MILWAUKEE – The main event at American Family Field on Monday night featured the Toronto Blue Jays taking on the Milwaukee Brewers with a chance to reach .500 for the first time since April 29. A quirky side story developed in the fourth inning, when Vladimir Guerrero Jr. fouled off a Colin Rea sweeper and launched his bat well over the visitors’ dugout, where the knob became entangled in the stadium’s protective netting.
After several attempts to dislodge the bat with a makeshift rod, Chris Bassitt liberated the lumber in the top of the sixth inning, a second oddity in as many days after Yusei Kikuchi’s bizarre but endearing and ultimately harmless collision with Tyler Soderstrom on Sunday.
As for the main event, well, that had a less happy ending for the Blue Jays, who managed just four hits in a 3-1 loss to the National League Central leaders.
“Sucks that (Guerrero’s bat) was the most entertaining part of the game,” quipped manager John Schneider.
Before the game, catching coach Luis Hurtado knocked two of Alejandro Kirk’s bats together to wake them up at the catcher’s request and he responded with his second homer of the season, and first since April 28. But that was all the Blue Jays managed while Jose Berrios surrendered three runs, two of them on solo shots by Jackson Chourio in the third and Willy Adames in the fourth on slurves that broke right into the middle of the plate.
If they hope to return home with their record level, the Blue Jays (32-34) will now need to take the final two games of this set against the Brewers (39-27).
“I know things haven’t been easy for us, but we know it’s never going to be easy,” said Berrios, who relied more on his changeup with his slurve not there and grinded his way through 5.2 innings. “We need to keep trying, keep competing all together like a team. I’ve been seeing that lately. Tonight we lost, but tomorrow is another day, we’re going to come and keep doing our thing.”
Two weeks ago, when the Blue Jays dropped a 14-11 heartbreaker to the Detroit Tigers and fell a season-high six games below .500, it was hard to envision them being within sight of level ground this soon.
But a 9-4 stretch through a schedule soft spot pulled their season back from the brink and reopened a number of possibilities for them ahead of the July 30 trade deadline, probabilities be damned.
Still, the coming five weeks before the all-star break, which includes six games apiece against Cleveland and Boston, four with the Yankees and four with the Astros before a West Coast swing to Seattle, San Francisco and Arizona, will all but certainly define what route the front office takes.
Either way, how the team performs makes the decision.
“I wouldn’t say we’re out of the hole, but I think we know this is the kind of baseball that we’re capable of playing,” said George Springer. “And we can still be better, we can still do things better.”
The Blue Jays feel they began turning the corner when they shifted some of their approach to game-planning and at the plate before a series against the Minnesota Twins on May 10, making incremental gains that took a while to show up on the field.
While the quality of their at-bats is certainly far better than during an ice-cold April, it hasn’t always translated into results. Colin Rea did a better job than most of keeping them at bay, allowing only four hard-hit balls, the Kirk homer among them, over seven innings, but it’s their ability to stick with and execute an approach that could still get steadier.
“Our plan going in, was to stay on the fastball,” said Schneider. “He’s got cutter, sweeper, splitter but you’ve got to be on time with the heater first and foremost and try to make adjustments. He was pitching to the short end of the bat, really. So give credit to him, he’s having a good season.”
For the Blue Jays to have a good season, reaching and surpassing .500 needs to be the starting point, not the end goal, of course, but they didn’t bury themselves in a single night and they can’t get above ground in one night, either.
At the same time, moving the ledger closer to even “feels a lot better, albeit not where we want to be and not where we’re hoping to go,” said Schneider. “You say two weeks ago you’re confident in the things that you’re doing to get better, and then you slowly start to see that happen on the field, so there’s good progress being made. …
“I like where we have landed, right now, in relation to where we were two weeks ago, in terms of how we’re preparing, how we’re going about our games. Our starting pitching has been phenomenal the last turn through. And baseball is funny, it goes like this and you can feel as good or bad as you want to based on your record. But it feels good to gain a little bit of momentum.”
They’ll need to maintain it for what’s shaping up as an interesting deadline.
Only 11 of the 30 teams in the majors are currently .500 or better, leaving a lot of mid-clubs vying for the three wild cards. As bad as things have felt at times this season for the Blue Jays, they’re only three games back of the Twins for the American League’s third wild-card spot, underlining how hard it is to really fall out of the race in a three-wild-card world.
That also creates the potential for a market with relatively few sellers, which is why other teams have been sniffing around the Blue Jays since the spring, trying to assess in which camp they’re most likely to land.
Should things do go sideways again, they’ll certainly pivot and sell off their expiring assets for a regroup in 2025, but that’s not Plan A and a decision on that won’t come for a while yet. Their play the last two weeks opened the floor to all options. Their play the next five is likely to dictate what choice they make, although they could also wait right until July 30 if they remain on the fence.
If there’s time available, might as well use it.
“It’s easy to look at our division and see New York and Baltimore and they’re whatever they are and be like, oh, well, you don’t have a chance,” said Springer. “The reality is we do have a chance and we’re still in a good spot, even though it’s no secret, we haven’t played the way we’re capable of, especially early. We’re playing much better now, honestly, not really trying to worry about the standings, but understanding we have 90-something games left that we need to go out there every single day and prepare as if it’s our last one. And if we don’t get the job done, it’s about how fast do you flush it and move on to tomorrow.”
The exact task for the Blue Jays after their opener in Milwaukee.