Baltimore Orioles left fielder Austin Hays (21) is tagged out at home plate by Toronto Blue Jays catcher Alejandro Kirk (30) during the second inning at the Rogers Centre.Nick Turchiaro/Reuters
Though fans of the St. Louis Cardinals could be forgiven an interested glance north of the border Thursday, with a quartet of erstwhile Redbirds settling into new nests following Monday’s trade deadline, for the trio now calling Toronto home, there is little time to dally.
Not that anyone is suggesting it’s on new shortstop Paul DeJong or the bullpen pair of Jordan Hicks and Génesis Cabrera to carry the Blue Jays into the playoffs.
Far from it. That onus firmly rests with the rest of the roster, the nucleus of which carried Toronto into a home wild-card playoff series against the Seattle Mariners last year.
But after the Baltimore Orioles wrapped up another series win against the Blue Jays with a 6-1 rout Thursday afternoon – improving to 8-2 against Toronto this season – the task for manager John Schneider got a little more precarious. The loss dropped Toronto 7 1/2 games back of the division-leading Orioles, who helped pitcher Jack Flaherty to a debut win after he came over from the Cardinals on Monday.
The right-hander pitched six innings of one-run ball and held the Jays to four hits to pick up his second win against them this season. Kevin Gausman, 8-6, took the loss.
“We’ve seen Flaherty and [he had] a little bit of a different mix than what we saw in St. Louis,” Schneider said afterward. “Not much, but I think in terms of in-game stuff, you just adjust to the game situations, whether it’s a runner at third or runner at second, whatever it is, and you go into the game with the approach and you got to execute it.”
The immediate problem facing the Blue Jays is replacing Bo Bichette’s offence. The all-star shortstop is in the midst of a career year, with his American League-leading 144 hits tying John Olerud for the franchise record for the most before August.
But after singling in his first two at-bats on Monday, Bichette left the game and was subsequently placed on the 10-day injured list with patellar tendinitis in his right knee.
In the three games since, the Blue Jays have mustered just 13 hits, including five on Thursday.
“Tough loss obviously, we’re talking about a really, really good player,” Schneider said of Bichette. “You need other guys to step up in big moments in big spots. And we have those guys here.”
While the Blue Jays have been putting bat on ball for most of this season – their 968 hits ranked fifth most in the major leagues before Thursday’s game – subtracting Bichette’s record-tying contributions leaves an undesirable hole at a crucial juncture of the season.
Just three other Blue Jays have mustered more than 100 hits this season, and one of them, George Springer, only just broke out of a career-long 0-for-35 stretch on Wednesday, which tied Ed Sprague and Danny Jansen for the longest such streak in team history. He then went 0-for-3 with a walk on Thursday.
After hitting 27 home runs and batting .235 with the Arizona Diamondbacks last season, off-season acquisition Daulton Varsho is struggling at the plate in Toronto, with 12 homers and a .211 average.
And despite winning the home run derby at last month’s all-star game, Vladimir Guerrero Jr. is a long way from replicating his form of 2021, when he won the American League’s Hank Aaron Award, given to the best hitter, with a .311 batting average, 48 home runs and 111 runs batted in. Although he currently has 109 hits, good for third on the Jays, Guerrero is batting .265, with just 17 home runs and 66 RBIs.
To make matters worse, there is little respite for the Blue Jays. After getting mowed down by the Orioles, Toronto will continue to run the gauntlet that is the AL East with a three-game series beginning Friday in Boston, which sits just two games back of Toronto in the race for the final AL wild card.
Toronto is 8-23 against the other four members of what is routinely considered the toughest division in baseball, while going 52-27 against the other five divisions in Major League Baseball.
Despite the high stakes in this series, Schneider maintains confidence in his team.
“You have to trust who you are as a team, which we do, and you have to just go try to execute a plan no matter who you’re playing against,” he said. “I know how it looks in terms of the games that we have played against the AL East or whatever it is, and you got to just put that behind you and continue to move on.”
With 21 games to play against AL East rivals this year, Toronto has runway for improvement. Though it has no chance to rival its 43-33 (.566) mark from last year – MLB reduced the number of intra-division games to 52 from 76 as part of its scheduling tweak – it can at least raise its winning percentage.
As for why Toronto struggles against its divisional rivals, particularly its 2-15 record against the Red Sox and Orioles, the players are at a loss to explain it.
“If I had an answer for you, we probably wouldn’t be in this situation,” Gausman said. “They definitely have some young guys, both teams have a good amount of young guys that I think are okay with really diving into [a batting] approach and listening to a hitting coach and not trying to do too much and maybe that’s why, I don’t know.”