Don't go breakin' my heart
Well that was eight hours of our lives we’ll never get back. I guess we should talk about it.
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This is a tweet that I had lined up to use before I decided that I really didn’t want to write about Thursday’s painful Blue Jays loss to the Red Sox. I think ought to resonate even more after Friday’s disaster against the Rays.
On Thursday the Jays took a 7-5 lead into the top of the seventh, and with Boston's number 2-3-4 hitters coming up, chose to go to one of their best healthy relievers, Tyler Chatwood. He pitched a clean inning, and in the next frame Boston were sending their number 5-6-7 hitters, Rafael Devers, Christian Vázquez, and Hunter Renfroe, to the plate. The Jays elected to use their other best healthy reliever, Jordan Romano, to face that trio. This left the ninth inning for the freshly healthy Rafael Dolis. I'm not sure if there was something about the matchups with those hitters that made using Dolis there particularly unappealing, or if it was simply the fact that he had faced all three just two days prior, but the decision proved fateful. Chatwood mowed down the 5-6-7 hitters, Dolis was setup to face the 8-9-1 guys, but he couldn't get the job done. A three-run Red Sox inning ended up being the difference in the ballgame.
A lot of fans were upset about manager Charlie Montoyo’s deployment of his relievers. A lot, it seemed, would have preferred it if the bruised and battered Blue Jays had tempted fate and pushed Romano and Chatwood beyond just single frames.
A lot, it also seemed, failed to note that Dolis happened to have some not great luck. He got beat on two halfway decent pitches to bad hitters.
The first of these was a 95 mph sinker to Bobby Dalbec that ran in on him to catch the inside corner of the plate, but which he smacked down the first base line too hard for a sprawling Vladimir Guerrero Jr. to handle, resulting in an infield single.
The second was an 0-2 slider to Michael Chavis that beautifully caught the bottom of the zone, but that Chavis managed to reach out and poke over the second baseman’s head.
It wasn’t all good from Dolis, of course. The hanging 0-1 slider to J.D. Martinez after he’d just thrown him the exact same pitch (albeit several inches lower)? Pretty brutal!
Still, Dolis has been a dependable reliever for the Jays. Yes, his outings can be adventurous, and yes, this was just his second appearance since a stint on the IL. But there was nothing wrong with this move, it just happened to not work out.
Friday's loss, however, was a bit of a different story. At the best of times, Montoyo’s infatuation with asking his hitters to bunt is one of those “well, you take the good with the bad” aspects of his current arrangement with the Jays. But Friday was not the best of times. And when a bunt attempt is so assured that the opponents’ corner infielders are practically able to touch the dirt of the batter’s box, and when there are two goddamn strikes and you’re still asking an clearly ineffective bunter to lay one down with Reese McGuire in the on-deck circle, we are a long way from the best of times.
I’ll turn here again to Brendon for some words of wisdom:
Yep. Exactly. It was stupid. Bunting, in general, is stupid. Asking modern players to bunt is stupid. Expecting Santiago Espinal, who will need to out-hit Joe Panik (and eventually Cavan Biggio) if he’s ever going to earn a full-time roster spot as the Blue Jays’ utility player, to use hit limited amount of practice time to work on bunting is stupid. Continuing to call for the bunt in that specific situation, with Buck and Pat in the broadcast booth tearing their beautiful hair out over it, was stupid. Bunting with two strikes is always stupid.
Intentionally walking two guys who ended up coming around on a 12th inning grand slam was not Montoyo’s brightest move either, but I was a little less bothered by it because, 1) the Jays were into the dregs of their bullpen anyway, and 2) by that point I’d flipped to hockey, figuring that there was little chance anything good could happen after the Jays blew two shots to walk it off with the potential winning run gifted to them on second base.
Joel Payamps did a great job in both the 10th and the 11th, and he deserved better from his teammates. And, yes, his manager too. But again, let’s not lay this entirely at Charlie’s feet. Ranting about fireable offences and calling the manager a bloody useless moron is fair enough, I think, when you’ve just wasted four goddamn hours of your life watching Marcus Semien’s potentially glorious cycle melt away like that Nazi’s face in Raiders of the Lost Ark into a heartbreaking loss to the fucking Rays. But hopefully in the light of day we can all have some perspective.
I mean, yes, there’s a difference between something bad happening because a pitcher missed his spot or a hitter missed his pitch and a manager choosing to set the team up for failure. But let’s think a little about how we got to where we did. Anthony Kay was once again horribly inefficient, needing 91 pitches to get through four innings. Montoyo theoretically could have gone to Trent Thornton at that point, except that he’d been needed for 2 1/3 innings two nights earlier to clean up Ross Stripling’s mess. Instead, Travis Bergen and A.J. Cole were used as the bridge to the seventh inning, and while it would be unfair to say that their coughing up the lead was a predictable outcome, it, uh, wasn’t exactly not predictable.
Meanwhile, despite the Jays’ hitters getting to the Rays' excellent starter, Tyler Glasnow, for nine hits and five earned runs over just 4 2/3 innings, the offence dried up the moment the bullpen got involved. Between Rowdy Tellez's lead-off infield single in the sixth (on which Rays second baseman Brandon Lowe couldn't get the ball out of his glove cleanly, and which required a replay review to uphold) and Vladimir Guerrero Jr.'s cool-but-ultimately-pointless 12th inning home run, the Jays were held hitless by Tampa’s bullpen. Even with the manager dumbly giving away one out in the 11th, there were plenty of opportunities to execute. The Blue Jays simply didn’t.
Of course, overall, in both games, you can’t say the Jays’ hitters didn’t do their jobs. They scored seven runs in each! Fourteen runs over two games and zero wins is a tough feat to pull off. And while these two games — three if you add Wednesday’s 8-3 loss — are more an especially ugly blip than reflective of the quality of pitchers on the team’s roster, clearly cracks in the façade are beginning to show.
This, I think, is why so much of Jays fans’ energy over the last month has been taken up by working ourselves into a lather over prospects. Sure, Alek Manoah and Nate Pearson — and, to a lesser extent, Thomas Hatch — are exciting young pitchers on the verge of being big leaguers. But they’re also necessary. Even if they haven’t necessarily been, uh, necessary yet.
The Jays players and trainers and coaches have done a remarkable job thus far in holding the pitching staff together with tape, but clearly the grind of the season is wearing on them. It’s wearing on all of us. It’s turning mid-May games into contests worthy of World Series-level scrutiny because the lack of reliably effective options is making the team’s margin for error unbelievably thin. Romano and Chatwood can’t pitch all the innings. You need to score runs before Beasley has to come into the game. Stripling is deservedly on the thinnest of ice. And yet you want to be careful not to send Manoah stumbling down the same path Pearson has been on for the last year. Cole, and Bergen, and Mayza are guys you’d be fine seeing out there with a comfortable lead, taking the pressure off some of the better relievers up the chain, but maybe not as the first line of defence in a tight game after your starter can’t take the ball in the fifth.
The good news is that some measure of help is on the way. The bad news is that the Jays may choose — and may be right to choose — a couple more weeks of short-term pain for the long-term gain of getting Manoah some valuable development time in the minors and Pearson built back up just a little bit more. (Hatch can’t be activated until his time on the 60-day IL is up in early June). They have some tough choices to make in that regard. It’s important to do right by those youngsters, just as it’s important not to slip back from the position they’re in based on the incredible work their big league players have done to have reached this point in the season, despite all kinds of challenges, with a 23-20 record.
That kind of stuff is vastly more important than whether or not the manager made a terrible decision to dumbly give away an out, infuriating as that is. It’s also more important than the fact that he’ll probably do it again at some point, too. And that’s a good thing! Having Manoah on his way, whether it’s Monday or a little farther off in the future, is amazing. Springer, Pearson, Hatch, Castro, Borucki — they’re all close. (And man, have we ever seen how important Borucki is over this last week he’s been out, eh?)
Granted, things may not get better right away. Yes, Robbie Ray and Hyun Jin Ryu will start the next two games for the Jays, and Manoah may start on Monday, but Romano and Chatwood have pitched on back-to-back days so won’t be available to close things out here on Saturday. The bullpen is thin. There will potentially be roster moves between the time I’m writing this and when the game starts. Today may not be the day where it all turns around. But it doesn’t have to be. The Jays will get out of Dunedin. They’ll have to go to New York and Cleveland next, but they’ll start getting some bodies back. They’ll get to Buffalo. Their schedule will ease up a bit. Toronto will start to look possible. Manoah and Pearson will start to make us forget about Stripling and Kay and Zeuch and Roark and whoever else they’ve given the ball to so far.
That we still have some potentially rocky waters get through underscores why watching the team piss away winnable games like the last two has been so especially agonizing and infuriating. It’s hard to keep thinking positively when the great start to the season is in danger of being undone. And even though we all know he’s in a tough spot the manager definitely doesn’t make it easy sometimes. I’m very forgiving when it comes to Charlie, but I completely understand why many others aren’t. Still, things are already looking up and the team has hardly even been down. I’m happy to make that my takeaway from these two horrible disasters and simply leave it at that.
Top image via Baseball Savant; screengrabs via MLB.com/Sportsnet
Observations & comments after Saturday game:
..Randy Arozaena is the second coming of Rickey Henderson. That is all.
..The Jays have lost the first two of this series maybe disappointing, because I thought we were similar level teams, but there are positives
..Jays are better, clearly, relative to performance last year against the Rays. Painful two losses but Jays wouldn't be consistently playing this close to them per last year.
..The Rays are a really good team. They are laters of depth & interchangeable players; boy does it work.
Those were two tough games to watch. And it's only May! Did anyone watch the Tampa broadcast? They were convinced that something fishy was going on with the way the Jays hitters were handling Glasnow. They worked themselves up into a tizzy about how unhittable pitches were being fouled off or left alone....they didn't come and say we were cheating, but it was fairly implied.