John Schneider has been hanging around Ross Atkins so much lately he’s starting to sound like the general manager of the Blue Jays.
He’s becoming rather adept at saying something that sounds a lot like nothing.
Which is kind of what this Blue Jays season has become: The club looks like something and plays like nothing.
And sometimes it looks like they’re getting worse.
When manager Schneider was asked before the game Wednesday night if he saw anything positive in the Blue Jays two nights of defeat to the Baltimore Orioles — those crushing, embarrassing 17-3 cumulative defeats — he said with apparent honesty: “There’s a lot of things to be positive about. I don’t know if that’s an unpopular opinion but there’s a lot things to be positive about.”
Like what …
The Blue Jays came back Wednesday night with an impressive walk-off win against the impressive Orioles. There was momentarily something to celebrate.
Momentarily.
As they remain caught in the quicksand that is the American League East, still a good month behind the Orioles and the New York Yankees. Not completely drowning but not swimming either.
And blaming Schneider for a team that can’t hit and can’t pitch is rather easy for fans and online screamers but Casey Stengel and Joe Torre couldn’t get this group out of last place and the only real power you see from Vladimir Guerrero Jr. these days — or any days for that matter — is when Schneider is pitching batting practice to him.
That would be funny but there is nothing seemingly funny about this Blue Jays team. For the third straight night in the nicely renovated Rogers Centre a crowd was rather small for one of the American League’s largest attractions.
Toronto fans are on to this team. And the numbers show it.
These are the kind of games and the kind of series that tend to define teams and so the win last night was meaningful. But only meaningful if they come back this afternoon and do it again against Baltimore.
The Blue Jays began the season with the lost winter belief that their defence in the outfield would make up for that lack of offence throughout their lineup. That was noble thinking on somebody’s part.
What the Jays quickly discovered, as if they didn’t already know this, is you can’t win when you don’t score runs.
So then they changed the approach. They moved players around the lineup and batting order to get more bats in the line-up and relinquish something defensively. That didn’t work.
In between all that, the deepest starting pitching in the league doesn’t look that deep and a somewhat injured, somewhat battered, somewhat inconsistent bullpen has been injured, battered and inconsistent.
And yes, their underlying numbers are OK. (Fans love that one.) That shouldn’t make you feel Schneider’s positivity.
The Jays are 29-32 with a run differential of -44 heading into Game 4 of the Orioles series. Run differential is a baseball number that general managers view rather closely to determine what kind of team they have. When Alex Anthopoulos had a losing team nearing the first half in 2015, the club’s run differential convinced him to trade for David Price and Troy Tulowitzki, among others, at the deadline.
The Jays are 122 runs behind the second place Orioles. They’re 155 runs behind the Yankees. They’re 116 runs behind the Cleveland Guardians.
And this is just past the one-third mark of the season.
“Yeah, it’s part of today’s game,” manager Schneider said of run differential. “Every team is trying to defend and create. It’s the name of the game.”
It’s just not the name of the Blue Jays game.
The book title right now should be: Season Going Nowhere.
Subtitled: So long Ross. It was nice working with you.
And therein lies a problem on its own. If the Jays are going to be sellers come baseball’s trade deadline, who do you want making the trades? Important trades. Trades that could plot out a new future for an old franchise.
Do you want the GM who made this mess in the first place fix what he said he would fix a year ago and didn’t? This is where the absent chairman, Edward Rogers, comes in. Where is he and what he think about this baseball team. Who knows? It would be nice hearing from him on occasion. If only it was on occasion.
Mark Shapiro, the club president, can decorate your house if you need renovations. He’s good at that. He’s the Mike Holmes of baseball;. Atkins can continue to play the part of bobblehead GM. But where are the baseball brains to fix this?
It’s hard to know what kind of manager Schneider is when he a) doesn’t have better players; b) is told what to say some days and when to say it; c) they continue to game plan games before they are played, failing to understand that baseball is a game played by humans not by algorithms.
Hell, even the Jays are computers are having a rough season.
Kevin Kiermaier understands. He looks around the Blue Jays clubhouse some days, and can’t completely explain what’s happened to this team. He believes there is more talent here than has shown itself.
“Playing against these guys for so many years, I never thought people in here could struggle,” said Kiermaier, the former Tampa outfielder in his second Toronto season. “We haven’t played to our potential. Everybody knows that.
“We know the clock is ticking and we have to do better … It’s weighing on people now. Frustration has been here throughout the whole season. It doesn’t matter what you have on paper, you have to go out and execute.”
Once the great football coach, John McKay, was asked what he thought of his team’s execution. Tampa Bay was winless that NFL season. McKay said: “I’m in favour of it.”
Blue Jays fans, this rather long season, would understand.
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