BALTIMORE — The Blue Jays entered the all-star break with another loss on a second disastrous trip.
By virtue of their 4-2 defeat against Baltimore yesterday, the Jays completed a 10-game odyssey with a 2-8 record, a grim grind that included four walkoff losses, three of them in extra innings.
Coupled with their infamous 0-9 road disaster in May, the Jays enter the break with a 19-28 road record, are 25-18 at home and are 44-46 overall.
So far, the 2009 season has been a series of adventures and misadventures.
Over the next three weeks, the Jays’ fan base will be holding its collective breath regarding the future of all-star right-hander Roy Halladay. Will he remain or will he be traded?
Same goes for centre fielder Vernon Wells, third baseman Scott Rolen, right fielder Alex Rios and others.
Stay tuned on that front.
As for what has transpired so far, it has been a mixed bag.
“I think it has been an inconsistent first half,” Alex Anthopoulos, the Jays assistant general manager, said yesterday. “If you had talked to us in the off-season and said we’d be around .500 at the break we would have been pleased considering how young we were going to be on the mound.”
Manager Cito Gaston, who returned from his sister’s funeral in Texas to be at yesterday’s game, agreed.
“We talked last season about where we want to go (and from that standpoint) we’re OK,” Gaston said. “But we did get off to a great start and I feel like we just had a
so-so first half even though we had all the injuries and things like that. But we still could have played a little better.”
The rotation, of course, has been a revolving door because of injuries.
Lefty Marc Rzepczynski, who made his second start for the Jays yesterday, was the 12th pitcher to start a game for the Jays this season and the sixth rookie. Overall, 23 pitchers have performed for the Jays in the first half.
The injury factor has opened the door to a lot of young pitchers and of the lot, none has run with the ball more than Ricky Romero, who went 7-3 with a 3.00 ERA and 11 quality starts from 13 appearances.
“There definitely has been some bright spots and it’s the young players,” Anthopoulos said. “There’s the emergence of Adam Lind (.306, 19, 59), Aaron Hill coming back from his concussion and becoming an all-star, seeing Romero step it up and looking like he’s going to be a very good starter for us for a long time.”
On the down side, there’s the obvious sub-par performance from Wells and the inconsistent performances from Rios and first baseman Lyle Overbay.
The bullpen also has dimmed from 2008 when it was the best in the league.
“The bullpen hasn’t been the strength it was last year and that obviously relates to the starting rotation and its inconsistency,” Anthopoulos said. “Coming into the season, we always hoped we could do better and do better especially the way we started. But overall this is about where we thought we might be coming to the break.”
The second half promises to be a hard road as 45 of the Jays’ final 72 games will be against the AL East, a division where they’ve gone just 13-19 to date.
If there’s anything to look forward to, it’s the return to the rotation of Shaun Marcum in August and Casey Janssen, this time to the bullpen, when the Jays open the second half with three games against Boston on a nine-game homestand.
The best the fans can hope is that they still may have Halladay to cheer for.
