SLUMPING JAYS A MESS
Team looks ’dysfunctional’ after getting pounded by Mariners,
So shell-shocked were the Blue Jays after the Seattle Mariners took a 6-0 lead in the fifth inning on Saturday — following yet another homer off of R.A. Dickey — that the entire infield seemed to lose track of how many outs had been made.
After Dickey struck out Kendrys Morales for the frame’s final out, catcher Henry Blanco threw down to third baseman Brett Lawrie, who then sent the ball around the horn as if the inning hadn’t just ended.
The collective brain fart was just the latest example of an utterly lost Jays team, whose woes deepened on Saturday with a fourth straight defeat, an 8-1 pounding from the Mariners in front of a frustrated 35,754 at the Rogers Centre.
Even with their knuckleballing ace on the mound the Jays couldn’t stop the bleeding. They have now lost eight of their last nine and 14 of their last 18 games, falling 11 games below .500.
On their current four-game skid, the Jays have been outscored 25-3. Their hitters have the lowest batting average in the majors, while their pitchers have the secondhighest ERA. In other words, they’re a mess. “I think we’re somewhat of a dysfunctional team right now,” said Dickey, who lost his third consecutive start. “We’re kind of searching for a way to score runs, a way to pitch well. We’re doing a lot of things poorly, myself included.”
If the Blue Jays continue to underperform as they have, this highly anticipated season could slip away before it ever has a chance to get off the ground. Yet there are few answers as to what ails them, or how it might be cured.
“Coming into the season with great expectations, I gotta say we haven’t handled that well,” said Jays manager John Gibbons, who has come under increasing pressure as his team continues to stumble out of the gate. Gibbons, much like his players, has been at a loss to explain the team’s ongoing underachievement.
“I don’t think there’s a magic bul- let. You wish everybody could relax, get a couple games go your way. . . . That hasn’t happened yet.” Dickey gave up just six hits on Saturday, but three of them left the ballpark, including a fourth-inning grand slam to Mariners’ second baseman Dustin Ackley that put the game out of reach. Dickey also gave up a pair of solo shots to Victorianative Michael Saunders, who now has five home runs in 15 career games in Toronto. Dickey couldn’t ignore the “adamant” boos raining down after Saunders’ fifth-inning blast. “You can’t blame them,” he said. “We’ve played well below our expectation. We’re booing ourselves. So it’s tough, but again we’re trying to hang on to the hope that we’re too good of a ballclub for this to continue. It’s one thing to say that but we’ve got to be actively pursuing ways to get better.” One positive Dickey took from the outing was that physically he felt much better after pitching through back and neck discomfort in his recent outings.
The Jays snapped a 23-inning scoreless streak by scratching out a run on a sacrifice fly in the seventh, but that was all they could muster against tough right-hander Hisashi Iwakuma, who has quietly been among baseball’s stingiest starters since last year’s all-star break.
Heading into the game the Jays were hitting a paltry .196 with runners in scoring position, and their struggles continued in that regard on Saturday. They went 2-for-10 with men in scoring position.
“We’re all pretty beat up mentally right now,” Gibbons said. “But you got to get through that. This is professional baseball, there’s a lot of season left. You get tested and you find out what you’re made of. . . .
The Jays need to find a way to battle through this adversity, Gibbons continued.
“The game of baseball is cruel. It doesn’t let you up.
“Tough as it is to come back the next day you’ve got to do it. Only the strong survive. That’s not just baseball; it’s life, it’s everything. You find out what you’re made of, you really do.”