TORONTO – Nathan Eovaldi threw six shutout innings, Carlos Beltran homered and the Yankees did what they so rarely had all year – scored a bunch late to widen a lead and avoid having to use all their best relievers to win a game.
This was May 24. The Yankees beat the Blue Jays, 6-0. They moved to .500 at 22-22 for the first time since 4-4. This also launched a nine-game span exclusively against Toronto and Tampa Bay.
The AL East was split: the Red Sox and Orioles up top with a nice pre-Memorial Day gap and down below, the Yankees in third, Rays in fourth and Blue Jays last. The Yankees had an opportunity – particularly with Toronto reeling and looking nothing like the late-season juggernaut that soared to the AL East title in 2015 – to gain distance from the bottom and make inroads toward the top.
Instead, the Yankees played poorly, the Rays worse and Toronto ran off a 6-1 stretch, including four straight victories over the Yanks. June began with the Yankees and Rays losing contact not only with the division lead, but perhaps even the wild-card race. The Blue Jays had surged to two over .500 and within three games of the Orioles and five of the Red Sox.
Despite the Yankees’ history, mandate and payroll, the Blue Jays actually have greater urgency. They expressed that in a Steinbrenner-ian wave of damn-the-future trades last year that has a spill-over to 2016.
After making the playoffs for the first time since 1993, the Blue Jays revived a baseball fever in Toronto and do not want to squander that. The popular Canadian general manager, Alex Anthopoulos, left after the season, largely because he saw his power base eroded by Mark Shapiro being hired away from Cleveland to be team president.
The Blue Jays have nine players in their walk years (10 when reliever Franklin Morales returns from the DL), notably foundation pieces Jose Bautista and Edwin Encarnacion. So the chance to win with this group is pretty much now, and the timetable to the next winner might take a while with all the trades leaving the farm system lacking quality depth and impact (don’t forget the deal that sent away Noah Syndergaard and Travis d’Arnaud for R.A. Dickey a few years back).
“We absolutely do [feel the urgency],” said first-year GM Ross Atkins, who followed Shapiro from Cleveland. “But we have to balance that with performance costs and alternatives. We have to be cognizant that we have to get younger as an organization, not just in the minors, but on the major league team.”
Atkins said it was “definitely not impossible” that the club would retain Bautista and/or Encarnacion, “but definitely it is hard to do.” He talked about “shared risk.” Translation: Toronto would want the duo to offer some form of hometown discount at a time when Bautista has been very public that he will not do that. It was reported during the spring he wanted a five-year, $150 million deal to stay.
This front office just is not going to do that. Not only because of the small-market Indians DNA. Look at the Yankees trying to drag multiple older, faded players to the finish lines of contracts. It is ugly. Troy Tulowitzki is 31, has four years at $78 million left after this season, is on the DL yet again and was hitting miserably before that. Russell Martin, 33, had just a Yankee-ish .531 OPS and three years at $60 million left after this season.
No way Toronto has three or four players on huge deals into their late 30s. Bautista, 35, remains a patient/fierce at-bat, but has lost steps in right field and his future is as a first baseman/DH. Encarnacion, 33, is the DH and his .760 OPS is his worst since 2009.
If the Jays fell out of the race, even Atkins admits they would have to be open-minded about re-stocking the system by considering trades for Bautista and Encarnacion and maybe even starting pitchers Marco Estrada (signed through 2017) and J.A. Happ (signed through 2018) because the upcoming free-agent market is so bad that interested teams would have to consider giving up big pieces for starters who help in a race now and future seasons.
But it would be surprising if Toronto were not, at minimum, a wild-card factor.
The lineup has mostly underachieved. That is unlikely to persist. The rotation has been good, but Aaron Sanchez has an innings cap, which eventually will necessitate a move to a bullpen that needs the help.
There will not be big trades to go for it as there were in 2015. But there is urgency. The Blue Jays are much more a “now” team than are the Yankees.