Blue Jays’ confidence hasn’t wavered despite rough stretch against AL East

TORONTO — During the top of the 11th with the Blue Jays and Baltimore Orioles tied 3-3, Sportsnet TV cameras caught starting pitcher Yusei Kikuchi scrambling to find his batting helmet just in case he was needed as a pinch runner. By the bottom of the inning, after the Orioles had scored five, it was Alejandro Kirk, not a noted speedster, who emerged from the dugout to take his place at second base to begin the bottom of the extra inning.

Scoring one run wasn’t going to make a difference because the Blue Jays needed six for a win. They scored zero. It was that sort of week at the Rogers Centre.

With Sunday’s 8-3 loss, the Blue Jays were swept over three games by the Orioles, twice losing in extra innings. It capped off an awful 1-6 stretch against the New York Yankees and Orioles at home and saw them finish with a 4-6 record on the 10-game homestand that kicked off their challenging sequence of 17 games in 17 days against contending ball clubs.

“They’ve handled it extremely well,” manager John Schneider said about his team’s tough stretch. “Just in talking to them after the game in there today, it’s tough. It’s a tough grind, no matter who you’re playing — AL East, NL West — it’s tough. Every team is good and it’s tough to win every night. If they were not competing and battling then you go, ‘OK, what are we doing?’ But I mean the effort is there, (but) the results are not. They’re handling it very well or as well as you can. You hate going through stretches like this, but they’re handling it well.”

As losing six out of seven would suggest, the Blue Jays haven’t been playing their sharpest. Featured in the losses this weekend were base-running blunders, mis-executed pitches, errors in the field and even gaffes from the dugout after Schneider forgot how many mound visits had been made in an inning Saturday, forcing him to take Alek Manoah out in the sixth inning at 85 pitches. But most noticeably during this disappointing stretch, the Blue Jays haven’t been generating the timely hits they need.

Toronto was 3-for-16 with runners in scoring position on Sunday. They loaded the bases multiple times, including with only one out, in the sixth and seventh inning, but only mustered one run on a sacrifice fly from third baseman Matt Chapman, who also hit a solo home run in the second inning. The issue, clearly, hasn’t been getting runners on base. It’s been scoring them. Over the past seven games, they’ve gone 12-for-74 (.162) with runners in scoring position.

Chappy connects 💣 @mattchap6 pic.twitter.com/VY2wdXRAdC

— Toronto Blue Jays (@BlueJays) May 21, 2023

“It’s kind of at the point where it’s enough is enough,” Schneider said. “You’re waiting for it to turn. It will — not I think it will, I know it will, but in order to get there, the guys are just going to have to continue to work their asses off to do it and not just expect that it’s going to happen, You got to work your ass off for it to happen, and totally confident that they will.”

Hitting with runners in scoring position can ebb and flow and there is no snap-your-fingers fix for it. With the team struggling in that situation as a collective, there is a temptation to try to do too much but as Schneider said, “You can’t, you got to reel it in. You have to stay with your approach. You have to understand what pitchers are doing.”

Added Blue Jays designated hitter Brandon Belt: “You can’t chase the hits, man, you got to chase good at-bats, so I think that’s how you get back into it. But we all want this really bad and that’s what leads to going out there and trying to make something happen. You got to let it come to you. We made a lot of hard-hit outs with runners in scoring position, too, and there’s not much you can do about that. You just got to keep battling and keep grinding until you overcome it. And for us, it’s just a matter of time.”

That the offence wasn’t able to come through wasted another marvelous performance from Blue Jays starter Kevin Gausman, who threw a season-high 115 pitches over eight innings, allowing two runs on six hits with two walks and four strikeouts.

“He didn’t really have his best splitter, it wasn’t really carrying the zone as much as it has, but eight innings, what else can you ask for with a pretty taxed bullpen?” Schneider said. “That’s what elite pitchers do. He was absolutely phenomenal today.”

After the back-to-back series losses against their division opponents, the Blue Jays are now 5-12 against the rest of the American League East and fifth in the division with a 25-22 record. Granted, it’s a tightly-packed division full of winning teams, but the Blue Jays also own a division-worst plus-seven run differential. They’ll need to not only be better overall, but especially better against their own division. (With no more tie-breakers, their win-loss record against those teams could matter come October.)

And, they’ll have the chance to close that gap immediately, albeit against the American League-best Tampa Bay Rays, who the Blue Jays trail in the division by 8.5 games. The two teams begin a four-game series at Tropicana Field on Monday. As tough as this last week was for the Blue Jays, they’ll need to flush it quickly, lest it continues to spiral on them.

“We don’t really have the time to hang our head, we’re going to Tampa, playing a really good team and obviously we need to turn it around,” said Gausman. “That’s the good thing about baseball is that you don’t even have time to really think.”

Understandably, it was a quiet clubhouse after the game, while players packed their bags for the upcoming seven-game road trip. But the mood remained confident that this was just one forgettable week in a long season.

“We’re still confident, I think that’s the main thing,” said Belt. “Obviously, it’s a little rough when you’re losing games like this, but confidence hasn’t wavered. We know what we can do. We did it for the first month and a half and just kind of left us for a little bit, but it’s going to come back and we know that.”

(Top photo of Blue Jays relief pitcher Yimi Garcia after being relieved by manager John Schneider in the 11th inning: Dan Hamilton / USA Today)