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cathal kelly

At this point in his career, R.A. Dickey outings are rarely great. They vary somewhere between middling and shambolic. The best thing that can be said for them is that they go on for a while.

Saturday was not one of those days. Maybe it was the heat. Or the roof. Or the wind. Or the humidity. Or the … it's hard to keep track of all the reasons why Dickey's knuckleball doesn't knuckle.

"Sometimes you're at the mercy of the pitch," Dickey said afterward. "It's going to do what it's going to do."

What it was going to do on Saturday was seek and find repeated contact with hardwood surfaces and human tissue. Dickey's day was undone by a pair of hit batsmen and a subsequent Nelson Cruz grand slam. He was pulled in the fourth after recording no outs.

"I've had a lot of starts here as a Blue Jay and that may have been my shortest. So, looking to kind of reset and push forward."

It was your shortest in five years.

"It was just a really bizarre outing."

In fairness to him, no one else was much better. Jesse Chavez allowed six hits against two outs. Drew Storen threw an inning of batting practice. They booed Storen when he gave up another home run to Cruz. Then they patronizingly cheered him when he finally got someone to hit into a groundout.

After three hours spent watching awful baseball in the withering heat, you could forgive them their annoyance. The Jays lost 14-5– their most lopsided reverse of the season, and possibly the most gruesome to witness.

"One of those games. Everybody gets caught up in it. Once things start going south like that, usually everybody gets victimized," Blue Jays manager John Gibbons said.

How bad was it? The Jays best pitcher on the day may have been mid-season DL parachutee Franklin Morales – a player Toronto buried in the minors until they had to either bring him up or cut him and lose a (very poor) $2-million (U.S.) investment.

Once a power pitcher, Morales now throws a fastball in the mid-to-upper 80s without the benefit of much movement. What he's doing on the mound has more in common with lawn-bowling than with baseball.

But nobody likes to buy something and have to give it away still sealed in the box. Might as well take it out and bash it around a bit first. And so, for now, Morales will continue to be employed as a major-league player.

Bullpen issues remain top of mind, but Dickey has got to be creeping up management's Fear Factor index.

He remains a prodigious eater of innings, but that isn't much use if the team is losing the vast majority of those games.

Toronto is 7-14 in contests Dickey has started this season. No one else in the rotation is under .500. Cumulatively, the Jays are 47-30 behind any other starter.

Essentially, when Dickey starts, the Toronto Blue Jays lose.

That isn't entirely Dickey's fault. His run support has been atrocious. The Jays score an average of 3.9 runs – close to the lowest in Major League Baseball. J.A. Happ is getting the benefit of twice as many runs.

But at a certain point, you have to ask yourself why one guy consistently has such poor luck.

There's not much to be done about it now. The Jays will spend the rest of the season hoping their most eldest statesman finds that reset button. If he doesn't, they'll stick with him in any case.

Dickey's never been spectacular as a Blue Jay, but he has been remarkably consistent. Maybe he can pull himself back to his personal median over the final third of the season.

But it's very likely that we are seeing the last of him in Toronto. His contract is up at year's end. His numbers suggest that the pitch that rescued his career is beginning to desert him. At 41 years old, time is not on his side. And no one is ever going to pay him anywhere close to the money he made here ($12-million per year).

In the end, he'll likely be remembered in Toronto as an intriguing personality, a reliable presence and the guy who was traded for Noah Syndergaard.

If Dickey would like the storyline to run differently, he has, perhaps, three months to change it.

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