler the other way, manager John Gibbons remarked on his team’s swell fortune.
“A lot of good things happened today,” he said. “Who knows what that does for you?”
If the 2016 season for the Blue Jays so far is any indication, what a big, emotional win, and a little streak, does for them is this: nothing. Or, possibly: something.
This team is a study in the unpredictable. It’s been true in the macro sense, when they came out of the gate with a fearsome lineup that suddenly couldn’t put bat to ball. The hitting eventually came around but the offence has never reached the heights expected of it, and all the while the starting pitching, thought to be a question mark, has been mostly excellent.
The unexpectedness has been true in the micro sense, too: every time it has seemed like the Blue Jays are about to bust out, they have instead busted. And, when it has seemed like a tailspin might be upon them, they have quickly pulled out of the dive.
With a series beginning on Tuesday against the Baltimore Orioles, where a couple of wins would all but salt away some kind of wild-card berth in the playoffs, one prediction is obvious: don’t make any predictions.
Before the series closer against the New York Yankees on Monday night, after three straight Toronto wins pushed the one-time AL East power to the brink of missing the post-season, Gibbons was asked if he had an explanation for why, for all of the Blue Jays’ obvious talent, they hadn’t been able to rip off a sustained win streak like those of last year. This team won seven games in a row in early July; last season Toronto won 11 in a row in June and again in August, when they went 21-6 for the month.
“I’ve thought about that, too,” Gibbons said of the lack of a long streak that could have allowed the team to survive its early-September wobbles without surrendering the AL East lead. “We seemed to be always waiting on one.”
Not that thinking about it led him to any kind of conclusion.
“I can’t put a finger on it,” the manager said, leaning back in his office chair. “Nobody knows why.”
That’s pretty much baseball in three words, right there: nobody knows why. Momentum is highly overrated in all sports, but particularly so in baseball, a game of discrete events that have no bearing on one another and are heavily influenced by randomness. You can convince yourself that a hockey or basketball team lost a game because they came out flat or lacking energy, but it’s rare when you can accuse someone of playing second base with a lack of intensity.
The Blue Jays of September alone have been a stark example of how trends are unreliable. In a seven-day period starting two weeks ago, the generally strong Toronto pitching staff surrendered 28 runs, including nine home runs. Then they turned into The Untouchables, allowing just five runs over the following seven days. Some of this is due to the difference between facing the wall-crashing Boston Red Sox in the former period and the tepid Yankees lineup in the latter, but there was no indication when Boston bashed the Toronto staff around that it was about to start mowing down batters with abandon.
On the offensive side, despite having six hitters with at least 20 home runs, Toronto has rarely had many of them mashing at the same time. In September, the Blue Jays have scored as many as seven runs just three times. In one 30-day period beginning in late August last season, Toronto scored as many as nine runs in 11 games.
This is probably the thing that Gibbons can’t quite put his finger on: the offence, even though it had scored the fourth-most runs in the American League heading into Monday night, still feels like it is on the verge of a breakout. Or, at least, it could be on the verge of a breakout.
But this has been the case all season: Tuesday will bring Game 157 of 162, there is not much runway left for the Jays to unleash the offence of 2015, when they scored 891 runs. (They had 738 runs through Sunday’s games this season.)
Gibbons, though, knows that none of that will matter if they do make the playoffs. Last season’s team rode euphoria into the postseason, then promptly dropped two home games to Texas. They flipped that series around, then got The Bat Flip for the biggest franchise win in 22 years, and turned that into ... two losses to Kansas City.
Maybe entering the playoffs amid something of a lull would work for them. Or maybe not.
“Maybe we’re on that win streak right now,” Gibbons said, a grin on his face.
A manager can hope, after all.