September Disaster: The Blue Jays Collapse Versus Rangers
I went to my first, and likely only, game of the season yesterday and witnessed the Texas Rangers complete the four-game sweep in this massively hyped series of “important” baseball for the Blue Jays.
The vibe was actively bad. I arrived at 5:30 or so, and I found that the normal buzz that exists in and around the stadium at this time of year was stagnated. I sat in 116R, which is pretty much parallel with first base, and no one seemed that into anything. The third inning felt like it should have been the sixth.
I wrote this note down in the fourth, “They want us to karaoke, yet the crowd is openly hostile and maybe a little bored.”
It was this mood that made me notice the video package the stadium used in-game. Obviously, every pro-sports game has some sort of pre-planned video package, with ads and highlights. The one the Jays produced last night in juxtaposition with the actual reality of what was happening in the game actually fed into the hostility.
The clearest example of this was in the bottom of the seventh: Kirk and Bichette had worked walks around a couple of strikeouts and a pitching change. The game was still within reach. Guerrero sees six pitches, strikes out swinging and the air goes out of the building. Immediately after, as the Jays were headed back to the field at the top of the eighth, there was an ad for Michelob ULTRA featuring Guerrero absolutely massacring baseballs. He could not miss. He was unstoppable.
The juxtaposition between the promise and possibility of the ad and the reality of what had just happened not a minute before was disconcerting to the point of mockery.
The boos got louder, as did the “drunk on Thursday” guys, who raged at every failure.
In the aftermath of the trade, there were whispers that the Blue Jays parted ways with Teoscar Hernández because he wasn’t serious enough. The home run jacket was also retired for the sake of “seriousness”, that the Blue Jays were declaring that “fun time” was over and it was time to focus. If that was the goal, then the Blue Jays should be congratulated. No one would ever argue any of this is fun.
The Atlanta Braves, currently the best team in baseball, were the first team to punch their post-season ticket earlier in the week. So congratulations should be extended to general manager and president of baseball operations Alex Anthopoulos, whose team looks poised to challenge for their second World Series championship in three years.
I used to belong to a “young professionals” group with Jays Care and one of the events was with an executive with the Blue Jays. I remember it being 2017 because he was talking about Kevin Pillar using a homophobic slur the day before, and dealing with the fallout of that.
I don’t remember his name, but I do remember other bloggers at the time telling me that they had gone out for beers with him and thinking that apparently, I wasn’t cool enough for beers.
He talked about his work and working with the upper management, including things like the challenges of renovating, and that attendance in Toronto was very much tied to how well the team was performing. At one point, he said something along the lines of Shaprio and co.’s goal of making the Rogers Centre “a place to be even if the team isn’t any good.”
I had been asking questions all night, and he had sort of been teasing me about that. And I was on the highway heading home before it occurred to me to ask “Why wouldn’t the team be any good?”
I was reminded of this evening’s conversation when I heard about the stadium renovations happening after the 2022 season and again when I heard about the success of the Atlanta Braves.
I’m not sure the stadium is at the point of being distracting enough to make us forget about shitty baseball, but I’m sure they can get there.
The Alek Manoah situation got ugly this week, with the Blue Jays announcing through the media properties (notably Ben Nicholson-Smith of Sportsnet and the Jeff Blair Show on the Fan 590) which, like the Jays, are owned by Rogers Communications, that Manoah would not pitch again this season.
There were rumours that he didn’t report to Buffalo, and then other rumours that he wasn’t healthy, which were more or less confirmed by Schneider on MLB Network:
“At the current time he feels like he’s not ready to compete so we’re going to respect that and kind of move on from it,” Schneider said. “We’ve been working through every decision with him together as a group and respecting his requests along the way.”
It immediately made my antennae go up. If Manoah was injured and needed to stay behind in Toronto for tests, why not announce that at the time? Did I miss that? Why all the talk about Manoah quitting the team? Why was there talk about him not reporting to the Bisons if there was a legitimate reason (staying behind for tests) for not reporting? Why is it coming out this week? Was it to distract from the terrible Rangers series? To further sink Manoah’s reputation after a disappointing 2023? To somehow bring him to heel?
The Blue Jays have used the Blair show in the past. In 2018, it was starting to become clear that Shapiro and Atkins were not going to go forward with a manager they had inherited. I remember hearing rumours at the time that they floated a rumour that was reported by Blair on his show that John Gibbons wasn’t interested in managing a young team. The front office did this so they could gauge how much of a reputational hit they would take by firing a beloved Toronto figure. It also worked to bring the discussion out into the open, forcing Gibby to make a comment.
Controlling the narrative is just one of the benefits of having an entire media company at your disposal.
