Toronto Blue Jays starting pitcher Alek Manoah throws against the Chicago White Sox in Chicago on May 29.Erin Hooley/The Associated Press
“Things are going to change for us,” the Blue Jays pitcher said. “This team is too good to lose as much as we have. … I know it’s going to turn around.”
They collect these quotes and chisel them into the walls of the Toronto clubhouse. They never vary.
A lot of pitchers at a lot of times have said things like that in a Jays uniform. In this particular instance, it was Marco Estrada. He said that just about on this date – May 29 – in the sainted Toronto baseball year of 2015.
That team was also supposed to dominate. It was also junk as of late May. Toronto had been supposed to dominate on and off and been steadily junk for several years at that point.
But unlike Toronto teams this century before and since, that one did something about it.
The biggest moment in Toronto baseball in years is the bat flip. A close second is the morning in late July, 2015 when you woke up and heard that the Jays had traded for Troy Tulowitzki.
Getting Tulowitzki wasn’t hard. He had an anchor of a contract on a team headed nowhere. All the Jays had to do was offer to swing by and pick up the body. As it turned out, it was a bad trade. Tulowitzki got hurt early on and never really got unhurt.
But the player wasn’t the point. What made an impression was that a Toronto sports club had done something to avoid another season to nowhere. The Jays were the first in a town full of losers to try.
That was electrifying. It didn’t fully work out in the end. But for a good few months, the city pulsated with newfound purpose. If things aren’t going your way, it is possible to radically alter your approach – the Jays had just proved it.
A few years later, the Raptors confirmed the lesson – good team, bad results, take a big risk, reap a reward.
And that was that. Toronto has been a stick-with-the-process/lose-with-valor sports city since. The slide into consistent, across-the-board loserdom is under way.
Two months into the season, it is clear that the current version of the Jays are doomed.
Not doomed in the way they have been for a few years now – good enough to scramble up to the top, where someone faster, smarter and better is waiting to kick them in the teeth.
But doomed in the sense of inevitable obliteration. Everyone on this team looks like a man on the edge of something, and it isn’t an eight-game win streak. This season is more likely to end in a brawl at a players-only meeting than in a playoff game.
The Jays are deficient in every sense. They can barely pitch, hit, play defence, or maintain a lead. The only thing they do do regularly is show up for the national anthem.
The obvious next candidate for manager is currently overseeing the 23rd best offence in baseball, so that’s not great. Only the Shapiro-Atkins Blue Jays could be organized enough to not only blow the plan, but also the backup plan.
The players talk like workers at the U.S. embassy who’ve just heard that helicopter shuttles are being drastically reduced in frequency.
“The reality is that if we don’t play well, we might not be together for much longer,” Kevin Gausman told The Toronto Sun a week ago.
The 10-game stretch that just ended was meant to be a yay or nay on their prospects. As usual for this group, it was neither.
Toronto went 6-4 against teams as bad or worse than them. That’s a yay. They also managed to lose ground in the divisional and wild-card races. That’s a nay.
Now, two roads diverge in a playoff hunt.
The first is the familiar path taken by Toronto teams who were smart enough to get the parking concession. That is the road of nothing.
Keep telling people that things are bound to get better. Around August, tell them that they should have gotten better. In October, tell them that you are as sure as you can be that they will get better next year.
This road doesn’t get you anywhere in a lot of cities, but it’s a safe path in Toronto. This city loves being shined on by sports executives, politicians at every level and other assorted hucksters.
The second road is the one less taken. That’s the road of all in.
The Jays are not getting better next year, and definitely not the year after that. They may be able to re-sign Vlad Guerrero, Jr. The question is, why would you want to? Guerrero is morphing from the next Hank Aaron into the next Pee Wee Reese. When he does hit, it’s a pokey single into shallow centre. It is time to confront the fact that this is as good as he ever gets, at least for this club.
Ditto Gausman, Daulton Varsho, Chris Bassitt, George Springer, et al. They will all either age out or move on.
If you believe this is a good team and it is not getting better, the logical move is to go deep now and see where it gets you.
Some insiders have suggested the Jays should be sellers at the deadline. To what purpose? Are we seriously saying that the people who blew the first rebuild should begin the next one? I guess we are.
You ever wonder why every free-agent player treats Toronto like the Forbidden Zone, but every executive is dying to get in here? This is why.
In a more aspirational, more hopeful, and more demanding city, the only option for this club is to summon the spirit of Alex Anthopoulos and 2015. Go out and do something wild. Get the best available players on the market, regardless of price. Accept that whatever you currently have – which isn’t worth much – won’t last, and do whatever you can to make a civic memory right now.
It’s that or the Jays can get started on their “definitely next year” speech a few months early.