Blue Jays takeaways: Miracle rally to stun Orioles caps a microcosm of the season

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This article was published 19/06/2021 (1611 days ago), so information in it may no longer be current.

The view from Deep Left Field on Saturday’s 10-7 Blue Jays win in Baltimore:

There is an ebb and flow to a 162-game baseball season, and going into the ninth inning on Saturday, it appeared as though the Blue Jays were ebbing it up about as much as they possibly could.

They were three outs away from losing a sixth straight game and second in a row to the lowly Baltimore Orioles, having allowed the worst team in the league to hit six home runs in taking a 7-4 lead.

But then the ninth inning happened, and that ebb turned into quite the flow. A flood, even, as the never-say-die Jays offence, down to its final out, erupted for six runs and quite literally snatched victory from the jaws of defeat.

It was about time, because boy has this team been snatching defeat from the jaws of victory lately.

An important component of the Jays moving from ebb to flow was the personification of flow himself, Bo Bichette, who drove in the game-tying runs with a little duck snort just out of the reach of a diving right-fielder Anthony Santander.

Bichette came to the plate following a two-out bases-loaded walk drawn by Marcus Semien and fouled off seven consecutive pitches before finally dropping a little doink just inside the foul line. A team that is built to hit the ball very hard and very far got its biggest hit of the week on a ball that came off the bat at just 69.4 miles per hour.

Of course, Vladimir Guerrero Jr. and Randal Grichuk followed with 107-m.p.h. rocket doubles to open up a three-run lead, so it wasn’t all dinks and dunks.

The game itself was a microcosm of a season. Things looked great early, as Semien and Guerrero homered in the top of the first, but by the end of the fourth inning, with the Orioles up by three runs, the Twitterati was falling all over itself to be the first to declare the season over, fire manager Charlie Montoyo and wonder what the Jays would get in trade for Semien, Robbie Ray and even Guerrero at the July 30 trade deadline.

After all, losing two in a row to Baltimore means this Jays team is truly a bottom-feeder, no? Well, no, and not just because they came back to win.

There’s an old saying in sports — and it’s gotten to be so old because it’s completely true — that a team is never as good as it looks when it’s going well, and never as bad as it looks when it’s going poorly.

The Jays had a terrible month, going 10-18 from May 19 to June 18. The bullpen blew six saves over that span and, more tellingly, an even dozen of those losses came in games in which the Jays were leading or tied in the seventh inning or later. That’s an astonishing number for a single month, and it gives legitimate fuel to the fire of the doomsayers.

It’s almost as astonishing that a team that has had such an ugly month, losing so many winnable — or at the very least coin-flip — games is still only one game under .500 after all that.

Saturday’s game in Baltimore was only the third that the Jays have won when trailing or tied in the seventh inning or later since May 19, the arbitrary date I chose to reflect just how bad a month it has been.

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Also, unlike say basketball and football, good baseball teams lose to bad ones all the time. No fan of a certain age will ever forget the expansion Jays’ 19-3 win over the eventual World Series champion New York Yankees in 1977. The 1992 Jays actually had a losing record against last-place Boston. The 1993 team hit a 2-12 rut in the middle of the season.

A second straight loss to Baltimore might have felt like it was time to pull the plug on this season, but it wouldn’t have been. Luckily, the ninth-inning rally made it moot.

Some bullpen help would still be nice, though.

Tune into Mike Wilner’s weekly Blue Jays podcast, Deep Left Field, wherever you get your podcasts.

Mike Wilner is a Toronto-based baseball columnist for the Star. Follow him on Twitter: @wilnerness