Blue Jays show they are class above also-rans with Royals sweep

TORONTO – The Toronto Blue Jays are a far better team than the Kansas City Royals right now.

This statement is far from a shock. The Blue Jays are a team hoping to contend while the Royals came into this season expecting to tread water – at best. When they opened the series Toronto had a 9-5 record to Kansas City’s 3-10. So, it wasn’t altogether surprising to see the Blue Jays earn a sweep, culminating in a 15-5 win on Wednesday.

It was, however, a good sign for a team that was living in also-ran country thanks to an anemic offence just one year ago.

“I don’t know what I expected [from this lineup],” J.A. Happ said after a six-inning four-run outing. “But it’s fun to watch. I know I say that a lot, but we stayed on them again today and that’s how you win ballgames. It’s tough to sweep anybody.”

Simply put, the Royals came into Toronto and played bad baseball. They committed four errors to the Blue Jays’ one. They hit 5-for-28 with runners in scoring position. They allowed eight of 12 inherited runners to score. They got blown out in the first game of the series, coughed up a lead in the second, and did both in the third. By the time they left town they’d been outscored 31-12.

Poorly-played baseball is hard to quantify, but it’s often easy to identify – and that’s the kind of baseball the Royals played in this series. The Blue Jays had a major role in the drubbing to be certain – you can’t score 31 runs solely on your opponent’s mistakes – but they were given the opportunity to succeed. The difference between this club and the disappointing 2017 version is that they took it.

“We’re playing good baseball, bottom line, and doing everything well,” manager John Gibbons said of the series. “So you try to ride that.”

Right now the Blue Jays sit at a sterling 12-5. The reason for that, more than anything else, is that they’ve beaten up on teams less talented than them. Like the Royals, the Chicago White Sox, Baltimore Orioles, Texas Rangers all projected to be subpar outfits and they’ve proven worthy of that designation so far. In four series against these squads the Blue Jays have now gone 9-3.

That information could be used to diminish the Blue Jays’ start, and there would be some validity to that. However, this team doesn’t write its schedule and its ability to pummel the presumed cellar dwellers does tell us something about them. Does it tell us that they’re ready to take the division away from the clutches of the sizzling Boston Red Sox or the sure-to-rebound Bronx Bombers? No, we don’t know that yet – though a 3-2 record against the New York Yankees and Cleveland Indians is a solid start down that road and we’ll learn a little more when they travel to New York on Thursday for a four-game set.

“They’re going to be rocking and rolling at Yankee Stadium, obviously a tough ballpark to play in an opponent,” Curtis Granderson – who capped the series with a late grand slam – said. “But we’ve just got to come in and do the things we’ve continued to do up to this point.”

For now, the Blue Jays have won the games they’re supposed to win and done so convincingly. The American League has some intimidating squads in its upper tier, especially with the Los Angeles Angels looking like the real deal, but it also has a number of clubs going nowhere fast. The Blue Jays aren’t necessarily in either category, but they certainly don’t look like they’re in the latter – and that’s excellent news for fans who watched this team fall into a sinkhole from the get-go last year.

Now is not the time to let wild optimism run amok or change our collective conception of the Blue Jays too much. This team has many hurdles to clear. The bullpen probably won’t be this good all year. Skepticism about Yangervis Solarte and Teoscar Hernandez is still fair. Josh Donaldson’s season outlook has to be on the murkier side. Luke Maile’s heroics have an expiration date.

Theoretically speaking, it’s impossible to prove a negative, but the Blue Jays have done their darnedest this year to demonstrate they are are a class above the dregs of the AL. The next step will be proving the aren’t a class below the Junior Circuit’s juggernauts.

That’ll be a significantly harder task.

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