Jays ‘try to shake it up just a hair’
Bautista moved to cleanup in bid to kick-start offence and regain ground in race
NEW YORK— In an effort to spur a little more offence from his flagging club, Blue Jays manager John Gibbons tweaked his batting order on Wednesday, bumping Jose Bautista down to the cleanup spot while having Devon Travis, Josh Donaldson and Edwin Encarnacion occupy the top three spots.
“Try to shake it up just a hair,” Gibbons said before Wednesday’s game. “That’s it, man. Give it a little spark. This ain’t rocket science.”
The move is hardly a drastic one, but it does suggest an increased urgency for a club that let its slim lead atop the division evaporate on this middling road trip. They woke up on Wednesday in a dead heat with the Boston Red Sox, while Baltimore was just 11⁄ games back and the Yankees
2 within striking distance. The Jays’ offence hasn’t been entirely cold since leaving Toronto a little over a week ago, but it has underwhelmed, flashing its usual relentlessness only in fits and starts, as was the case Tuesday night when they mounted two late-inning rallies, but ultimately came up short in a 7-6 loss to the Yankees.
Given the everyday nature of their sport, baseball players tend to have remarkably short memories. But Tuesday’s loss stung more than usual, given the Jays held the lead in the eighth inning and came so close to another comeback in the ninth.
“It definitely hurts and it definitely sticks with you,” said Kevin Pillar, who notched the go-ahead hit for the Jays in the eighth.
“But that’s the beauty of baseball — you get to come back and try to make up for what you did yesterday and get a chance to win a game today.”
This season has had a very different feel for the Jays compared to last year and it figures to be a very different home stretch. A year ago the Jays stormed up the standings following a transformative trade deadline. They went 43-18 from July 29 through to the end of the season for a ridiculous .705 winning percentage. “We caught fire and it was like a light switch,” Gibbons said.
Jays fans would love to go back to those happy days when the team seemingly could do no wrong.
This year hasn’t had a sudden surge, but no major dips, either. The Jays have never won more than seven games in a row, but only twice this year have they lost more than three straight and their two significant losing streaks — one four-game and one five-game — occurred back in April and May, respectively. This week marked just the third time this season the Jays have lost back-to-back series.
“We really played as steady a ball as you can play,” Gibbons said. “In a lot of ways that’s probably better.”
Gibbons might be right, but Jays’ fans would probably prefer the hal- cyon days of last summer. This September figures to be much more nervy as the Jays wrestle with their division rivals in what figures to be the tightest playoff race in the majors. Regardless of how they have played to this point, the season will be decided in the next three-and-ahalf weeks.
“I know everyone in here cares, everyone wants to win,” Pillar said. “(The recent struggles are) not from a lack of effort. We’re trying. We’re playing good teams. In our division we’ve got arguably four teams that are still trying to win the division and still hoping to play in the post-season. So we’re getting everyone’s best pitching and we’re getting everyone’s best effort and that’s just how it is sometimes. Those aren’t excuses; it’s just reality.”
But Pillar said the Jays also have to start playing better baseball.
“There’s really no other option,” he said.
“We’ve got to start playing better and kind of take that mentality that we’ve shown in some later innings, in some comebacks and have that level of focus and intensity from the first inning.
“But that’s the beauty of it being early in September. We got an opportunity to ride this out and start playing our best baseball heading into October or we’re going to find ourselves sitting at home.”