Blue Jays break typical pattern in grim loss to White Sox

Not only have the Toronto Blue Jays lost more games than they’ve won this season, they’ve also tended to lose in predictable fashion.

A Blue Jays loss tends to go like this:

• Pitching that’s OK, with an ugly start if anything

• Non-existent offence thanks to too many strikeouts

• Limited excitement

With the exception of the last point, that’s not how things played out in their 4-2 loss to the Chicago White Sox on Thursday night. Perhaps the only part of the standard pattern that fit was Marcus Stroman continuing to get no run support.

The right-hander was solid once again, giving up just one earned run in six strong innings. His normally-sturdy bullpen, however, was not. Joe Biagini barely escaped a bases-loaded jam thanks to an inexplicable strikeout of Welington Castillo and Derek Law let the game unravel in the bottom of the eighth.

It was the offence that was truly inexplicable, though. On paper, the club did a few things right. The Blue Jays brought one of the league’s worst strikeout rates into the game, perhaps their biggest singular problem with the bats. In this one they managed a season-low three strikeouts in their 31 trips to the plate - quite a feat in 2019.

They also walked a more-than-respectable four times. You rarely see teams posting BB to K ratios above one in a game these days, especially ones like the Blue Jays, whose .30 season rate is 26th in the league.

Another overlooked aspect of the team’s 2019 struggles has been the inability to produce on the bases. Prior to this game, their -2.6 BsR was 24th in the majors and their stolen base total of nine was tied for dead last.

On Thursday they swiped two bases, one of them a beautiful swipe from Jonathan Davis, and the other an ugly clunker amid the confusion of a Vladimir Guerrero Jr. called strikeout from Eric Sogard.

If you were told coming into a Blue Jays game that the team would walk more than it struck out, steal multiple bases, and get a quality start, you’d think they’d be in for a win. In this case, not only did they not win, they never led.

Any rebuilding process is going to lead to ugly losses, and there’s no doubt this was an ugly loss. There were unforced errors like a tough Freddy Galvis botched grounder and a poor call for a Sogard bunt in the eighth, plus the club couldn’t capitalize on a huge advantage in the matchup between the starters.

Finding a silver lining is difficult, but if nothing else it was a different sort of loss.

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