Luckless Blue Jays already running out of road in AL East as returning Manoah struggles

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Do you find that you are experiencing too much good luck in your life? Call up the Toronto Blue Jays. They can fix that for you.

On Saturday, the Jays came back from six runs down to beat the Minnesota Twins. All the sluggers who haven’t been slugging slugged. Their 10 runs scored was Toronto’s most this season. Good times all around.

On Sunday, they started Alek Manoah.

Manoah has become baseball’s main proponent of the ‘looks better than his results’ school of pitching. On a given day, he seems about as likely to knock the mascot unconscious as he is to strike out 10.

A year after we’d last seen him, All-Star-calibre Manoah showed up on Sunday. Through six innings, he’d allowed three hits and no runs. Most important, this wasn’t one of those starts where every out is a line drive to the warning track and the guy walks half the batters he faces. Manoah looked comfortable and in control. The game was a runless tie.

In that moment, you could have argued this had been the best weekend of the Jays’ season. The offence was back (albeit briefly). Their prodigal Cy Young contender had returned (again, briefly). Everything was finally working out.

But this Blue Jays team cannot take a W when there’s an L on offer as well.

Manaoh hadn’t thrown seven innings in a big-league start for more than a year. In between, he’s yo-yo’d between the majors and minors, been repeatedly, mysteriously, injured, and had more bad comebacks than KISS.

Maybe this is not the guy you want to keep throwing out there right after he’s just had a psychological breakthrough. Forget the result. Six pristine innings is an investment in future Manoah.

So the Jays threw present Manoah back out there anyway, and the usual Benny Hill nonsense broke out.

Toronto third baseman Ernie Clement looked at a bouncing ball that was an easy out all the way off the bat onto the heel of his glove, whereupon it caromed around between his legs for a bit. Manoah got a look on his face.

A couple of batters later, trying to get the fourth out of the inning, Manoah gave up a three-run homer to Carlos Santana.

Three-nothing is not the end of the world. Here was a gold-plated chance for the Jays’ offence to pick up the slack two days in a row.

Instead, Toronto finished with two hits. The Jays lost 5-1.

So what changed about the offence from one day to the next?

“Different pitcher,” manager John Schneider said.

Well, when you explain it like that …

Afterward, Manoah didn’t look crestfallen. He never does. Even when things were at their worst, he sounded like a guy experiencing a small dip, rather than falling endlessly into a smoking crater.

His cliché game remains best in league. Rattling off the many superlatives of his teammates after Sunday’s game he included, “ … defence made some big plays behind me …”

If Manoah is back to anywhere close to his best, that’s good news. And if the offence keeps playing like this more nights than not, it won’t make a whit of difference.

The Jays have now completed a quarter of the season. At 18-22, they are comfortably last in the AL East.

They have the 27th-best offence in baseball by runs scored. They’re about the same in pitching (26th) by runs allowed. Their bullpen is shockingly bad and their rotation is starting to wobble. None of the stars are playing like stars. Some of the stars (Bo Bichette, George Springer) look like they were hit in the head in the off-season and forgot which end of the bat you’re meant to hold. Everyone else is not a star and isn’t playing like one.

Mid-May is a bit early to start grasping, but the Jays are already there. After a terrible start to the year, Vlad Guerrero Jr. has been kind of good for a dozen games. Will he save them?

The results of the past three seasons would not seem to suggest so.

It is in the nature of baseball that teams you thought were finished do a personality switch midseason. All of a sudden, they can’t be stopped.

But that sort of team typically has problems in one area of the game that they either work out or improve with a personnel adjustment. The Jays are bad at all parts of the game.

In order to resuscitate Manoah’s career, the Jays wanted to slip him quietly into fifth spot in the rotation. Somewhere dark and cozy where he wouldn’t feel too much pressure. That was before Kevin Gausman started leaking like cheesecloth and José Berríos fell off his early, Sandy Koufax-esque levels.

If the Jays are going to have a chance, they need players they didn’t think would be good to be extremely good. No one’s higher on that list than Manoah.

If he comes out in his next start and throws the same sort of game and wins, then great.

If, however, he comes out and is not his best, that’ll be three bad losses in a row. For a guy who seems to tilt in whichever direction the prevailing wind is blowing, that is not a propitious scenario.

Sometimes, when things are going well, you can’t lose for winning. The Jays are in the other situation. The good things that happen only seem to highlight the bad ones. The stuff that works one day falls apart the next. They can never get everything working at the same time.

So a weekend that should have been celebratory ends up as a bit of a downer. That happens. But if it keeps happening for another month or two, there won’t be any more celebrations left to have.