Astros give Jays a blowout send-off to break
Toronto has four days to lick its wounds and regroup for stretch run
John Gibbons’ wish list for the Blue Jays’ fortunes after the all-star break is short.
“More wins,” the manager said Sunday, hours before the team headed into four days off on a particularly sour note, a 19-1 loss to the visiting Houston Astros in the team’s third, and worst, blowout loss in a week.
The fourth-largest margin of defeat in club history brought an end of a roller-coaster week in which the pendulum swayed from glimmers of optimism to disappointment over a 4-3 run. The trouble for the Blue Jays, with their 41-47 record, is that even slightly over .500 play couldn’t get them any closer than fives games back of a wild-card spot.
It’s hard to imagine this Toronto team, with its back-to-back American League Championship Series pedigree, not fulfilling Gibbons’ seemingly simple goal after a disappointing first half of the season. But it will be a tall order for a team plagued by inconsistency so far this year, struggling to marry good health, strong pitching, hot bats and solid defence on any sort of regular basis.
Those season-long issues were once against apparent in what Sunday’s starter J.A. Happ called a “couple touchdown” loss.
“That’s what it’s going to take, a lot of consistency on both sides of it,” said Happ, whose four innings matched a season low. “We’ll find out where were at and we’ll certainly have a tough stretch coming right around the break.”
The catalyst for Sunday’s loss was a five-run second inning in which Happ, one of the team’s better starters as of late, allowed three homers. Josh Donaldson, the hero in Saturday’s 7-2 win, and Darwin Barney made costly defensive errors along the way and the Blue Jays offence mustered just seven hits.
By the time Ryan Tepera notched a first out in the top of the seventh inning, after he and Aaron Loup allowed another six runs between them in that frame, the sellout crowd’s cheers had become more ironic than emphatic. Joe Biagini’s four-run ninth inning didn’t help, but those fans who remained did get to their feet for Ezequiel Carrera’s two-out solo homer in the bottom of the ninth.
Toronto split the series with the best team in the American League but, as it has done on so many occasions this year, the team failed to put a final nail in the coffin and close out the series with a win. It was reminiscent of the nine times the Blue Jays have had a shot at reaching the .500 mark this year.
How’s that going, you ask? Well, they’re not there yet.
As Justin Smoak and Roberto Osuna head off to represent the Jays among the league’s best in Miami, Toronto is10 wins back of where they were heading into the break in 2016, having played three fewer games this year.
The Jays were second in the AL East before last year’s all-star game, two games back of the leaders. This year, they are 81⁄ games back of Bos
2 ton. It will be 17 days from the trade deadline by the time Toronto returns to the field in Detroit on Friday, with Aaron Sanchez slated to start that game against the Tigers.
That is not much time before the club’s front office has to answer a question that has been bubbling for months: Are the Blue Jays buyers, or sellers?
Both Happ, a potential selling piece for Toronto, and Smoak say the clubhouse isn’t paying any attention to the possibility of a rebuild, remaining confident in the abilities of the current squad.
“We’ve got a really good team and we know it,” Smoak said. “It’s just a matter of getting hot at the right time.” But asked what he would have thought had someone told him back in spring training that the Blue Jays would be closer to the bottom of the AL than a wild-card spot, Happ was lost for words.
“I don’t know. I don’t know what I would have thought. But that’s the spot we’re in, so we’re going to have to find a way to climb out of there, that’s for sure. We’ll take the break and we’ll see what we got when we come back.
“It’s going to take a great effort but I think we can do it.”