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The Blue Jays and the meaning of a late season freefall

The Blue Jays entered September with a two-game lead in the AL East. From May 19 to Aug. 31, the team went 57-34 to wrest control of the division from Boston and Baltimore.

On Sept. 6, the Jays watched their bullpen give up four runs in the bottom of the eighth inning to the Yankees, then watched Brett Garner snatch a potential go-ahead home run away at the top of the left field wall at Yankees Stadium in the ninth off the bat of Justin Smoak. The Jays would get swept in New York and relinquish their division lead to Boston.

Several days later, after a players-only meeting and a win over the Red Sox at home that pulled them within a game of the division lead, Toronto appeared poised to catch up with Boston in the standings when Troy Tulowitzki hit a grand slam in the third inning, sending the Rogers Centre crowd into a frenzy as the Jays took a 6-4 lead. The score would not hold, the Jays ended up on the losing end of an 11-8 game and Boston left town with a division lead it would hold on to for the remainder of the month.

The list goes on for a Jays team that's gone 11-15 in September. Toronto went on a West Coast trip in the middle of the month and won the first two games against the last-place Angels, then settled for a split, scoring one run in the final two games of the series. Even when the Jays have been able to put together a decent streak, a run of five wins in six games, they've managed to cast a pall on the proceedings.

Seeking a four-game sweep of the Yankees at home earlier this week, the Jays got into a series of benches-clearing brawls in the final game of the series and lost key reliever Joaquin Benoit, who tore his calf muscle running out of the bullpen to join the melee. The Jays blew that game in the ninth evening.

On Wednesday, when it appeared the Jays were on their way to opening up a three-game lead on the first wild card spot on Baltimore, they failed to hold a 2-0 lead heading into the eighth inning, lost to the Orioles 3-2, were shut out on Thursday, and now head into their final series of the season against the Red Sox at Fenway Park tied with the Orioles for the first wild card spot, with Detroit just 1.5 games behind.

Baseball is a strange sport, in that there are often times when the expectation of a team and its performance don't line up, but the discrepancy can be attributed to luck, small sample size, one bad inning. You can play great baseball, you can be the better team, but over a period of time, say a week, you still might not win as many games as your performance indicates you should. The most disheartening part of watching a team falter over a month is when you realize that there are no such excuses. In September, the Jays have stumbled into a must-win situation in the final weekend of the season to no fault of anyone else's but their own.

The offense, which ranked among the top of the AL all season, has scored three runs or less 14 times this month. The bullpen, filled with question marks after closer Roberto Osuna, has a 4.70 ERA in September. No one John Gibbons is handing the ball to before the ninth inning is inspiring much confidence at the moment. The Jays are free-falling, as much as a team that still has control of its own destiny and can still find its way into the ALDS via the one-game play-in wild card can be termed as collapsing in the final month of the season.

The end of the regular season, in fact, offers a bit of reprieve for this team. It will need to win a few games in Boston to ensure that it either hosts or plays in next week's wild card game, but should the Jays get there, they will have both earned a chance at continuing their season and very much earned nothing more than that given their performance over the past four weeks.

Get there though, and it's a clean slate. The great thing about baseball is that past performance offers very little predictive value to what will happen in the future. Sure, September has revealed the flaws of this team. But taking an optimist's view, the Jays have a starting rotation backed by J.A. Happ, Aaron Sanchez and Marco Estrada that can compete with anyone in a short series, let alone a play-in game.

There are still plenty of hitters with proven track records over a longer period than just this month who can win the team a game or two as well. The bullpen is concerning, but the shortened rotation offers Gibbons a chance to insert Marcus Stroman or Francisco Liriano — who has been a revelation since joining the team mid-season — in a high-leverage role ahead of Osuna to make it work.

There are plenty of ifs, but if the Jays want to be encouraged by their prospects of turning things around this late in the season, they can simply look at their playoff run last season. The 2015 Jays ran through the American League after the acquisitions of David Price and Tulowitzki near the trade deadline and entered the playoffs as prohibitive favorites in some circles.

Their second-half surge meant nothing when they lost the first two games of the ALDS at home against Texas, needing the craziest inning in playoff history and a bat flip to complete a comeback. The Jays might have been a better team on paper than the Royals, but Kansas City played better baseball for a week and advanced to the World Series.

The Jays are, in many ways, working backwards this season. There's a particular sense of urgency too given Jose Bautista's and Edwin Encarnacion's impending free agency. The team will still be competitive next season, with a relatively young starting staff and reigning MVP Josh Donaldson, along with Tulowitzki and Russell Martin, but this could officially be the end of an era.

All of that serves as the backdrop to the start of Toronto's final three games of the season in Boston tonight. All month, this team has failed to get jump-started, and now this represents the final chance. If the Blue Jays can just escape with a playoff berth clinched, they get to press the refresh button. If not, it will be the end of a gut-wrenching month-long collapse that will send this team home. Either way, you play the 162 games, and you wait for the truth about a team be revealed. We're about to find out exactly what that truth is for the Jays this weekend.

Can you name the players who were on both of the Toronto Blue Jays back-to-back World Series teams of 1992 and 1993?
SCORE:
0/12
TIME:
3:00
2B
Roberto Alomar
C
Pat Borders
RF
Joe Carter
RP
Mark Eichhorn
SS/3B
Alfredo Griffin
SP
Juan Guzman
1B
John Olerud
3B
Ed Sprague
SP
Todd Stottlemyre
RP
Mike Timlin
RP
Duane Ward
CF
Devon White

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