'Flush it': Blue Jays look to cast off tough night

TORONTO -- Some nights you win, some nights you lose and other nights you wish you could just skip to tomorrow.

Coming off a brilliant road trip, going 6-1 through Yankee Stadium and Fenway Park to pull their August sharply out of freefall, the Blue Jays came out flat to start Friday’s 12-0 loss to the Angels, and never found their sparkle. By the end, Whit Merrifield was on the mound, slinging side-arm.

If this loss had come a week ago, when the Blue Jays were playing some of their worst baseball of the season, the red sirens would be flashing in downtown Toronto. Coming off the adrenaline high of the road trip and a late flight home from Boston that didn’t get players to bed until close to sunrise, it’s not quite so alarming. But the loss still works as a useful learning experience for how the Blue Jays can avoid similar letdowns in the future, especially when the emotions run so high -- and correspondingly, so low -- in the postseason.

What you’ll hear from players and coaches after games like this is: “Flush it.” It’s a way of saying that they’ll forget about it and move on to the next one with clean slate.

That’s the beauty of baseball, with 162 games. In a 17-game NFL season, one blatantly “off” night can sink an entire season, but baseball leaves plenty of room for mess. It’s all about timing, though, and a loss like this hits the Blue Jays differently on Aug. 26 than it would have on April 26.

“I think you flush it,” interim manager John Schneider said. “It’s one bad day out of the last eight, and you move on to tomorrow. It was not our best brand of baseball today, and that’s all right. We’ve been rolling pretty good. You just move on to the next day.”

As the first and second innings trudged on, bringing back memories of Thursday’s four-hour and twenty-two minute marathon in Boston, the Blue Jays couldn’t get out of their own way. Vladimir Guerrero Jr. had a particularly rough start, first on the bases and then in the field.

After Guerrero singled in the first inning, a low scorcher clocked at 111.2 mph off the bat, he attempted to steal second. It was a high pitch and a wide throw, so Guerrero beat it easily for what appeared to be his fifth steal of the season, but the replay immediately showed that he’d popped off the bag. He was quickly called out.

Then, in the top of the second, Guerrero fielded a bunt with runners on first and second and nobody out. He considered every option all at once, and landed on none. Guerrero gave a look to third, thinking of an aggressive throw to get the lead runner, and by the time he settled on a soft toss to first base, everyone was safe. It was exactly the kind of mental error the Blue Jays have moved away from in recent years as their young core has matured.

The defensive blunders weren’t over. Later in that same inning, with a section of Blue Jays fans in the outfield chanting “Overrated!,"Shohei Ohtani lifted a ball to the wall with the bases loaded. It shouldn’t have been too difficult for Teoscar Hernández to catch, but as he got to the wall, the ball somehow landed several feet to his left. Hernández was later removed with a left foot contusion, but Schneider said the two weren’t related.

“Not really, not. You have Ohtani in the box and he usually hits the ball really hard,” Schneider explained. “I think it was just kind of misread by him. That was basically it.”

Saving the Blue Jays’ bullpen from another long day, at the very least, was Mitch White, who grinded through five innings of seven-run ball without much help behind him.

“As soon as I get punched in the face there, it’s like, ‘All right, this is going to be a grind,’” White said. “I just have to be ready no matter what.”

The good news for the Blue Jays? Saturday's sellout crowd watching Ohtani face Alek Manoah will make it impossible for anyone to come out of the gate slow, and there’s no better way to flush this ugly outlier than to match that energy with a statement win.