Schedule offers chance to make up lost ground
The Blue Jays left the Rogers Centre almost two weeks ago on a huge high, their return to Toronto serving as rocket fuel for a 9-2 homestand that made a return trip to the post-season seem inevitable.
They limped back to their dome sweet dome on Friday a different looking team, all that momentum lost thanks to a 3-6 road trip that included multiple meltdowns by a bullpen that’s once again unreliable and another trip to the injured list by George Springer, who had been on fire at the top of the lineup.
It feels as though those playoff dreams are fading into the distance, but the truth is the Jays are only hitting the quarter pole of their season this weekend, with 40 games left after the Detroit Tigers leave town on Sunday.
Things might appear to be getting late early, but the Jays understand what they have to do to make a playoff push. All-star second baseman Marcus Semien went to the post-season each of the last three seasons with the Oakland A’s, so a pennant race is nothing new to him.
“I think about the teams I’ve been on in the past that have made the playoffs and you look at the win total — so, ‘OK we gotta get here,’ ” Semien said before Friday night’s series opener against the Tigers. “But it’s a process. You can’t just get there. There are little things you have to do along the way, cleaning up our baseball.
“I think we can get there, but it’s not going to happen overnight. Sometimes it takes a game where something clicks out there and we turn it on, and you catch momentum.”
Cleaning things up is something the Jays absolutely need to do, as the trip through Anaheim, Seattle and Washington brought back some early-season sore spots. More than just the bullpen, there were defensive lapses. Too many opportunities were given to opponents who too often took advantage.
Manager Charlie Montoyo sees a positive in the fact that his team went
“I think we can get there, but it’s not going to happen overnight.” MARCUS SEMIEN
JAYS SECOND BASEMAN
through the same thing last year, though much later in the season.
“We were almost about to (clinch) the playoffs and all of a sudden we lost six in a row,” the skipper recalled, “and you could feel the tension, which was great for the kids. So they’ve already gone through that. Now it’s about playing a full season, maintaining your body, trying to stay healthy. You’re going to get tired. They’re learning on their own, which is fun to watch.”
In the pandemic-shortened 2020 season, the Jays were in second place in the American League East on Sept. 15 when they opened a three-game series in the Bronx and got their heads handed to them by the Yankees: outscored 43-15 and swept. The Yankees scored 20 runs in the series opener. That kicked off the six-game slide Montoyo mentioned, but the next week the Jays rebounded to take three of four from the Yankees in Buffalo and clinched a playoff spot in the final game.
What can Montoyo do to get his team back on track?
“Keep (being positive),” Montoyo said, making a motion as though he was patting someone on the backside, “because it’s not easy. Baseball’s not easy. It’s a mental grind. They’re doing fine, though, they’re doing fine.”
In a macro sense, they are. They had won 15 of their past 24 games heading into Friday night, and if they maintain that pace through the final quarter they will be just fine. But losing five of six and getting swept in Washington by a team that has pulled the plug on the season clearly suggests things can’t continue the way they’re going if the Jays are going to stay in a playoff race for the next six weeks.
“We see the standings, of course — they’re everywhere,” Semien said. “And it’s just going to take a (good) series to get us going. You run into hot streaks, you run into cold streaks and right now we’re hoping for a hot streak.”
Randal Grichuk, the other Jays position player who has been through a playoff race in a 162-game season (making it to the post-season twice with St. Louis and falling just short another couple of times), feels the urgency as well.
“We know each and every night matters, and it feels like we need a win every night,” said Grichuk. “But (we also) need to take it one game at a time. We can’t look past opponents. Just understand that (at-bat), that inning, that pitch, that game is what matters.”
At the same time, the veteran outfielder understands where we are on the calendar.
“The wild card’s not too far out of reach,” Grichuk said, accurately. “If it was midSeptember, you might say ‘All right, we gotta go.’ You don’t want to put too much emphasis on any (one) game, but we all know what’s at stake.”
The schedule has opened up for the Jays, and even though they certainly didn’t take advantage of it on that last road trip, they play over half their remaining schedule against the also-ran Tigers, Twins and Orioles. They also have seven games left against the Yankees, important head-to-head matchups with one of the teams they’re chasing for that final playoff spot.
There are no must-win games in August, as much as it might feel as though there are. And while the Jays aren’t as good as they looked on that 9-2 homestand, they’re also not nearly as bad as that 3-6 road trip.
As Semien said, they’ve got to clean things up, and the sooner the better.
Another 3-6 run is something they probably wouldn’t be able to overcome.