Jays must act, and with conviction

Next few days will plot course of 2015 and beyond

The Houston Astros are building themselves a playoff rotation. Already with one front-of-the-rotation starter in groundball machine Dallas Keuchel, this week they added another, acquiring Scott Kazmir from the Oakland Athletics.

Heading into Friday’s action, at 54-41, Houston held a two-game lead over the surprising Minnesota Twins for the top American League Wild Card spot, and were only a game behind the Angels for top spot in the AL West. Teams have certainly fallen from further heights, but the Astros are rolling again after a six-game losing streak heading into last week’s All-Star break, and can feel comfortable in their position. They also have the luxury of a deep farm system from which to trade — by some accounts the prospects dealt for Kazmir were ranked Houston’s 19th and 22nd best, according to MLB.com, would have been top-10 players for other clubs — and continue to strengthen that position.

For Houston, there will be little angst over their wheelings and dealings ahead of next week’s non-waiver trade deadline. They’re not trying to reshape a flawed roster into one that can vault itself into contention over the season’s final two months. They’re looking toward October and trying to set themselves up for short, intense, all-or-nothing playoff battles to come.

For the Toronto Blue Jays, however, firmly on the outside looking in — struggling to keep pace with a surprising Yankees club that sometimes seems unable to lose, but only three games behind an overachieving Twins team for the second Wild Card — things are quite different. They are indeed that club trying to reshape a flawed roster into one that can vault itself into contention, and though that task seems eminently doable, there will be angst. There will be questions, no matter which way the rest of this month goes, about whether they’re doing the right thing.

Watching Houston load up doesn’t help. Waiting for the Yankees’ inevitable scooping up of expensive talent some cash-poor team wants off the books won’t help.

The Jays now need to play catch-up two ways: They need to catch what the teams ahead of them currently are, and they need to catch what they will be on the morning of August 1st.

But to do so they need to make bold deals to strengthen their roster, all while dealing with fears that could make them hesitate in ways that won’t hold back the clubs who feel more certain of their playoff destinies.

Plenty can go wrong from here until the end of the season, but plenty can go right, too. That’s why these next few days are so pivotal for the Blue Jays — not just the 2015 version, which could still very easily lose whatever tenuous grip it has on playoff relevance, but for the organization as a whole, as it struggles to find a path that does right by both the present and the future, amid a chaotic landscape of proposals, counter-proposals, and needs shifting by the week, if not the day.

And yet, on their most basic level, the answers seem rather easy.

On the field the club has held up its end of the bargain, winning two crucial series out of the all-star break, positioning themselves well as they head into Seattle for a virtual home series (thanks to the tremendous support the Jays receive from fans in nearby British Columbia) against a disappointing Mariners team. Over the three weeks that follow they’ll get six games with the Yankees, and four with the Twins club they’re chasing.

Ground to be made up, in other words, will be there for the taking over their next several series, and the impetus to make the club even better positioned for that stretch and beyond ought to be strong.

Especially so because the Jays are also dealing with a question of faith. Not only in terms of consumer confidence, but perhaps even with respect to the players regarding the commitment of the organization itself.

I don’t think anybody in the big leagues, who is still playing to keep his job and, ultimately, for a paycheque, is going to play worse for any perceived slight. But they’re humans, and another summer of inactivity would be a blow — would, maybe rightly, make players who haven’t yet succumbed to the same fatalism of so many fans in this market, question what the

There seems to me to be a different sense of urgency

point is and why these people are even running a team in the first place, if all their talk of upgrades and saving money to add pieces only turn into empty promises.

Last season the Jays, at least superficially, were in better position at the deadline to do something. They held the second Wild Card spot, and were just 1½ games back in the AL East. Some players were vocal about the ultimate lack of activity, but it was easy to see how the front office could justify it. Money wasn’t there to absorb contracts — something well understood following the Ervin Santana debacle that spring — and the club was battling injuries and possessed few of the kind of MLB-ready prospects that were especially being coveted, or at least few with which they were willing to part.

This time it ’s different. There seems to me to be a different sense of urgency — or at least there should be, given the job status of both Paul Beeston and Alex Anthopoulos. There are no injuries dragging them down. They have a roster with problems that are much easier to diagnose. And slowly, surprisingly, it may even be turning into a buyer’s market for pitching.

To get so scared of damaging some ethereal future that they find themselves paralyzed into inaction again, when they ought to know and believe in — and show they believe in — what the club is capable of, would be monumentally frustrating, even to a fan base (and roster) so used to frustrations.

Buy the ticket, take the ride.