Nine Games In May

If 2-11 was an unfortunate, ugly start to the season, what has hit the Blue Jays since, in terms of injuries, is nothing short of a calamity.

It’s been a surreal 25 days since Donaldson hit a double against Baltimore and pulled up with a re-aggravated calf injury on April 13th. The club is 11-14 over that span. Since then they’ve seen the Mat Latos era come and go. Jarrod Saltalamacchia is gone. Ty Kelly and Juan Graterol, too. Neil Ramirez has also come and gone. Casey Lawrence, Matt Dermody, Dany Barnes, Leonel Campos, Luke Maille, Mike Ohlman, and J.P. Howell have all been variously activated and/or deactivated.

To have gone 11-14 through all of that is, frankly, kinda fucking remarkable. But it has felt a looooong way from it, because they entered the Donaldson game already in a 1-7 hole.

The worst now seems to be nearly over. Aaron Sanchez is slated to return on Sunday. Troy Tulowitzki might play in rehab games over the weekend and rejoin the club next week. Donaldson shouldn’t be too far behind. And with due respect to Martin, Morales, and Happ, if you had to choose you’d clearly prefer to have Donaldson, Tulo, and Sanchez healthy.

Of course, this club really needs everybody healthy if they’re going to climb out of the hole that they’re in quickly enough for it to matter. But in the meantime there is actually a little bit of hope for the Blue Jays, and it comes in the form of the schedule.

The Mariners are in for four games starting on Thursday, and their rotation is as battered as the Jays’ lineup at the moment. Worse off, even. Hisashi Iwakuma has been placed on the DL with shoulder troubles, meaning four of Mariners’ five top starters are currently on the shelf. The Jays are slated to face Chase De Jong (a former Blue Jays prospect who was dealt to the Dodgers two years ago for international bonus pool slots in the run-up to the Vladito signing), Christian Bergman, TBA (likely Dillon Overton, so far as I can tell), and Ariel Miranda.

Overton, Miranda, and De Jong are sitting on ERAs of 5.06, 5.20, and 6.75 respectively. Bergman gave Seattle 3.2 nice innings of relief work against Texas this weekend, but posted an 8.39 mark in 24.2 innings for the Rockies last season.

Those aren’t sneaky-good pitchers you just haven’t heard of yet. They’re guys the Jays ought to feast on — and who, as the insufferably jaded among the fan base will surely quip, they inevitably won’t.

The Jays will follow this up with four games — two at home, two away — against the 11-19 Barves.

Win tonight against Cleveland, run the table in these next eight very winnable games, and the Jays are back to .500!

Asking that is, of course, far too much. It’s damn near impossible for a team to win nine straight, and at least as impossible to predict when a struggling and injury-riddled club might snap off a streak like that.

It’s also a bit rich to suggest that a season hangs in the balance because of nine games in May. But the Blue Jays will literally not be given a better opportunity this season to right this ship than in these next nine. The Mariners are reeling. The Barves are bad.

Even six or seven wins over this spell would serve the club very, very well. It might not full-on turn the season around, but it would at least turn the narrative that the season is all-but-over around — and that alone would be fucking welcome at this point. And, most importantly, it’s fucking doable.

And the other side of that coin is, if they merely tread water through this spell, or if they somehow do even worse than that, it will be wholly fucking demoralizing.

To wit:

 

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Granted! They follow this string up with three in Baltimore, two in Milwaukee, three at home to the fuckbag Rangers, and then three more home dates against the shitty Reds to close out the month. Right away there’s another somewhat soft part of the schedule, and maybe that could be the point at which they finally start to turn things around. But they can’t keep hoping to tread water much longer than that.

The June schedule is daunting. Afterwards it gets even worse.

June begins with four with the Yankees then a west coast road trip to visit Oakland and Seattle. The Jays come home for the Rays and White Sox, then go on the road at Texas and Kansas City. After that it’s a homestand that starts with the Orioles and moves into July against the Red Sox. A three-game visit to the Bronx and then four with the Astros and we’re already at the All-Star break.

A healthy Jays roster could conceivably make up some ground in June after treading water through May, but that looks like a much tougher road.

Oh, and isn’t this fun: the Jays come out of the All-Star break with a ten game road trip to Detroit, Boston for four, and then Cleveland.

You don’t want to get to those ten games still needing a big streak to make up ground. By the time that road trip is over, you’re just a week away from the trade deadline.

Baseball is a funny game, and wins and losses don’t come in predictable ways, but it still generally holds that you’re less likely to beat good teams than you are bad ones. It also generally holds that if you don’t beat the bad ones, what you do against the good ones isn’t going to matter a whole hell of a lot anyway.

There are still 129 games remaining on the schedule, so it’s slightly crazy to say that these next nine games have any sort of extra-special significance. But looking at the schedule ahead, and looking at their opponents for eight of these next nine, and looking at how quickly time is running out for the Jays to establish themselves as buyers — or at the very least neutral — at the trade deadline (56 of the remaining 129 games will be played after July 31st), and it’s hard to deny that the time almost has to be now.

LET’S GO FUCKING STREAKING ALREADY.