Blue Jays head home still looking for offensive spark

NEW YORK — Well, the Toronto Blue Jays are through their season-opening, 10-game road trip at 4-6 and while it certainly could have been better, given the way they swung the bats it definitely could have been worse, too.

Sunday’s 8-3 loss to the New York Yankees capping their three-city trek encapsulated an off-kilter beginning, a mix of promising moments, unfulfilled opportunity and opponents ready to make them pay.

Mirror-image scenarios in the third inning underlined that point as in the top half, Luis Gil loaded the bases with two outs, walked in a run to open the scoring before catching Cavan Biggio looking to escape the jam. Then in the bottom half, Bowden Francis loaded the bases with two out and walked in a run to tie the game before Giancarlo Stanton ripped an inner-edge fastball 417 feet to left for his 11th career grand slam.

The Blue Jays kept chipping away, just as they did Saturday when they fell behind 9-2 and eventually lost 9-8, getting back-to-back doubles from Vladimir Guerrero Jr. and Bo Bichette in the fifth and a run-scoring groundout from Guerrero in the sixth, but not the big-damage swing they really needed.

To wit, offensive co-ordinator Don Mattingly’s description of the offence as “wavy” seemed especially apt, their struggle to push across runs disturbingly reminiscent of last year’s season-long grind at the plate. For now, at least, that can be attributed to the quality of opponent they faced and the time it can take to find level water after the initial plunge, with Mattingly saying, “that’s what you see, to me, this part of the year, guys don’t seem to be as steady and consistent one day to the next.”

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The Blue Jays’ revamped game-planning is meant to help smooth that process out, with Mattingly saying that “more than anything, we want to simplify.”

“It still gets down to getting balls in your area and knowing what you want to do with those when you get them,” he continued. “We want guys to work, try to get balls in areas where they handle pitches the best, work to get to those pitches and then be able to put ourselves in a good position to hit them. We’ve just been wavy. We see good games. We score eight and nine (at) Tampa, then we get one and two. We don’t really score in Houston, they kind of shut us down. Here, the first couple of days have been pretty good games.”

The third one might have been, too, but the gap in power between the Blue Jays and Yankees was again evident, most so in the third, when the home side maxed out on their shot with the bases loaded and the visitors did not.

The Blue Jays also loaded the bases in the sixth but again came away with just a single run, underlying their need for big blows.

Intriguingly, Mattingly described seeking damage as “kind of a scary word because when you’re trying to hit home runs, they usually don’t happen.”

“I think for us, it’s wanting to get your best swing off, make sure you’re working in your zones, trying to get your best swing off in those areas,” he continued. “We don’t necessarily want to be trying to hit everything on the edges early in counts. Let this guy make a mistake, but be willing to let it go when you get balls in your area. It’s really just getting balls that you can hit hard. And hopefully within that there’s some home runs.

“I don’t really see us as a huge power club, but we do have the chance to have four or five guys hitting 20 or above, and that would be good for us.”

That feels like a conservative estimate, but the point remains that the Blue Jays are in need of impact and seemingly caught in between trying to get it.

That puts extra heat on the pitching staff — Francis, like Gil, had to work around Angel Hernandez’s all-caps UMPIRING and struck out five in three innings but made one mistake on the Stanton homer.

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The Yankees kept adding from there while the Blue Jays continued to search for the consistency they believe will inevitably come.

“Our offence has been grinding a little bit,” said Ernie Clement. “But I think we’ve done a really good job of battling and trying to find ways to win games when maybe we don’t have our best offence at the moment. If we can find a way to win games when we’re not playing our best, I think that’s huge because this team’s going to start to click and we’re going to be really dangerous when that happens. So I think it’ll be really nice to get home and we’ll definitely try to get on a run there.”