Patience, Blue Jays fans, the hits will come

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This article was published 05/05/2022 (1586 days ago), so information in it may no longer be current.

CLEVELAND, OHIO—The Blue Jays played outside for the first time in a couple of weeks, and the weather was exactly what you’d expect from an early-season night game in Northeastern Ohio.

It was chilly, it was windy and it rained.

You could blame the ugliness of the evening, and maybe a 4 a.m. arrival Thursday morning, for the Jays’ sluggish start in a 6-5 loss against the Cleveland Guardians — if it wasn’t so similar to what they’ve been doing for weeks. The team that was expected to be an offensive powerhouse has gotten off to a rough start in the scoring department.

The Jays scored 20 runs in their first three games, but only 18 over the next six. These last couple of weeks have seemed to be a repeat of last August, when it felt like pretty much every game was 2-1 or 3-2. It’s not just that half the Jays games have been decided by one run; it’s that seven of those one-run games have been 3-2, 2-1 or 1-0.

Thursday’s game seemed to be headed in a similar direction, with the Jays down 3-2 going into the bottom of the fifth.

They had gotten off to a quick start: a Bo Bichette single and a Vladimir Guerrero Jr. homer in the first inning. But that was it for a while. Cleveland starter Aaron Civale retired 11 of the next 12 hitters before Santiago Espinal led off the fifth with a double, and that’s when the Jays’ Achilles heel showed up.

No big-league team has been worse at hitting with runners in scoring position this season than the Jays. Going into Thursday’s action, they were last in the majors with a .172 batting average and a .541 on-base-plus-slugging percentage with runners at second or third or both.

Espinal was left stranded when Alejandro Kirk lined out, Bradley Zimmer struck out, and Raimel Tapia flew out.

The Jays managed just one hit in 10 at-bats with runners in scoring position Thursday, though it was a pretty big one. Zack Collins smacked a two-out double deep into the right-field corner in the sixth to score Bichette and Guerrero, cutting the Guardians’ lead to 6-4.

“It’s definitely good to get back there and score a couple of runs with two outs,” Collins said. “Gets the team back into (the game) … I was pretty excited.”

The excitement didn’t last long. The Jays, down a run in the seventh, got a runner to second base again with nobody out but Tapia grounded out, Bichette popped up and, after Guerrero was walked, Lourdes Gurriel Jr. grounded out. The .172 average went down to .168.

Collins isn’t worried, and he says his teammates aren’t, either.

“I honestly don’t think anybody is thinking about (being last in the league with runners in scoring position),” Collins said. “I think everyone’s just trying to come through big in every situation. It’s baseball, that’s how it’s gonna roll.”

“I think everybody’s showing up every day, still positive,” pitcher Alek Manoah added. “Everyone understands their abilities. I think the game is just testing us right now. We know we’re really good. We’re having to grind out some close games and that’s what good teams have to do.”

There’s no question it can be tough to watch, even though the Jays are on pace for 96 wins. But it’s just a big ebb in a season of ebbs and flows. Like last August was.

It may well have faded into memory with the excitement of September, but last year the Jays played 10 straight games in late August over which they scored a total of 27 runs. There were four low-scoring one-run games and two more that were decided in extra innings by more than one run.

Over that 10-game span, the Jays hit .132 with runners in scoring position. That includes a game in which they went 1-for-17. On a team that had Marcus Semien and a healthy Teoscar Hernandez, as well as Randal Grichuk. In the last of those games, they went 0-for-10, though they beat Detroit 2-1.

So what happened next? Thirteen wins in their next 15 games, averaging more than eight runs a game

Manoah knows it’s only a matter of time. “They know what they’re capable of doing. We’ve kind of seen little sprouts of it and, once they put it all together, it’s just going to break out and there’s going to be no looking back after that.”

THREE THINGS

Three things you need to know about the Blue Jays’ 6-5 loss in Cleveland on Thursday:

Berríos not at his best

Starter Jose Berríos struggled through his shortest outing since getting knocked out in the first inning on opening day, giving up a season-high six runs over 4 2/3 innings.

He allowed Steven Kwan’s first major-league home run in the third and hit the showers after the Guardians went double-walk-lineout-single-single against him in the fifth.

At one point in that fifth inning, pitching coach Pete Walker came out to talk to Berríos and brought trainer Jose Ministral with him, wondering if something was wrong. Ministral quickly went back to the dugout, though, and the conversation turned strategic.

It was the first time in Berríos’s 16 career starts against Cleveland that he failed to strike out a single hitter.

Good swings rewarded

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Alejandro Kirk came into the game hitting .254 with only one extra-base hit, but started the night with two terrific at bats.

He blasted a fly ball to the warning track in deep right-centre his first time up, a ball run down by Guardians centre-fielder Myles Straw. His second time up, Kirk ripped a line drive toward the same gap, but it was snatched out of the air by second baseman Andres Gimenez. He was not to be denied in his third at-bat, launching his first home run of the season deep into the Cleveland night.

Avoiding Guerrero

Vladimir Guerrero Jr. homered in the first inning to give the Jays their only lead of the night, and when he came up in the seventh with the tying run on third and two out, the Guardians held a conference on the mound to talk over what to do with him. They didn’t intentionally walk the young slugger, but pitcher Nick Sandlin didn’t throw a pitch anywhere near him, either. Guerrero took the free pass and Lourdes Gurriel Jr. followed with a ground ball to short to end the inning and the Jays’ last threat of the night.

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