After slow start, the Blue Jays have finally shown they have one of the best rosters in baseball

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Looking back on it, it’s clear where the Blue Jays season was meant to slip off a ledge and begin a long fall into September.

A week and a half ago – May 23. The first game of a quick in-and-out against St. Louis. An early lead despite only four Toronto hits on the evening. A late wobble by starter Jose Berrios, left in a smidge too long. A Paul Goldschmidt grand slam in the 10th.

That loss encapsulated everything going wrong in the Jays’ season – so-so starting pitching, leaky bullpen and an offence that looked like nine guys trying to chop tomatoes with a samurai sword.

But it was manager Charlie Montoyo’s reaction afterward that got people exercised.

Over three seasons and a bit, Montoyo has been a fount of positivity, punctuated by scattered moments of despondency. It’s this professional frailty that makes him so relatable.

This was an ill-timed example of the latter tendency.

“I’ve been around the game for a long time and I’ve never seen a bunch of good hitters struggling with men in scoring position, you know,” Montoyo said, bouncing nervously from foot to foot. “It’s coming. I don’t know when it’s coming, but it will come.”

Everybody understands there’s a certain amount of magical thinking involved in running a baseball team. You’re in charge, but you’re not in control. No amount of yelling or begging is going to make professionals do their jobs right.

But when things are going sideways, people don’t want to hear the manager has no concrete solutions beyond “I’ve started praying the rosary at lunch as well as before bed.”

In the background you could hear the big clock that used to be ticking on episodes of 24 coming to the foreground. Never ask for whom the bell tolls, Charlie, because it probably tolls for thee.

One more loss would have been fine. Two more? A problem. Three, and management’s running news-conference fire drills.

Once that happens, panic sets in. It spreads contagiously into the clubhouse and who knows how bad it can get? In the moments after Goldschmidt’s homer, you could see the rest of the season spread out in all of its most miserable potential.

But as the knife drawers were popping open in the Jays’ C-suites, a remarkable thing happened – the team won.

As of this writing, Toronto’s won eight games on the trot. A few of those have looked like three hours of batting practice. The run includes sweeps against playoff-calibre teams in the Angels and the White Sox.

What changed?

“I said, ‘The moment we start swinging the bats, and we keep pitching and catching the ball the way we did, we have a chance to win some games in row,’” Montoyo explained.

Ah, okay. Let me just write that down so I don’t forget – “swing bats + pitch + catch.” Fascinating. Let everyone in baseball know – I’m ready to take interviews for any open managerial positions. I could be convinced to be a bench coach if that includes a car allowance.

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Two months late, the Toronto Blue Jays that were promised have finally shown up. As of this precise moment, the Jays are the best roster in baseball whose home office isn’t in the Bronx.

It wasn’t schemed out this way, but all of a sudden this looks like a pretty great plan. Why play six months of baseball when you can play four instead?

You write off the first couple of months as an extended spring training. You aren’t good, but you’re not terrible either. Even while you’re being mediocre, you’re still able to hang on to a wild-card spot. That dissuades people from getting too squirrelly.

While people are still trying to decide how they feel about you, you dip lower still, daring everyone to give up on you. Just as a few are thinking about it, you spring back up to a fighting position. This is Sabermetric rope-a-dope.

While a baseball season is going on, no one on the team wants to talk much about any particular moment in it. Never too high, never too low. Tomorrow’s another day. It’s still early. All these clichés are designed to deflect introspection.

It’s only once a season’s over that you hear about the highly specific instances where things either went right or wrong. The moment of the big trade. That’s exactly when it turned around. Or that night in Cleveland when three balls hit the centre fielder in the head and went out for home runs. That’s when we knew.

Baseball lifers have an incredible ability to remember details about games months after they’ve been played. Who was at bat and who was on base and what they were thinking right then.

Former Jays manager Cito Gaston was fond of likening whatever had happened that night to a similar situation, down to the names and birth dates of all involved, that had occurred in some forgettable game a decade earlier. You’d check his math later online and he was always right.

So they are registering this stuff. They just don’t like talking about it until the whole picture has been painted.

Right now, the Jays are finally bumping along at cruising speed because they were always going to do that. Everyone knew it was coming. Never a moment’s doubt.

Assuming things work out, maybe later we’ll hear about the come-to-Jesus moment the Jays had that night in May in St. Louis. How they looked around and realized they had to decide which direction they were headed in.

In retrospect, it will probably feel like fate. They were always going to do it this way.

Every sport has these moments, but baseball – with its endless season and onus on repetition – has a special belief in the divine. All you can do is wait and hope. Sometimes, your prayers are answered.