The Blue Jays know exactly why they’re imploding – but hey, that’s a good thing

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The Toronto Blue Jays had a bad week at work.

On Monday, things started out fine. Not great, but fine. A couple, three games out of a wild-card spot. More than a third of the way through the season and they were maintaining contact with the lead group.

By Friday, the wheels on the bus no longer went round and round. Four grisly come-from-ahead losses in a row will do that to you.

When your own players have started torching each other mid-game and making national news for doing so, that will really do that to you.

When your manager throws his hands up and says the equivalent of “What do you expect from these idiots they give me?” Yes. That will do that to you.

After Thursday’s regularly scheduled bullpen disaster, manager Charlie Montoyo decided to change the emotional temperature. Remember when he told reporters, “This is what we got,” punctuated with an uncharacteristic f-word?

That’s in the past. Ancient history. So much changed in the two days since then. Not in terms of baseball. The baseball was still terrible. But everything else is amazing.

“We’re having fun. We’re working hard,” Montoyo said after beating the Yankees through the first six innings and then losing very badly to them for the last three. “That’s what people need to know. That’s why I wish you guys were here. So you can see and I don’t have to say it.”

Poor Montoyo. His post-game pressers are starting to sound like a letter home from someone who’s mistakenly gone on vacation during monsoon season.

“Is it wet? Sure. Does the roof leak? It does. But we love rain! The kids are having so much fun on overnight bucket duty!”

Maybe what Montoyo needs isn’t bullpen help. Maybe it’s an emergency Instagram account. Then he can post goofy, life-affirming selfies from batting practice. Say, him putting Vlad Guerrero, Jr. and Bo Bichette in a fun, double headlock. #BaseballLife. #WishYouGuysWereHere. #SoIDidntHaveToSayIt.

Then, a couple of hours later, the nightly slaughter begins.

Why does this season – which is subjectively better than any the Jays have had since the Donaldson-Bautista glory days – seem so depressing?

Guerrero is part of it. He’s having a campaign for the ages. He’s Mike Trout, but interesting.

Also like Trout, he is stuck on a team whose purpose is highlighting his brilliance by playing poorly around him.

Marcus Semien and Hyun-Jin Ryu are part of it. The pair represent two (measured) gambles in free agency that are paying off like a Daily Double. Semien is, without question, the best signing in baseball this year. Problematically, that’s all he’s contracted for – one year. If the team can’t come up to his level, it’s been for naught.

George Springer is part of it. They ought to put him in a special, hoop-ringed, red-and-white uniform so that fans can spot him in a crowd. Where’s George today? With the team getting therapy? On a rehab assignment in the swampiest parts of Florida? His various injuries have been day-to-day for months and months. It’s getting hard to keep up.

The bullpen is a big part of it. You’ve heard of the gang that can’t shoot straight? This is the gang that forgot its guns at home. A month ago, they were frustrating. Now, the only emotion they elicit is pity. It seems unfair to keep sending this sad-sack collection of semi-major leaguers out there every night knowing they will get their doors blown off.

It’s become popular amongst a certain section of the fan base to blame Montoyo for this failure. But what’s he supposed to do? Pitch for them?

(Actually, that’s not a terrible idea. Stupid, maybe. Impossible, yes. But just wild enough to …)

As with all teams in the midst of a total system failure, the blame is diffuse. It’s on the players for not playing well. It’s on the coach for being unable to motivate them to do so. It’s on management for choosing the wrong guys.

But the depressive aspect of this team comes from a good place – hope.

It’s been a long time since the Jays had the building blocks of what looks like an era-spanning powerhouse.

The last time the team was really good, its stars were either in the middle of or cresting the end of their primes. That was a team designed for a good time, not a long one.

This team had just started to look like the St. Louis Cardinals of not so long ago – one of those clubs designed to dominate the game for a decade or more with talent it identified and developed.

Guerrero’s emergence as the player he’d been advertised as turned that hope to expectation. Early, positive returns in the standings sharpened that sense.

And now this.

You know what comes next. This week’s sudden dip won’t go on forever. It will be followed by recurrent bursts of competence. Maybe even a winning streak or three. But the trend will be steadily downward. No one can win with a bullpen this devoid of quality.

The 2021 Jays will end up being the most frustrating sort of loser in baseball – a team whose analytics-based record is 10 or 15 games better than its actual record. A team that should have won, but didn’t.

Bizarrely, I find this all vaguely positive. Baseball is full of teams that are mediocre and don’t know why, exactly.

The Jays have a precise idea of why they aren’t good – their most expensive baseball player doesn’t play baseball and they need to do a little clean-up in the relief corps. With a firehose.

For the first time in about a million years, the problems are not just fixable. They are apparent.

That doesn’t solve the problem of this year. This year is a wash waiting to happen. But it means that if expectation arrived a little soon, hope is still going strong.