Why does my heart hurt so bad?
Things with the Blue Jays aren't great. But you already knew that.
(Well, if we’re trying to see the bright side…)
Let’s get this out of the way from the outset: The 2022 Toronto Blue Jays have been a disappointment.
You might have been able to quibble with such a statement two weeks ago. I might have, anyways. But mired in a truly and deeply bad run, losing nine of ten and mostly looking bad doing so, acknowledging that this team of such significant promise is underperforming their lofty expectations is about as uncontroversial a take as you could offer.
Tough loss. Valiant effort. Ugly loss. They ultimately all add up in the wrong column. A bad game begets a bad series; a bad series begets a bad homestand and/or a bad road trip; a bad week becomes a bad month. By the time you’re standing in what certainly feels like the season’s nadir, the questions about what’s happening to the team and where they go from here start to feel downright existential.
A streak like this understandably has the fanbase…unnerved? Disturbed? Unhinged? When you’ve barely been able to deal with the previous day’s gutting loss before the next one is upon you, it’s probably asking a lot of fans to process their emotional reactions into a thoughtful response.
Still, it’s pretty ugly out there, in the places where fans vent their frustrations. The number of fans who are taking to social media to blast the team and declare themselves to be over and done with the season grows daily. Even those you’d otherwise consider stable and thoughtful fans are spitting mad and kicking dirt. As the schedule tipped past the midway the finish line feels so much closer, the anxiety amps up as the Jays’ hold on a playoff spot - the absolute minimum standard of expectations for this season - begins to feel increasingly tenuous.
To be blunt, fans are pissed. Blame is being assessed. Everything from the micro to the macro is being scrutinized, questioned.
I don’t so much have a problem with the voicing of frustration from fans. If sports didn’t elicit emotional responses, there’d really be no point at all in watching a bunch of overgrown jocks gallivanting around a park in their pyjamas, hurling and chasing and hitting balls.
I certainly attempt to catch myself before I reflexively start policing good fandom versus bad fandom, because I respect that people can have a different perspective from mine, and come to sports for different reasons. I at least try to hear out arguments, even if they are made with ill temper.
But at the same time, there’s a level of unrestrained anger that just isn’t merited, nor is it healthy. After close to 40 years of sports talk radio influencing sports talk television and the multitudes of social media platforms, it seems like for some folks, the anger is the entire end goal of their fandom.
(Which is perhaps why some pundits have chosen to body surf on the giant wave of negativity around the team. It’s not exactly brave to say that a team sucks when they have undeniably sucked while in their worst stretch in years…but have at it, I suppose.)
Those media have also spawned a number of rote, axiomatic and clichéed narratives that serve more to assess blame and seek justice or some sort of overt action to change the fortunes of the team.
And so, we descend into more and louder incantations of “Fire Montoyo”. At this point in this lousy streak, every negative outcome on the field becomes a further mark against the manager’s record.
The lineup is wrong, the bullpen management is wrong, that player who swung at a slider isn’t being coached appropriately, or the guy who got thrown out on the bases isn’t being held to account, or the pitcher who stopped throwing strikes wasn’t appropriately exhorted to, you know…start throwing strikes. The team is too tight, or too loose, and maybe both but at the wrong times, or maybe at the same time, and someone has to take responsibility for all that, right?
The problem with this line of thinking is that it is entirely superficial. In looking for an explanation or an excuse, putting the hairshirt on the manager is easy. Especially considering that there are many who have never needed much of an excuse to question this particular manager. When you get thousands of replies every season that question every move “Montoyo” makes, or doesn’t make, or the look on his face during games, or how he’s not enough of a hardass screamer, you eventually recognize that there’s no winning for this guy.
There’s even a tacit, self-aware admission from some of the angry masses that even if it won’t resolve anything, or if the manager is not truly to blame, that firing the manager is just the way that these things go. They’re hired to be fired, you can’t fire the players, etc., etc.
The problem with all of this discussion is that it is distraction from the bigger questions of how the Blue Jays have reached this point, and how do they make things right from here.
Is there blame to be assessed for this season? Yes, likely. Perhaps. It’s baseball, so no one has a perfect run for anything more than a fleeting moment. Mistakes are made.
Are we to believe Montoyo, or his on-field coaching staff, or the committee of the many who have input into the on-field decisions are mostly to blame for this disappointment?
Certainly, if you were so inclined, you could gather multitudes of evidence from over 87 games to point to this time that they bunted, or that time that they didn’t pinch hit, or this reliever who shouldn’t pitch in leverage or that starter who should have stayed longer. We’re all managing along with the game from our seats, and given the nature of the sport, there’s probably at least one or two or five decisions with which you can disagree in any given game.
Maybe that’s the way you stay engaged in the game. Getting annoyed or upset or angry because they didn’t play it the way you would have. I’ve been there, and done that. If most of the fun of sports is having an emotional attachment to something that is beyond your control, then certainly, this is a way to follow the game.
In recent years, I’ve personally taken the approach that is less about angrily questioning the decision, and instead attempting to understand the logic of why the management group or the front office have made the decision they have.
My reticence to excoriate “Montoyo” for choosing not to pinch hit Gabriel Moreno for Cavan Biggio last weekend led one tweeting dude to tell me and his dozen or so followers that I clearly knew nothing about baseball, and that I was a phony and a fraud, and that I was terrible at my “profession”. (I tried not to take it too personally, although given the dickish way I just described the interaction, you can decide for yourself if I have or not.)
The decision makers around the Jays are all people who not only have far more experience in the game than I do, but they are privy to far more data than I am that feeds into these choices. And that data includes both the numbers as well as the knowledge of who is tired or sick or gassed or just generally disengaged from the game.
So rather than just assuming that I am smarter than they are, I take a pause and try to understand the logic. Maybe the folks in the dugout have noticed that Moreno has had a hard time hitting the ball out of the infield, happier to make weak contact than to load up and hit off his back leg. Maybe they figured that even in a lefty-lefty matchup, Biggio has a better chance of giving them a good at bat. Maybe they don’t want to move Lourdes Gurriel Jr. to first base five minutes after he gunned out a runner from the outfield to save a run.
(I mean, if it was really up to me? I probably pinch hit Moreno there. But I’m not going to assume that the whole bench staff is comprised of obtuse imbeciles just because, you know, the platoon advantage.)
But where I’ve had a harder time following the logic this year is with the roster machinations, made far above the field level.
Look, there’s a lot of misfortune that befalls every team every year. It’s dead easy in July to say that Ross Atkins and the rest of the fellas in khakis should have known that Nate Pearson and Julian Merryweather would be hurt or unavailable for most of the season, and that Hyun-Jin Ryu was certainly on his way to a significant injury given his age and recent performance. But when you are making decisions about your 40-player roster in March, you can’t simply jettison players like that simply because you have an informed hunch.
And if you are the Blue Jays in 2022, you can’t sign a player who doesn’t want to sign with you, or who has differing opinions on the efficacy of COVID vaccines, or who has found a better offer.
Nor can you force teams to make a mid-season trade with you for the sort of pitchers who can step in and fill those expectations, or have them accept terms that are something less than usurious.
So I’m sympathetic to the front office…to a point.
But what has bothered me for much of the season is that there are multiple spots on the active roster and the 40-player roster that are seemingly held by placeholders who are not effectively contributing to the team’s success.
No one should pin this prolonged swoon on Zack Collins or Bradley Zimmer. But one can wonder about the opportunity cost of having those two active roster spots occupied by players whose value to the team largely involves the most marginal, least likely of situations in the run of a game, or a week, or a season.
Nor should someone blame Leo Jimenez or Otto Lopez for occupying spots on the 40-player roster despite the fact that they have little to contribute to the near-term success of a team that should be a World Series favourite, and not nervously looking over their shoulder at the Baltimore Orioles.
One can ask, though, whether if front office is making the most of the value that could be derived from each roster spot. And maybe you could ask if they get attached to players or past decisions.
The Blue Jays are caught in this moment where they can’t acquire the major league talent they need to keep themselves afloat, and they are stuck trying to make do for weeks on end with whatever serviceable marginal talent they can scrape from the waiver wire. Maybe that’s a lack of foresight, or maybe that’s just a bad jag of bad luck that has knocked them off stride.
And maybe playing eight games in seven days before flying to the west coast with a personal tragedy hanging over the team makes it hard to find the rah-rah energy to fight and scrap your way to the All-Star break.
Whatever it is, firing Charlie Montoyo isn’t going to fix it.
A+