This was supposed to be the year the Toronto Blue Jays were ready to compete with the hockey’s Stanley Cup playoffs (see Canadian highlights) for the attention of Canadian sports fans. It was going to be an unforgettable season. Coming out of Spring Training a month ago, all the media—certainly in Toronto—were falling all over themselves to anoint the Jays as genuine contenders in the American League East, the redoubt of the storied New York Yankees.
A series of trades for pitchers—including last year’s National League Cy Young Award winner R. A. Dickey and the NL’s 2011 batting champion, shortstop Jose Reyes—were going to lift the Jays to their first playoff appearance since 1992-93 when they won back-to-back World Series.
It was to be a long, dreamy summer s at the Rogers Centre watching games that really meant something. The Jays were back, everyone said.
Alas, a month after Opening Day, the Jays have been a team to forget. Were they a Broadway-bound show, they would have closed in New Haven.
They Jays open a three-game series Tuesday at home against the first place Boston Red Sox, who they trail in the standings by 9.5 games. Following a four-game sweep by the Yankees in New York over the weekend, the Jays under their reconstituted manager, John Gibbons, have a 9-17 record. They have lost 11 of 16 games since Reyes hurt himself sliding awkwardly into second base.
The conventional wisdom in baseball is that it is never too late. The season lasts 162 games, after all. Heck, in 1951 the New York Giants trailed the Brooklyn Dodgers by 13.5 games in mid-August and came back to win the pennant in the most famous playoff in baseball history—the three-game series capped by Bobby Thomsen’s famous “Shot Heard ‘Round the World” off the ill-fated Dodger pitcher Ralph Branca.
But things are not pretty right now at the Rogers Centre. Unforgettable has morphed into forgettable—unless one loves punishment. On the field, it’s all gone bad. And one also has to wonder what kind of effect this team is going to have on the future of Major League Baseball in Canada. Disappointment tends to come in inverse proportion to high hopes. And hopes were indeed high.
To find out what’s gone wrong and the possible ramifications, RCI asked the Toronto Star’s baseball columnist, Rich Griffin, to join us.
Terry Haig spoke with Richard Griffin from his home in Toronto.
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