Catching Up With the Toronto Blue Jays, A Baseball Team That Sucks

uh oh

The Blue Jays have won four in a row, but it doesn't really feel that way. They dropped two out of three at home to the Orioles -- a team I have chosen not to believe in lest they overturn all that I have believed about run differential and all that flows from it since first reading Bill James so many years ago -- and the roof got stuck open and it rained on everybody (well, not everybody). The sweep in Boston that followed made for some excellent lazy afternoon radio, don't get me wrong, but man this season has been and continues to be a drag. 

I don't know man. I really don't know.

KS

Blue Jays 2, Rays 0; Blue Jays 2, Rays 1; Rays 5, Blue Jays 4; Rays 9, Blue Jays 4: You Know What This Was Actually Pretty Neat

slid right into his butt, like right into it

Great starts from Carlos Villanueva and Brandon Morrow, back-to-back games ending with dudes thrown out at the plate, and tight, low-scoring affairs that could totally have gone either way, I mean, shoot, that sounds pretty awesome, does it not? And indeed it was! Were it not for Ricky Romero getting absolutely pasted beyond all recognition in the series finale on Sunday afternoon -- 1 IP, 8 H, 7 R, 7 ER, 1 BB, 0 K, 1 HR -- this would have been nothing but good times, man, nothing at all. But yeah, the Romero start, his worst ever, and pretty much the worst you could ever possibly see, took a little bit of the shine off an otherwise excellent weekend of baseball, the Blue Jays series I have enjoyed most in a long time (because I kind of whiffed on the Yankees series, to be honest). 

I would like to point out, in case you had not noticed which is entirely possible, that E5 is now up to 37 HR, which is utterly ridiculous. Not that it would have made that much difference to the shape of the season or anything, but wouldn't it have been cool if Jose Bautista's wrist hadn't exploded and both these awesome dudes hit forty-plus dingers? Boy. Boy.

KS

Orioles 6, Blue Jays 4; Orioles 8, Blue Jays 2; Sweet Cleansing Rain; Blue Jays 8, Yankees 7 (F/11); Yankees 2, Blue Jays 1; Blue Jays 8, Yankees 5: Aaaaaand Jose Bautista is Gone for the Year Now

this Ichiro thing is still nuts imo

Things in Baltimore went hideously: the Blue Jays dropped both of the games they actually got in, and Jose Bautista left in like the third inning of his second game back, and now he's done for the year with all kinds of wrist awfulness, which is a pretty big concern long term if you are inclined to worry about such things and I am very much so inclined yes. Then, mercifully, came the rains, postponing the third game and allowing them to just play a bunch of awesome old Tom Cheek calls on the radio, which was a welcome diversion from this current season which, it gives me no pleasure to say, has sucked. And so to New York, where Colby Rasmus ended his 0-for-eternity with a home run to win one in extras, Ricky Romero put in his best start in ages in a loss, and Yunel Escobar returned from paternity leave a monster, and there you go, two out of three from the Yankees, who actually haven't been great for the last six weeks or so actually. The AL East has been so weird this year: the Yankees are totally good but aren't playing that way; Baltimore is still way over .500 with a seriously negative run differential, which really isn't a thing that happens that often; Tampa is doing it with all pitching and no bats; and Boston just pulled off a Baseball Mogulesque salary dump of epic proportions, so ruined is their year. 

This totally would have been the year for the Blue Jays to do something if the roster had not, like, ulcerated. 

KS

Tigers 5, Blue Jays 3; Tigers 3, Blue Jays 2; Tigers 3, Blue Jays 2 (F/11): Muck/Shit/Despair

brooms of woe

In the opening game of this fine series against the Tigers, poor, poor Ricky Romero issued bases-loaded walks in consecutive innings en route to losing his tenth-straight decision (you will recall that he was nearly as bad when he was winning). Game two ended yeah that's right ended with Omar Vizquel thrown out attempting to steal second in a tactical decision so egregiously dumb that it was singled out on the Baseball Today podcast, a fine institution but not one that goes out of its way to let you know what happened for all of the last-place teams the previous day, you know? What I am suggesting to you here is that the Blue Jays forced their hand at ESPN by ending a game so foolishly. Then, finally, today, after beautiful, sweet E5 put the Blue Jays out in front 2-0, it all melted away into nothing more than a 3-2 walkoff loss and a sweep. 

I like the Tigers; they are respected AL East foes of yore. I occurred to me the other day, with another disastrous game on the radio, that if the Toronto Blue Jays for some reason ceased to exist tomorrow in some kind of Twilight Zone-style occurrence, I would defy the century-old tradition of my homeland and turn to the Tigers, not the Red Sox, as the team I would watch and then get sad about. When the Detroit Tigers make the playoffs, they are the team I want to see come out of the AL, and thus the team I want to see win the World Series (because National League baseball is smug and I will not stand for it). I wish them every success. But holy cow I wanted the Blue Jays to win one of these, man, just one. Why should that matter at this stage of a pretty spectacularly lost season? I have no idea.

KS 

Blue Jays 3, Rangers 2; Rangers 2, Blue Jays 1; Rangers 11, Blue Jays 2: At Least We Still Don't Have Any of Our Guys

return to me my sweet

I think my favourite part of this series was when the Blue Jays totally wasted a great start by Carlos Villanueva on Saturday afternoon, totally failing to do anything despite loading the bases a couple of times late at which point dudes elected to just pop up on 3-1 pitches. That was tremendous. To me.

KS

Rays 3, Blue Jays 2; Rays 7, Blue Jays 1: Seriously I Don't Even Know Who These Guys Are

E5 takin' it back

Just some crazy fucking line ups these days, man. It's just a situation. At least Jose Bautista is ready to start hitting off a tee! But also Brett Lawrie is on the DL. And now the Yankees are in town. 

Revised 2012 prediction: the Toronto Blue Jays will lose one thousand games.

KS

Blue Jays 3, Athletics 1 (F/11); Blue Jays 6, Oakland 5: It Is Going to Be Like This The Rest of the Way Isn't It

don't act like you've never seen Moises Sierra before, jaws all on the floor , etc.

So yeah hot on the heels of all of the muck and shit and despair of basically the whole west-coast trip until Saturday, the Blue Jays picked up two against the A's to put them, well, five games out of the wild card, which is to say, just close enough that you keep checking the scoreboard but far enough back that they are still totally doomed. What we have before us now is a team of unrecognizable dudes, several of whom I am sure will be totally serviceable, but seriously man this is too much. Today, for instance, both Drew Hutchison and Dustin McGowan are going under the knife. Two dudes. Same day. Why not. 

KS

Athletics 7, Blue Jays 2; Athletics 16, Blue Jays 0; Blue Jays 10, Oakland 4: Even With That Win This One Felt Like a Sweep

me too, rick

Yeah, that second game was so fucked up that it cast a shadow over what should have been a pretty cool win in the getaway game. Romero has got to be hurt or something, right? There is no way he could just have gotten this bad this quickly, is there? This is just depressing. As is this: with J. P. Arencibia out for a while now, you'd think this would be an exciting opportunity to get a look at Travis D'Arnaud, one of the top catching prospects in all of baseball, but no, he wrecked his knee. So get used to Jeff Mathis, I guess, who actually pitched the ninth in the blowout, which is the sort of thing we all like to see I think (not kidding here actually). 


Coming into this series I was telling myself things like, "all we need is a sweep here against these ridiculously and unaccountably hot and possibly even magical Oakland A's, and we're tied for the wild card," which, looking back, may have been folly on my part. 


And yet, with basically no players at all at this point, here we sit, right at .500, a mere four games out of the wild card. What if everybody totally got healthy right away? What if this major-league-leading offense (look it up, it's true!) were supported by a couple of even league-average arms picked up before the trade deadline? What would all of that do to me? 


Oh yeah also Jason Frasor's arm is in ruins, how about that.

KS

Yankees 6, Blue Jays 1; Yankees 6; Blue Jays 0: Is This Real Life?

think of me as a more exasperated version of all of the women in this picture except that I am a dude

Getting swept in New York whilst our rotation is a humiliating shambles is one thing, but to lose both Jose Bautista and now Brett Lawrie to injury over the course of that shambles is quite another. If this was a season of Baseball Mogul, and one hopes that that is indeed all this is, we would have just now reached the point where you decide that the highest difficulty level is just absurdly cheap, injuring all of your key dudes in completely arbitrary, Spinal Tap-drummer ways, and you either start again or go outside. But if this is really what is going on outside, where do I go outside to? And so you see that this totally untenable rash of injuries creates not just on-field problems but metaphysical ones, and that makes me uncomfortable, like, existentially. I mean, here's the fucking .gif of the thing:

totally don't bro

If Brett Lawrie pulls this kind of pseudo-heroic nonsense again I will forsake him. It is as simple as that. I have forsaken for less. It left him looking like this . . .

. . . which is arguably punishment enough, but imagine if on top of that, he was also forsook? 

KS

Blue Jays 3, Phillies 0; Blue Jays 6, Phillies 5 (F/10): Oh Man What Is Even Going On Here

sorry skip my arm exploded

So, because of baseball I totally get that clustering is a feature of randomness, and also that random clusterfucks are a feature of baseball, but Jesus Christ what is going on here is a feeling I definitely felt following yet another Blue Jays starter -- this time young Drew Hutchinson -- going down with an injury after basically no pitches and further dooming us. Mike Wilner, who I on the whole do not enjoy, tweeted something to the effect that after the trainer had been talking to the freshly injured Hutchison, he sat down on the bench for a minute and had a few words with Ricky Romero, who then proceeded to bury his head in his hands (like a boss?). After the Phillies (specifically Mike Fontenot) threw that game away Friday night, it was Ricky Ro himself who took the mound Saturday afternoon, and he wasn't all that good. But a J. P. Arencibia tied it late! And Rajai hit the walkoff double in the tenth! But we still don't have any pitchers! What will become of us!


KS