CHICAGO — In the aftermath of Sunday’s choose-your-own-adjective-for-awful loss to the Detroit Tigers, Toronto Blue Jays manager John Schneider made a point of addressing his players. It’s not unusual for him to offer up a few post-game thoughts, but after watching the group fight back from 5-0 and 8-3 deficits to take a late lead in an eventual 14-11 loss, he thought it was important to recognize the effort.
Now, everyone understands that this is a time for actual victories, not moral ones. But the Blue Jays need to take anything they can build upon from the latter to help produce more of the former and rescue a season careening toward some degree of pivot.
“Ninety-nine times out of 100, that game (Sunday) is probably a turning point,” Schneider said Monday before a 5-1 victory over the Chicago White Sox. “It’s bad timing to have that kind of game. The positives you take out of it are the way that we battled back, that’s a really good step in the right direction from our offence, and we didn’t get it done the last six outs. They understand that’s a tough loss, a really tough one, and a tough series overall and it’s been a season where we’re not where we expected to be. For the fan base and for everyone that’s not here, as cliche as it sounds, there’s a reason we play this many games, there’s a reason you play 162. …
“There are different ways you can go about it. You can say, this is May. Or you can say, OK, our season’s over, you know what I mean? The guys aren’t doing that. I’m not doing that. And it takes a good week or so to get rolling. That’s where the mental part of it comes in. We do this every single day. Some days are harder to turn the page — today obviously being one of them. You definitely mentioned that before the game to the guys. That’s the balancing act, for sure. But you’ve got to really put all your energy into today.”
The Blue Jays did that in a just-produced-enough Memorial Day matinee against the American League’s worst team before 14,993 at Guaranteed Rate Field.
George Springer opened the scoring in the second when he followed a two-out Daulton Varsho walk by ambushing a first-pitch fastball from Nick Nastrini and sending it over the wall in left, his first homer in 90 plate appearances dating back to April 24. While Chris Bassitt threw five-shutout innings, Bo Bichette’s solo shot extended the lead in the fourth and after the bullpen survived a nervous one-run eighth, Davis Schneider added a two-run homer in the ninth that provided some breathing room.
The win ended a three-game losing streak and improved them to 4-4 through a 13-game stretch that’s gone from soft-spot opportunity to just-avoid drowning. For context, their playoff odds, which peaked at 57.9 per cent April 22, stood at a season-low 14.6 per cent going into Monday’s play, per FanGraphs.
Where that math goes in the coming weeks will play a key role in determining next steps for the 24-29 club — selling off expiring assets or small adds to bolster a post-deadline — while the players will simply try to plough through whatever the probabilities suggest.
“You ignore and override. You go,” Schneider said. “Math is not always certain, whether it’s a matchup or whether it’s how many games you have left in a season. So you have to ignore everything and focus on what you’re doing each and every day. And at this point, yeah, there needs to be some other things rather than us just going out and doing our job for us to get to where we want to get to and to go our way. But to really start putting the numbers together at this point, for one, I don’t think players dive that deep into it. They worry about what they’re doing each and every day. You’ve got to take today for what it is and move on to tomorrow.”
Easier said than done, especially after the weekend’s misery in Detroit compounded by Sunday’s loss, added to the club’s recent stop-and-start frustration.
“It’s really easy to let those thoughts creep into your mind,” said Kevin Gausman, who starts Tuesday against Mike Clevinger. “But being the competitor that I am and that a lot of these guys in this clubhouse are, we’re not going to give in, we’re not going to give up. We have too many guys that have gone through so many things in their careers that have bounced back. None of us are going to give in. We want to win with this team. We want to win with these guys. We know we have the makeup to do it. We’ve just got to put it all together. And yeah, it’s frustrating that we haven’t done that, but there’s nothing else we can do but keep coming to the ballpark every day with the mindset that we can turn it around and we’re going to, that we have what we need to do it. That’s where we’re at.”