Blue Jays scratch out needed win with wild-card hopes slipping away

ARLINGTON, Texas — All told, the Toronto Blue Jays have had better weekends.

A stuff-dependent staff ace featuring the lowest velocity of his career on Friday , performing so concerningly that he’s sent out for an MRI the next day. A litany of defensive miscues, including an ugly sequence — walk, hit batter, throwing error, wild pitch — that led directly to Saturday’s game-winning run. A once-superstar mired in a never-ending slump exiting on Sunday due to an injury he’s carried for most of the season.

And the lone consolation, salvaging a 7-2 win over the Texas Rangers on Sunday to avoid a sweep, is potentially too little too late. The Blue Jays already lost ground in this series to a direct contender in an American League wild-card race rapidly running from view. And they have no remaining games against teams ahead of them, meaning they can only do so much to reverse the once-surging post-season odds that have cratered at their feet:

That peak to the right was Sept. 4 after the Blue Jays took the opener of a series in Kansas City, 9-2, on a run of eight wins in 10 games. Above .500 for the first time since early April when the season was only 9 games old, Toronto held a share of the American League’s third wild-card spot (technically it was theirs alone thanks to possession of a tiebreaker over Cleveland) with fewer than 20 games remaining in the season and a run of exclusively sub-.500 teams before them.

That’s when the bottom fell out. The Blue Jays lost eight of their next 12, averaging 3.58 runs per game with a minus-14 run differential. And they were remarkable frontrunners along the way, with only one comeback win and one blown-lead loss. Since July 29, the Blue Jays are 18-3 when scoring first — the highest winning percentage in the majors.

That’s fine if you frequently score first. But what if you concede the first run, as the Blue Jays have in two-thirds of their games over the last two weeks? Then you need the resilience to battle back, which the Blue Jays have done only once over the 9 times they’ve fallen behind early since Sept. 4.

The good news Sunday was the Blue Jays got on the board quickly, as Brett Bateman drew a leadoff walk, aggressively took third on a Vladimir Guerrero Jr. chopper the other way, and scored on a Nathan Lukes sacrifice fly. They cashed another with two outs in the third when Lukes, who reached via single, took off in a 1-2 count and scored as Sean Keys laced a double over his head into right-centre.

In the fifth, Bateman walked again, reached second as Myles Straw singled behind him, took third on a Lukes flyout, and scored when Kazuma Okamoto bounced a base hit back up the middle. Similar story in the seventh, when Bateman doubled, Straw walked, and Lukes singled in a fourth run. Later in the inning, Charles McAdoo’s two-out, two-strike double brought in a couple more.

If the Blue Jays aren’t going to drive the ball consistently — Toronto’s .265 slugging percentage over the week of play entering Sunday was dead last in MLB — this is how they’ll need to generate offence. Working deep counts. Stringing together hits and walks. Starting runners in unusual situations.