Jays win seventh in a row in chase for playoff spot,
The Blue Jays’ season has been flipped upside down and that could mean good things for their shot at securing one of the two American League wild-card spots.
For months, the knock on this young squad was that it didn’t have enough pitching and the defence was too sloppy. The bats might be good enough to beat up on the weak teams, but surely the entire package wouldn’t be enough to hang with the legitimate contenders.
Good teams, the ones heading to the post-season, aren’t supposed to make the kind of mental mistakes the Jays were often prone to. At some point it would catch up to them. One could argue, based on the standings at the start of September, it already had.
Yet here we are, approaching mid-September with the Jays playing meaningful games that are being decided by the little things, more specifically the failure to execute them. Entirely predictable, right? Not really. The miscues haven’t been hurting the Jays, at least not lately. It’s the opposite, they’ve been helping them.
The Jays’ resurgence continued Wednesday night as they extended their winning streak to seven games with a 6-3 victory over the Yankees, their third in a row in the Bronx. Toronto has won 10 of its last 11 to pull within 1⁄ 1 games of the 2 second wild card while the Bronx Bombers are going in the opposite direction amidst a five-game losing streak.
The Yankees, much like the Jays earlier in the season, have been their own worst enemy during their recent skid. In Monday’s series opener, they made three errors in an 8-0 loss. On Tuesday, DJ LeMahieu allowed a tailor-made double-play grounder to roll under his glove, leading to a costly two-run inning and an eventual 5-1 loss.
Then, on Wednesday night, New York starter Luis Gil walked seven batters across 3⁄3 1 innings and shortstop Andrew Velazquez made a costly throwing error that allowed Marcus Semien to reach second base in the seventh, where he later scored the winning run on an RBI single by Teoscar Hernandez.
The Jays are starting to win games in a similar fashion to the way they used to lose them. And, sure, there will be more mental mistakes from this inexperienced roster, but there haven’t been too many of them lately. Considering how little time remains in the season, that’s far more important to the here and now.
Charlie Montoyo’s squad had an off-night with the bats Wednesday but it was still able to push six runs across the plate, thanks to the sloppy play from New York. In the fourth, after Gil walked the bases loaded, one run scored on a wild pitch and two more came around on a two-out single by Semien. That pushed Semien’s RBI total to 90, which is two shy of his career high in 2019, the year he finished third in voting for the AL MVP award.
Rookie right-hander Alek Manoah surrendered the lead an inning later on a three-run homer by Jays killer Brett Gardner but the Yankees soon followed with more self harm. In the seventh, Velazquez made an ill-advised throw to first on an infield single by Semien that allowed him to reach second base.
Three batters later, Hernandez made the Yankees pay with an RBI single to right to give the Jays a lead they would not relinquish as Lourdes Gurriel Jr. tripled in the eighth and Vladimir Guerrero Jr. hit his 41st homer of the season in the ninth to provide the insurance runs. The Jays have 18 home runs during the winning streak, and they’ve scored at least five runs in each of the seven games.
The only bad news for the Jays on Wednesday night was that the Red Sox scored two runs in the eighth inning to steal a victory away from the Tampa Bay Rays. That meant the Jays remained two back of Boston for one wild card but pulled within 1 1 ⁄ of the Yankees 2 for the other, with the two teams scheduled to play four more times before the end of the year, including Thursday’s series finale.
That the Yankees are even at risk of losing their spot in the post-season is nothing short of shocking. In late August, they had a 13-game winning streak to move 9 1 ⁄ games in front of 2 the Jays as late as Aug. 27. More recently, it has been a much different story with New York dropping to 1-5 on its current homestand, and with losses in nine of 11 games.
By comparison, everything is going right for the Jays. Earlier in the year, there’s a good chance the bullpen would have given the lead right back to the Yankees. On Wednesday night, they bent but did not break as Trevor Richards, Adam Cimber and closer Jordan Romano combined to keep the game in check with 3⁄ 1 scoreless innings. 3
One of Montoyo’s go-to lines of late is “pitching and defence wins ball games.” The Jays are getting a lot of that these days. The Yankees, not so much, and as a result a spot in the postseason is very much up for grabs with just over three weeks to play.
For a long time, it felt like the ball never bounced the Jays’ way. Now it seems like the ball’s bouncing anywhere they want it to. The winning streak won’t last forever, but the longer it does, the more realistic it becomes that a September run could lead to a busy October.