Sox’ path full of Jay walking
TORONTO — The Blue Jays have been one of the most disappointing teams in baseball this season, and whether they stay that way actually has significant implications for the Red Sox’ chances of holding onto the AL East and living up to their own expectations.
After last night’s series opener in Toronto, the Red Sox have 15 more games against the Blue Jays this season.
That’s nearly 20 percent of the remaining schedule, including four of the first eight games after the All-Star break and nine of the last 32 games down the stretch.
“You can never count them out,” Red Sox manager John Farrell said. “Once they get their pitching back to full strength, it’s a good rotation. They’ve got a very good closer in (Roberto) Osuna.
“You look at this division top to bottom, I think there might be five or six games that separates everyone. That’s a good week of baseball that can turn it upside down. We know we’ve got a high number of games (against them), it’s just kind of the way the schedule has worked out this year. Utmost respect for them and we’ve got our hands full.”
That respect flows from the players in the Blue Jays clubhouse, not their wins and losses. Toronto was the only AL East team to enter yesterday’s games with a losing record.
And they’ve had that losing record all season.
After advancing to the ALCS the past two seasons, the Blue Jays opened 2017 by losing nine of their first 10 games. They were 8-17 at the end of April but went 18-10 in the month of May (two wins better than the Red Sox).
Josh Donaldson, Troy Tulowitzki, J.A. Happ and Aaron Sanchez each missed more than a month on the disabled list. Russell Martin and Francisco Liriano missed nearly a month apiece.
But Sanchez is the only one from that group still on the DL, and he’s currently on a rehab assignment, with a return in sight.
“I think we’re still just really trying to jell a little bit,” center fielder Kevin Pillar said. “It’s the majority of the same guys here, but the injury bug hit us pretty hard early in the year, and now we’re finally back (with) everyone healthy. We had some pretty important guys miss a pretty significant amount of time. Some of them haven’t really found their strides yet, so we’re really just still trying to find our identity as a team. Hopefully we can go on a little bit of a run here right before the All-Star break and everyone can go their separate ways for the break and kind of regroup and recover and make a push in the second half.”
The Blue Jays finish the first half with this series against the Red Sox, then the Yankees and Astros — the top three teams in the AL. Pillar called it a good test, and a strong finish into the break might give the Jays a fresh outlook.
Or a bad finish might seal their fate as sellers at the break, making it hard to predict what kind of team the Red Sox will be facing in all those head-to-head matchups late in the year.
“A lot of us, the young guys in here, have been spoiled with playing October baseball,” Pillar said. “It’s kind of all we really know. Obviously, there’s some older guys in here that, it took them a while to experience, but they got to experience it the last two years, and no one’s ready to have an uneventful end of the season and just kind of counting down the days to summer break. We’re a team that expects to go to the postseason. Everyone in here has done it the last couple of years, and that’s still our mindset. That’s still our goal.”