SEATTLE — There are some parallels for the Toronto Blue Jays in the players-only meeting they held in May after losing their seventh in nine games and the one called Friday before suffering their seventh setback in eight games.
After that, timely hitting was the main problem, the club often finding itself shorthanded in games with constant leverage. Now, injuries and rotation inconsistency have set in motion a vicious cycle of early deficits leading to poor plate approaches. In both cases, the club’s management felt it was necessary to discuss things among themselves.
“They’re similar, but the times in a season are different,” Springer said Saturday. “We are further ahead in the season. It’s a lot easier for people to look at the rankings and say you need to do this and you need to do that, as opposed to at the beginning of the year you can say I’ve still got time. I just said, “We all understand what our job is or what the task is. We can’t worry about other teams and standings and all that stuff. We just have to go play, control ourselves and see what happens at the end of the day.
The discussion didn’t pay immediate dividends, though the Blue Jays pitched much better, dropping a second straight game to the Seattle Mariners, 5-2 in 11 innings, Friday night in what turned out to be a road trip of misery.
They are in arguably their most physically demanding stretch of the season, capping a 31-game, 30-day hitting streak within a larger stretch of 42 games in 41 days before the All-Star break.
Hyun-Jin Ryu’s season-ending Tommy John surgery thinned the rotation before Yusei Kikuchi’s struggles and a liner hitting Kevin Gausman’s right ankle compounded matters. And in the shadows hovers the constant grief of first base coach Mark Budzinski, who has been away from the club since the death of his daughter.
That’s a lot, frustrations are building and the once-comfortable lead atop the wild-card standings is now down to third place, two games back of Seattle, heading into Saturday’s action. So it’s not a bad time for players to talk to each other and try to change the atmosphere.
“It’s one of those times of the year when things don’t necessarily go the way you want them to and everybody’s trying to figure out why instead of just going out and playing,” Springer said. “We lost a tough game (Friday) night, that’s it, that’s the game. We all understand that there will be ups and downs in a season and this is one of those times. But we also understand that we all have to go out and be better overall, try to get back to doing the little things better and we’ll see what happens.
Shifting the thought processes from why the losses are mounting to how to win in tough circumstances is no small matter, especially when there is so much outside noise about how the Blue Jays are frustrated with their pitching going around.
That they’re off to a 45-40 start despite not getting their hitting and pitching in sync outside of an eight-game hitting streak from May 24 to June 2 is both cause for pause and reason to believe better times are ahead.
That the club’s management group took the initiative to meet is “what you want,” manager Charlie Montoyo said. “I think when a manager comes and talks, they think he’s panicked. It’s nice when management has a meeting. I think that’s great.”
Still, the immediate challenge is unlocking the upside and making the roster function to its potential, an ongoing issue throughout the season.
“It’s never good when you try to push, whether it’s the staff or the offense. I just feel like we’re not clicking on both cylinders right now,” Ross Stripling said after throwing five gutsy innings in Friday’s loss. “When we’re pitching well, we’re not necessarily scoring a lot of runs, and we’re scoring a lot of runs, we’re not pitching well or whatever. We’re halfway there and we’re just not fully clicking on all cylinders yet. So we don’t push. No one panics there. But we know this line-up is too talented not to go and it looks like it could happen at any moment.”
Trusting the process over the results is part of that.
The Blue Jays made enough solid contact during Monday and Tuesday’s losses in Oakland to earn more than four runs, but it went to waste. They built a few innings of opportunities Friday, but didn’t execute on them.
With a few shutouts, they could be 4-1 on this trip instead of 1-4, which is both part of the problem and part of the solution.
“That’s baseball,” Springer said. “You’ve got to keep fighting, keep rolling and hopefully we’ll all be on the good side one good day. … But you can’t do too much. You can’t try to be someone you’re not. You can’t try to do things that you don’t know how to do or that you’re just not physically able to do. You have to go be yourself. The mentality of this team is to come out and play hard, never give up and fight until the end. No one ever tries to fail. We understand that as a team and we’ll see what happens.”
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