BLUE JAYS’ WORLD SERIES WINDOW CLOSING FAST.
MATH SUGGESTS THE JAYS RECENT SLUMP SHOULD EVEN OUT, AND THERE’S NO TIME LIKE ... RIGHT NOW
The unfortunate thing about not being in a pennant race for 21 straight years, aside from not being in a pennant race for 21 straight years, is that it doesn’t allow the fan base to get used to the fact that even good teams sometimes lose meaningful games.
And so, the Toronto Blue Jays lose six of eight heading into a huge three- game series with the Boston Red Sox, causing many fans to stick their heads in an oven. Others, more worldly types, are telling them to act like you’ve been there before.
To which a good number of the worried fans could reasonably reply: but I haven’t been here before.
Even though the Jays did finally play those elusive games that mattered last September, they didn’t have a week like the one this team just had. That 2015 bunch didn’t lose more than two games in a row in the season’s final month, and although they lost four of five to close the regular season, that came after the AL East had been clinched and most of the starters had their feet up, eating bonbons.
While it is true that there is an example of a contending Jay steam that suffered a September slump and lived to tell about it — a six- game losing streak that was immediately followed by a nine- game winning streak — that was in 1993. You can’t blame today’s Jays fans for not finding a great deal of comfort in something that happened two years before Roberto Osuna was born.
But, the optimism is not unfounded. The be- cool types have a point. The single biggest reason for this is there is every reason to believe the Blue Jays are more accurately defined not by the results of the past six games ( 1- 5) but by the results of the preceding 133 (76-57).
Baseball, as much as its numbers can be broken down and analyzed more than any other sport, is also a slave to randomness. Boring as it may be to explain a slump by shrugging one’s shoulders and muttering something about the unpredictability of hitting a round ball with a rounded bat, there’s something to that explanation.
Hitters go cold, sometimes all at once. The Blue Jays, in the past week, hit two home runs. In the week before that, they hit 15. They scored all of 22 runs in the past six games, and in the six prior to that, they scored 45.
Math suggests it should even out soon. And, keeping with the positives here, the pitching staff ’s unsightly ERA of 5.51 in September can partially be explained by the opposition’s .331 batting average on balls in play over t he same period, a stark jump from the .286 opponents have averaged over the full season. Sometimes, the other guys hit them where they ain’t.
The glass- half- full view, though, hinges on the Blue Jays sorting themselves out on this homestand, first against the division- leading Red Sox, and then the Tampa Bay Rays, the team that Toronto should beat but often cannot.
If t he s l ump were to become much more prolonged, then the fan base will have all sorts of other t hings to consider, and much of them not so good.
This might be the other reason so many fans are nervous, aside from the fact the Jays haven’t given them reason to be pennant- race-nervous for so many years: because they know that this feels like something of a last ride.
Jose Bautista and Edwin Encarnacion are only under contract for however long this season lasts, and since neither player agreed with the new team management on an extension in the offseason, the task of re- sign- ing them will only become harder when they are able to receive offers from every other team. Bautista’s season has almost certainly hurt his market value, while Encarnacion’s has raised his. So that’s a wash.
Whatever happens over the winter, there will be some very good players in Toronto, and the Mark Shapiro- Ross Atkins duo has shown it can make some shrewd moves: t he contracts given to Marco Estrada and J. A. Happ now look like smart bets, not overpayments based on a small window of success, as some skeptics wondered. ( Raises hand.)
But when the old GM remade his roster in the winter of 2012, it started the clock on a competitive window built around veterans like Bautista, Encarnacion and R.A. Dickey, all of whom could be gone next spring.
Meanwhile, vision bullies Boston and New York, each of whom has wobbled over the past couple of seasons, suddenly both look like their worst days are behind them. They’ll probably each take a look at Toronto’s pending free-agent sluggers. If there is a chunk of the fan base that is exceedingly anxious now, it will take every one of the city’s recently opened marijuana dispensaries to calm nerves should the heart of the lineup move to the neighbouring rivals.
Do the Blue Jays have to win now? Of course not. But if there is one thing the past 22 seasons have taught, it’s that the chances to win in the AL East do not necessarily come around often.