Following his team's loss to the Boston Red Sox on Wednesday, Toronto Blue Jays manager John Schneider engaged in a bit of cope. "It feels like the sky is falling right now, and it’s fucking not," said an animated Schneider. "We’ve got 90 wins, we’re in the playoffs and if the season ended today, we’re winning the AL East." It's true; both of these things are confirmed by a glance at the standings. Schneider felt the need to assert these facts aloud last night, in the way that a flustered person might pat their pockets in sequence to check for their wallet, phone, and keys, because the vibes of the Blue Jays lately give off the reek of decaying animal matter.
The Blue Jays clinched a playoff spot Sunday, with an 8-5 win over the Kansas City Royals. Though the team held a big raucous champagne orgy that day in the visitor's locker room, already they were giving off a sour waft. They'd lost four in a row, by the combined score of 28–3, and they'd seen their division lead over the hated New York Yankees drop from five games to two. For a stretch, the Blue Jays had been one of the better stories in baseball, climbing back impressively from a lousy 16–20 start to claim the best record in baseball by late July. Now they are less limping over the finish line than ragdolling, with a division title still there for the salvaging.
There are those who might assert—certainly not your brave and sensible author, who is merely riding the coattails of the arguers' bad faith—that this premature champagne celebration was an alarming indicator of that most dreaded of psychological conditions: the Loser's Mentality. "Today, we pass to the postseason," said Vladimir Guerrero Jr., at that moment literally soaked in beer. "But the job is not finished. We want to win the division." The Blue Jays talked about having a second clubhouse spray-party for an eventual division crown, but that's a little bit like thinking you definitely won't spoil your appetite for dinner by eating this half-sandwich at 5 p.m. After the age of 4, you're supposed to remember that the half-sandwich maneuver is definitionally about suppressing your appetite, and that it will work! Baseball grouches everywhere will note that a team that's been there before will generally tend to hold off on partying for as long as there is a bigger prize still up for grabs. The Blue Jays, relatedly, have won their division just once since 1993, and not at all since 2015. Josh Donaldson was that team's best player; R.A. Dickey started 33 games.
Since that party, Toronto has dropped consecutive games, by the combined score of 11–2. Worst of all, those damned Yankees continue to win games, and clinched their own playoff berth with a walk-off hit on Tuesday. They too went champagne mode, but more importantly, they then went out Wednesday and kicked the dicks off the Chicago White Sox, bringing their record to 90–68, dead even with the Blue Jays. The Yankees have won seven of eight, and their only remaining games are against the Pale Hose and the leprotic Baltimore Orioles. At this moment, you would feel safe betting on them to win the AL East. This outcome would be deeply embarrassing for the Blue Jays, if not all of Canada.
Random events have started to stack up against the Blue Jays, although not at the rate of their own failures. To their detriment, they seem to be dwelling on the parts of this they cannot control. In Sunday's game, Dalton Varsho was denied credit by the umpires for a sick diving catch in the outfield that should've turned into a rare 8–3 double play. The misfortune led to Schneider replacing his pitcher, the inning spun away from the Blue Jays, and the Royals plated a couple of infuriating runs. Toronto won the game, but this brush with injustice was on their minds their next time out, against Boston. In that game, George Springer was on the wrong side of consecutive controversial calls, within the span of two pitches. First, a ball he ripped up the third-base line with the bags full was ruled foul despite seeming to cross directly over the base. Next, infamously scattershot home-plate umpire Doug Eddings rang up Springer on a Lucas Giolito slider that appeared to miss the strike zone by a solid three or four inches. Springer lost his mind, and cameras caught him in the dugout seemingly referencing a league-level conspiracy to vault the Yankees to the top of the standings.
In Wednesday's game, Guerrero also became fixated on a borderline call, when umpire Gabe Morales rang him up on an inside fastball that shaved the edge of the zone. Guerrero stood and gestured until Morales eventually gave him the heave-ho; Schneider roared out onto the grass and gave Morales an earful, stopping short of earning his own ejection. Minutes later, Blue Jays hitting coach David Popkins was also tossed for continuing to gripe at Morales from the dugout. Schneider should consider preemptively ejecting Popkins from their game Thursday night: Wednesday's loss marked the sixth time in eight days that the Blue Jays have been held to one or zero runs.
Here again, rotten luck played a hand: Toronto's last shot at a rally in this game died very suddenly, with two outs in the ninth, when catcher Alejandro Kirk roped a liner to right field and was immediately thrown out at first by Red Sox outfielder Wilyer Abreu, an extraordinarily rare 9–3 putout:
Kirk, naturally frustrated, spent several moments in the dugout smashing the bejeezus out of his helmet. The Blue Jays have a hunted, haunted look about them. They are playing as poorly as they have all year, there are just four games left in the regular season, and as is the case with several other bombing would-be contenders, they do not have the luxury of much breathing room.
Hence, Schneider's emphatic message Wednesday night: "I don’t want to feed into the narrative that the umpires are screwing us, because they’re not," he insisted. "We’re not scoring enough runs.” Schneider is desperate to get his guys focused on playing baseball, rather than anticipating misfortune. Getting this lesson to root among the team's regulars might be a challenge, so long as their most experienced position player is alleging conspiracy, and while their best and highest-paid player is earning the gate on a perfectly ho-hum called strike. Still, to his credit, Schneider is digging in. "I want them to come out and play confident, play fast, play loose," he said yesterday. "When we do that, we’re really good. I don’t want them to get caught up in the last six days being tough, because this season has been really, really good."
The Blue Jays have not advanced beyond the wild card since 2016. It's easy to say that winning the division is still the goal when you are bathing in the joy and glory of a playoff berth, just as it's easy to say that making the playoffs is good enough when the division is entirely out of reach. The Blue Jays had the division in their grasp, and it's still there for the grabbing, if they can screw their heads back on pretty much immediately. For the moment, they appear to have picked a hell of a time to start thinking like big old losers.
