Power outage highlights duality of Blue Jays' offense
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TORONTO -- The Blue Jays’ offense has been stuck in the middle.
They’ve taken the Jimmy Eat World approach, preaching that everything (everything) will be just fine and that everything (everything) will be alright (alright). But even a baseball season runs out of games eventually.
Friday’s 6-2 loss to the Cubs on Friday night at Rogers Centre was another quiet outing for the bats, fresh off a series in which they scored just seven runs in a four-game split with the Guardians.
That power outage in Cleveland came just one day after the Blue Jays laid 13 runs on the Red Sox, though, another snapshot of the duality of an offense that can look like it’s taking batting practice one day, then look like Friday night’s version the next.
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With the loss, the Blue Jays now sit just a half-game up on the Mariners for the final AL Wild Card spot.
“Tonight, we had some quick outs and didn’t hit the pitches we should have,” said manager John Schneider. “Quick outs were the biggest thing tonight.”
The quick outs Schneider points to can be their own brand of frustrating, and they are what allowed the young Javier Assad to breeze through seven innings of one-run ball on just 90 pitches for the Cubs.
“When pitches are in the zone, you’ve got to take advantage of those,” Schneider said. “When pitches are more marginal, you have to be a little more patient. The last two games, I think we could do more of that. We’ve had a lot of success swinging early in counts, too, we just have to make sure those pitches are in the right part of the zone.”
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Expectations and identity
This is all a matter of context. If the Blue Jays were a plucky, upstart team that was expected to win with pitching and defense, then a 16th-ranked offense in runs scored would work just fine. But that’s not Toronto’s story.
Entering 2023, this looked like a lineup with legitimate power one through nine, and over half of the lineup seemed fully capable of hitting 30-plus home runs. That hasn’t happened. The Blue Jays rank 16th in the Majors with 135 home runs, a far cry from their seventh-place finish a year ago and from their league-leading performance in '21. If you could put the '21 offense alongside this season’s pitching staff, the '01 Mariners and 1906 Cubs might be losing sleep.
Toronto is hitting for average this season, but beyond its baffling issues hitting with runners in scoring position, the lack of power is most concerning. This was supposed to be the Blue Jays’ greatest strength offensively, and nothing covers up other issues better than a couple of home runs, but they’re still waiting for that to show up.
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“It comes down to getting big hits with guys on, but it’s also about how you arrive at that point, how you’re working the starter and things like that,” Schneider said. “We’re in a little bit of a rut right now and we’ve got to turn it around fairly quickly. There’s some good pitchers mixed in there and I think that it just has to be a consistent grind one through nine.”
There are many ways to score, and power isn’t the only identity that wins, but leaning into an identity of moving runners and creating offense on the bases only works if you come up with big hits in big spots.
Star search
The best thing that happened on the field for the Blue Jays on Friday came around 4:00, when Bo Bichette was running in the outfield under the watchful eye of the training staff. The All-Star shortstop is working back from right patellar tendinitis, and while he isn’t about to jump into the lineup tomorrow, running is his final hurdle, and Friday’s pregame activities suggest he’s progressing well.
Bichette has been a monster this season, batting .321 and still comfortably leading the AL in hits (144) despite missing the past 11 games. His eventual return will be crucial, but until then and well after, the Blue Jays need to see some star-level performances from other players. Just like a few home runs can cover up other issues, a dominant game from someone like Vladimir Guerrero Jr. can make us all forget the ugly innings awfully quickly.
It can even be Davis Schneider, the rookie who has already turned into a cult hero for his brilliant debut in Boston, where the Blue Jays swept the Red Sox last week. A roster this talented should be capable of taking turns, and like John Schneider says, they’ll need to do that fairly quickly.