Blue Jays banking best is yet to come

OAKLAND — At some point late Tuesday evening, the marine layer that so often envelops the Bay Area was likely to descend on the Coliseum, the aging decrepit stadium that houses the worst team in Major League Baseball.

It’s also the place where the Toronto Blue Jays were looking to start the second half of their season with considerably more aplomb than the initial run of 81 contests ended.

By any measure, the first half has been an underachievement for the Jays, who entered Tuesday’s action on pace for 88 wins, three fewer than the number that kept them a game shy of the postseason in 2021.

The added wild-card team for 2022 will help the cause, but it also comes with caution. You have to go back to 2017 to find the most recent season where 88 wins would have been enough to grab a third wild-card spot, had it existed — 91 in 2021, 93 in 2019, and 90 in 2018.

But while there may be some frustration with a late slide to keep the win total at 44 at the midway point, there doesn’t seem to be any panic among the Jays, currently sitting in third in the tough American League East.

“I don’t think we’ve played our best baseball yet, which is actually a good sign,” said centre fielder George Springer, the Jays’ highest-paid player and a star brought in to help navigate the team to playoff success.

“We’ve done an okay job of kind of staying afloat and we’ve got (12) more games until the all-star break, so we’ll see what happens.”

What has to happen — almost immediately — is help up and down the pitching staff, a situation that is approaching desperate times.

With Kevin Gausman doubtful to make his next start due to injury (ankle), Jose Berrios a mid-season work in progress and Hyunjin Ryu gone for the season, the rotation is a shadow of the one that began the season touted to be much more of a force.

With the starter’s struggles, the bullpen is threadbare and throwing on fumes, hardly a recipe for success long-term. So as much as the players are grinding through the recent lean run, the onus is on the front office to shore up the pitching staff before things get too far away.

That’s easier said than done as the market has yet to heat up, but it will soon enough as the Aug. 2 MLB trade deadline nears.

General manager Ross Atkins is expected to be active and aggressive, however. But in the meantime, those currently on the roster believe they also have more to give.

“This group understands that we haven’t played nearly up to our capabilities and we’re halfway through this thing,” said Gausman, who is nursing a bruised ankle. “We feel we’ve been pretty good, the way we’ve played, especially against good teams. We feel we raise our game when we play good teams.”

While there is urgency to right the ship, it’s been a challenge for a team fighting exhaustion amid an 18 games in 17 days stretch. Forcing the issue isn’t the solution either, as recent undisciplined at-bats have shown.

As a guy who has navigated the baseball grind as well as anyone, Springer knows when it’s paramount for a team to play its best. He also believes that lessons learned can pay off rather well.

“I would say that we’re learned from the good and we’ve learned from the bad,” Springer said. “We understand what it takes to get through the good and the bad and I think we all have a pretty firm understanding as a team of what we’re capable of doing.