SEATTLE — On June 13, when Santiago Espinal made a throw across the diamond that tore through Vladimir Guerrero Jr.’s glove tape at first base, it was easy for the Toronto Blue Jays to dismiss it as a freak moment. Things were generally going well at the time, they were up 11-1 against the Baltimore Orioles in the game and all the damaged skin did was delay the inevitable. There wasn’t even a page to turn.
Now, though, amid the crucible of disappointment the Blue Jays find themselves in, every mistake, every disappointment tends to fester and linger. And so, in the fifth inning Sunday, at the end of 31 games in 30 days and a particularly miserable road trip, Gabriel Moreno surrendered what should have been an inning-ending 1-2-3 double play that tore up the net on another glove of Guerrero may very well have ripped a lot more.
For a team nearing its boiling point, each shot becomes harder and harder to overcome. Guerrero’s broken glove drove in one run to cut the Blue Jays’ lead to 4-2. Another run followed on an infield single, this single, and the Seattle Mariners tied the game in the sixth when Tim Maiza hit Carlos Santana and two wild pitches past Gabriel Moreno led to a Cal Raleigh fly.
Bo Bichette hit the break button with a solo shot that gave the Blue Jays the lead back in the seventh. But Moreno, battling the sun, dropped a popup to JP Crawford to open the eighth, and Santana, already home in the second, promptly went deep for the third time in two games, giving the Mariners a 6-5 victory that completed four games.
Kama, who finished the road 1-6 with their ninth loss in 10 games, the Blue Jays are no longer trying to turn the page on a bad day, but rather trying to close the book on a maddening stretch.
Facing a bullpen day in the absence of Kevin Gausman, Sunday couldn’t have gone much better for them as Max Castillo pushed through four innings despite throwing three shutout frames on Thursday, George Springer went deep on the first pitch of game , Raimel Tapia singled in the fourth and Bichette broke things open with a two-run single in the fifth.
Even more solidly, they came through against tough Logan Gilbert, giving another heavily Canadian crowd of 37,694 at T-Mobile Park reason to believe this game would turn out differently.
But an attempt to extend Castillo into the fifth backfired when Raleigh and Adam Frazier hit back-to-back one-out singles. In came David Phelps, who walked Justin Upton before Sam Haggerty hit a weak chopper back to the mound, which he promptly handed home.
Moreno then fired first and the game, like Guerrero’s glove, began to unravel under the increasing weight of a mind-boggling stretch.
The Blue Jays seemed to have rebounded, taking two of three from the Boston Red Sox and then winning the first two games of the series against the Tampa Bay Rays. But then Gausman took a line drive off his right ankle in the first game of a back-to-back against the Rays, and the Blue Jays’ surging surge turned into an uncontrollable slide instead.
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