Changes coming after trouble with the curve

Bautista departure could be the start of offensive makeover

Strip mining into the stats slag hill of the Blue Jays season turns up this little nugget: Toronto went 11-12 against rookie starters.

So, in their very last game of 2016, Ryan Merritt was no anomaly. Although Kid Merritt didn’t actually get the win as he went only 41⁄ innings in his share of

3 the 3-0 freeze-out.

Thing is, Merritt threw mostly breaking ball slop, abetted somewhat by the umpire giving him the corners. Thus Jays batters repeatedly pivoted away from the plate, trailing their lumber, with body language that bespoke disgust. By Oct. 19, Game 5 of the American League Championship Series, it had become Toronto’s motif, their disdain for the strike zone as boxed out by the masked men.

Of course an inch matters. But it shouldn’t have mattered this much, not with the Jays’ hitting proficiency — 51 strikeouts racked up by Cleveland’s pitchers.

It will be autopsied from here to spring training, why Toronto was so enfeebled by the moundsmen encountered, because they weren’t all Andrew Miller and Cody Allen doing that thing they do so well; there were plenty of weak links in Cleveland’s injury-devastated starting rotation and the bullpen. And yet the Jays were limited to 31 hits, nine of them in the only game where Toronto prevailed. And just two jacks from a team that had cranked 221home runs in the regular season, fourth in the AL.

Manager John Gibbons sounded almost sheepish at having to state the obvious in his palaver with reporters early Wednesday afternoon. “You can’t win if you don’t score some runs. And yet this puzzling anemia — the antithesis of Blue Jays baseball — had nearly wrecked the club through its September sag, putting immense pressure on the bullpen to preserve slim leads. That widely criticized relief cadre had no blame in this bracket. They were sterling, surrendering not a single run. But only once were they handed the ball with Toronto up on the scoreboard. And the Indians weren’t exactly lightsout hitters either.

I know that Toronto players studiously watch video of the pitchers they’ll be facing. It’s part of routine preparation — to identify tendencies and tics, the likelihood of what that guy on the bump will offer on a particular count, because it’s crucial to have a plan before stepping into the box. Split-second reaction time means precious little room to adjust for a fastball that looked like a slider coming out of the pitcher’s hand.

So Josh Donaldson, a keen student of hitting and by the sixth inning of Game 5 well acquainted with Miller’s slider, took an intuitive hack at the first pitch he saw, anticipating fastball. But he struck the ball topside, causing it to hit the dirt in front of agile shortstop Francisco Lindor: Double play, inning over.

Finer baseball minds than mine will assess what went so dismally wrong for Toronto hitters — inside fastball pouncers who were pitched away, away, away.

But even a casual observer would have noticed that Jays didn’t shorten their bats when the situation called for it, rarely hit the opposite way, especially to stay out of double plays or take advantage of the shift, didn’t make use of all fields — Dioner Navarro, when he pinch-hit, and light-hitting Ryan Goins, when he was in the lineup, were notable exceptions — and relentlessly swung for the fences. It’s in their DNA, the long ball.

Doubtless management will be seeking to transform that DNA strand this winter. Subtracting Jose Bautista and perhaps Edwin Encarnacion (don’t do it) from the roster would entirely recalibrate the team’s essence. What Toronto saw in an immensely likeable and shrewd Cleveland squad is a blue print of the Jays’ presumable future — speed, smaller ball, matriculation from the carefully cultivated minorleague ranks, switch-hitters, right-left hitting balance. There’s little to knock your socks off on that lineup but the Indians knocked off hitting-gaudy Boston and set Toronto aside with remarkable ease.

We all await further enlightenment about Shapiro’s master plan because at the moment we have only those infomercials he’s invested on Sportsnet journalists.

But is this really the time to extensively re-invent the Jays? Bold changes did indeed put Toronto over the top in the early ’90s after the team had thrice failed to emerge from the AL playoffs between 1985 and 1991. What the Jays lacked in this final series were reliable contact hitters — men on base for the big bombers, although of course the grenade sluggers didn’t pull the pin much. While they managed to string hits together reasonably enough in the regular season and early in the post-season, an inability to cope with the curveball against Cleveland had Jays going down 1-2-3 on 18 occasions through five games.

Shapiro has carte blanche to reconfigure this team, albeit not carte blanche via payroll. But the AL East will be even more intensely contended in 2017, with the Yankees a couple of steps ahead, having shed stars for hungry young talent this past summer, a healthy Tampa Bay ripe for rebound and the Red Sox still the Red Sox, unfettered by fiscal restraint in replacing David Ortiz, perhaps with Encarnacion.

Key components of the Toronto roster aren’t going anywhere, the likes of Donaldson and Troy Tulowitzki by contract and others — Aaron Sanchez, Marcus Stroman, Roberto Osuna — by dint of majorleague time in. It would be daring for Shapiro to convert one of his tiffany assets, maybe Stroman, into hot-blooded hitters because you can’t get something for nothing.

“We would love to have everybody back,” Donaldson said in the sombre leave-taking clubhouse. “We would love to have Bats back. We would love to have Eddie back. These guys have been the faces of the franchise for many years now. The fact of the matter is everybody in here . . . we’ve grinded together, we shed blood with each other.

“Nobody wants to go home. Unfortunately, that’s the case.”

They’re gone already. Because that’s baseball, where nobody lingers. Some won’t pass this way again as Jays.

Thanks for the memories.