'We've got to clean it up': Bad luck, miscues deepen Blue Jays' struggles

ST. PETERSBURG -- What else could go wrong? Oh, what a dangerous question to ask.

Tropicana Field has always held such nightmarish answers for the Blue Jays, and their bad week kept snowballing with a 6-4 loss to the Rays on Monday night.

“We’re just not playing good baseball right now,” said starter Chris Bassitt, who allowed three home runs and saw his scoreless streak end at 28 2/3 innings. “We’ve got to clean a lot of things up. From a pitching standpoint to baserunning, basically all facets of the game, we’ve got to clean it up. Obviously, we’re in the heart of the toughest part of our schedule right now. To play the baseball that we’re playing right now, we can’t expect to win games the way we’re playing.”

After dropping three of four to the Yankees and being swept by the Orioles, Monday’s loss made it a 1-7 stretch in the AL East for the Blue Jays, with three games still to come against the mighty Rays. And while there are a dozen different ways to dissect these struggles, one simple dropped ball seemed to capture it all fairly well.

Tied 0-0 in the second with two outs and a runner on third, Rays catcher Christian Bethancourt grounded one up the middle to Whit Merrifield in a play that should have ended the inning. Instead, when Vladimir Guerrero Jr. stretched to make the grab, he dropped the ball, allowing Bethancourt to reach and Randy Arozarena to score from first. It wasn’t exactly an easy play, and Bethancourt deserves some credit for busting it down the line to make the play close, but it was ruled an error for a reason.

Two minutes later, Jose Siri was flipping his bat.

What should have stayed a 0-0 tie was suddenly a 3-0 deficit. The Blue Jays, who haven’t taken an inch given to them all week, gave the Rays a mile.

This can’t be hung on Guerrero alone. He’s coming off a Gold Glove Award campaign in 2022, and that dropped ball was his first error of the season (though he’d commit another just an inning later), but this just seems to be how things are going for Toronto lately.

“We’re not in a good stretch right now,” said Kevin Kiermaier, who knows as well as anyone how difficult it is to win in this division. “But when you look around our clubhouse, we’ve got all the pieces to make it happen. We just have to play better. I feel that everything that could go wrong for us lately has, and that’s the way baseball goes. At the same time, we create luck for ourselves and we’ve got to be better, plain and simple.”

So, what’s the fix?

After Sunday’s ugly 8-3 loss in extra innings to the Orioles, manager John Schneider said that “enough is enough.” He wasn’t necessarily telling his hitters to figure it out, though. The statement was something bigger, more philosophical.

“Yesterday in a nutshell just felt like, ‘Damn, it’s going to turn,’” Schneider said. “What else can happen?”

Again, The Trop has answers, and now the Blue Jays need to find some of their own.

“We don’t have a whole lot of guys playing with the greatest confidence right now,” Kiermaier said. “That happens. Results, we try not to be focused on that a whole lot, but sometimes you need them. I feel like a couple of our guys just need a good, hard line drive or something to get us going. Hitting can be very contagious, but on the other end, when you’re not hitting, that can be contagious as well.”

The real fix here is time, but that’s a finite property in the American League East, a division of Goliaths that has the Blue Jays at the bottom.

After Bassitt’s last start, a win against the Yankees, he said that a younger version of himself would have lost that same game, letting the moment get too big. He’s using that same experience to look at these recent struggles with the right mix of patience and urgency.

The way out isn’t a mystery, it’s just a matter of getting there.

“There’s so much time left. Don’t panic,” Bassitt said. “It’s a bit of a snowball effect. We’re losing a couple of games, so it’s like we need to try harder. Now, more mistakes happen because you’re trying harder. No, just go and play your game. We’re good enough to beat pretty much every team when we’re playing our game. We’re just not doing that right now.”

A better question now might be: What could go right? The Blue Jays are long overdue.