The Jays no longer control their playoff destiny, and now the Mariners are a problem

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This article was published 29/09/2021 (1495 days ago), so information in it may no longer be current.

Having lost the biggest game of the season on Tuesday night, the Blue Jays move on to the biggest game of the season Wednesday night, continuing their pivotal series with the visiting New York Yankees.

The Jays laid an egg in their series opener, a rare game this season in which they went down without much of a fight.

Corey Dickerson hit an RBI double with two out in the bottom of the fourth inning to give the Jays an all-too-brief 2-1 lead, and that was that. They didn’t get another hit the rest of the night against four Yankees relievers while the Bronx Bombers did their thing, taking the lead against Hyun-Jin Ryu with two runs in the fifth and putting it away in the seventh on another Giancarlo Stanton bomb.

Stanton, the reigning American League player of the week, homered in every game of the Yankees’ weekend sweep of the Boston Red Sox at Fenway Park and he kept the roll going with a mammoth three-run shot to deep left off Trevor Richards, extending the lead to 6-2.

The 2017 National League MVP has 13 RBIs in his last four games, while New York’s opponents have scored just 11 runs over that span.

It was supposed to be a grand homecoming for the Jays, with Rogers Centre’s capacity expanded to 30,000. They nearly packed the place, drawing 28,769, but the crowd was reminiscent of so many in Toronto over the years: excited as the game began, but sitting on their hands for the most part.

Granted, when the home team only gets three hits, it can be hard to find something to cheer about, but there was no lift provided by the crowd Tuesday night.

All is not lost, however, because the woeful Baltimore Orioles did the Jays a huge favour, beating the Red Sox 4-2 with a three-run rally off Chris Sale in the sixth inning at Camden Yards.

What that means is that instead of being one game out of a playoff spot with six games to play, the Jays are one game out of a playoff spot with five games to play.

They’re now three games back of the Yankees, which makes it difficult, but not impossible, to catch the Bronx Bombers. Going down as meekly as they did in the series opener makes it tough to imagine the Jays bouncing back to win the series, but the story of their season has been rebounding from tough losses and long offensive droughts to do what they do best.

After all, even with their current week of poor hitting, the Jays still lead the American League in OPS and home runs, and they’re third in runs scored. And even with Tuesday’s loss, they have the best September record in the league at 18-8. Yes, it was 15-3 at one point, and good thing it was, because they needed every bit of that to get back in the race.

All they need from here is to be one game better than Boston. And to hold off hard-charging Seattle.

While we’ve been watching the Jays close in on the Yankees and Red Sox all month, catching and/or passing both of them at various times, the Mariners have quietly put together an outstanding final month of their own.

The Jays’ 1977 expansion cousins have gone 17-8 in September, a run that included win streaks of four and six games. After Tuesday night’s 4-2 victory over Oakland, the M’s have won nine of 10. When they started this roll, they sat four games behind the Jays, who held the second wild card at the time, and five back of the Red Sox.

Tuesday’s win on the west coast after the Jays and Red Sox had already lost stuck them firmly in between the two AL East rivals — half a game ahead of the Jays and half a game behind the Red Sox.

Seattle miraculously sits at 88-70 with four games to play, despite having scored 50 fewer runs than its opponents this season. The Mariners are not just the only team in the AL playoff race with a negative run differential, they’re the only such team in the league that doesn’t have a losing record.

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They’ve managed the feat with an incredible 33-18 record in one-run games to go with 28 losses by five runs or more.

The Mariners are off Thursday, which is when that half-game will disappear. They will try for their second straight sweep of the A’s Wednesday night, and then finish up the season with three at home to the Angels.

The Jays controlled their playoff destiny when Ryu threw his first pitch on Tuesday night. With the series-opening loss, they no longer do. It’s possible for them to win every game the rest of the way and still not make it.

They need help, but they also have to take care of business themselves, and it starts with the biggest game of the season — the next one.

Mike Wilner is a Toronto-based baseball columnist for the Star and host of the baseball podcast “Deep Left Field.” Follow him on Twitter: @wilnerness