This was a bad few days for the Toronto Blue Jays. It may in hindsight be the point when things began to seriously fall apart.
The club hasn’t been doing much to endear itself to the city for a while now. It is getting worse, while continuing to insist that hanging on is synonymous with contending.
Aside from playing the game, its other function is whining about the condition of the stadium the Blue Jays play in. It needs repairs. Well, great. You got it essentially for free. Repair it.
But the implication seems to be that the rest of us should help pay for that.
The Jays bungled their initial response to Roy Halladay’s death. They won’t even pretend to want to sign their biggest star. The brightest spot in the organization is a teenager who spends his evenings delighting the citizens of New Hampshire.
But those are baseball problems. They can be solved by being better at baseball.
When Roberto Osuna was put on leave following an assault charge, that is a human problem. That one’s not so easily fixed.
The situation, if not the alleged offence, might be compared to Yunel Escobar’s 2012 adventure in eye-black bigotry. The then-Jays shortstop wrote down a homophobic slur in Spanish and took the field with it pasted to his face.
That iteration of Jays management moved quickly to try to mitigate the damage. They suspended Escobar for three games. He did a news conference the next day.
Since Escobar spent most of it dissembling – “I have friends who are gay. The person who decorates my house is gay” – it didn’t go so well.
The incident occurred a few days before the end of a lost season. Escobar was neither young nor especially good, so it was easy enough to trade him away over the winter. Problem solved – sort of.
When Kevin Pillar ran into the same problem – shouting rather than writing the same word – he was left largely to his own devices. Pillar was wise enough to show genuine-sounding contrition.
That was last year. Good vibes created by the recent playoff runs still surrounded the Jays like a forcefield. People weren’t just willing to forgive. They wanted very badly to forgive.
They wanted it partly because Pillar is popular in a way Escobar was not, and partly because pulling away from the team meant robbing themselves of something they enjoy. They weren’t going to let one dope ruin it, even if the dope was an integral part of the thing itself.
But those sorts of failures are cracks in the foundation of fandom, especially transitory fandom. Over time, they spread. If they continue to add up – and are not trowelled over with winning – people lose interest. No one wants to root for a collection of jerks.
That brings us to Osuna.
This is factors worse than anything that came before. It involves an alleged crime of violence against someone presumably unable to defend themselves. There’s no good explanation.
Worse yet, there’s no explanation at all. Sports organizations still cling to the “it’s before the courts” excuse, but no one buys that any more.
If you, on the one hand, want to be up in everyone’s faces advertising all the salutary aspects of the players’ private lives – he has his own charity; he owns a cute dog; follow him on Instagram – but clam up once something bad happens, people notice the disparity.
We know none of the details of the incident. Depending on how it proceeds through the courts, we may never know them. If people are left wondering, they will assume the worst.
All that is certain is that, eventually, Osuna will be cleared to play again.
And what then?
Unlike Escobar, Osuna is not dispensable in a baseball sense. He’s a young relief pitcher, very good at what he does and relatively cheap.
If what is alleged to have happened did happen, the smart play would be to rid yourselves of him. He can find a job elsewhere, just not here.
No business ever damaged its standing in the community by taking a principled stand, and this is not robbing someone of their living. He was a millionaire yesterday. He’ll be more of a millionaire in the years to come.
God knows that if Osuna spent his workdays railing in the media about how much he hates the team’s ownership, the baseball ops people would not be countering that he had the third-best WAR among closers last year. He’d be gone.
If you trade him, some of your customers will be angry, though not in any way that sticks because they know they’re on the cruel side of the argument.
But sports teams aren’t smart that way. They’re smart in morality-free, pragmatic ways. They think in terms of one goal – winning. Osuna helps them win. Ergo …
Meanwhile, an idea begins to take hold. That the Toronto Blue Jays are not a civic-minded institution. They aren’t an extension of the city’s best self. They are instead a business, with all the rotten connotations that go along with it.
If people wanted to root for businesses, there would be more cheering at shareholder meetings.
That idea attaches itself slowly over time. Its creep into the hive mind quickens when the team isn’t performing. And right now, the Jays are just okay. Based on probabilities – and the fact that most of their starting rotation is rolling the ball up to the plate – they will be less than that soon.
Baseball remains deeply embedded in the city. The team will never lose everyone. There will always be fans who will stick in even if the Jays run out a lineup of armed robbers. These are the people who can separate the art from the artist.
Most people can’t do that. These are the fans on the fringes, the ones who hopped on in ’15 because this all seemed like fun or get involved when the club is at the top of the news cycle. They’ll retreat.
When they do, it won’t be because the team is trailing badly in the AL East. It’ll be because the Jays, through a fault of their own, have made themselves hard to like.
Cathal Kelly