'We're better than that': Blue Jays struggle to balance highs and lows

TAMPA -- Sometimes, the only positive is that it’s over.

The only cold thing in Tampa this weekend was the Blue Jays’ bats. After three hot, humid, miserable days at George M. Steinbrenner Field, the Blue Jays will be happy to see the airport. They were swept by the Rays, capped by Sunday’s 13-0 blowout loss, and scored just two runs in the series.

This comes immediately after the Blue Jays swept the Padres at home in their most impressive series of the season, dominant in nearly every way, which is what makes the three losses in Tampa so jarring. The highs have been so high -- higher than we’ve seen since at least 2023 -- but the lows have looked like this. We know this team is capable of playing great baseball, but at this point, their season will be defined by their ability to avoid stretches like this in between.

“I know that we’re capable of doing that,” manager John Schneider said. “I think that today was the first time, halfway through the game, that the environment creeps into your head a little bit. It’s tough. It’s really hot. The environment is just different. I don’t want to say that we’re spoiled, but everyone has earned the right to play in the big leagues at a big league ballpark, so I think that creeps in a bit today. The highs and lows, we have to figure that out. We have to be better at being more consistent. That’s when you see the true identity of who we are.”

The Florida heat only added to the weight of this weekend. The temperature hovered around 34 degrees Celsius (93° F), which felt like 37 degrees (99° F) with the humidity. Toronto’s blue jerseys quickly took a new shade, and while it was a challenge for everyone, the pitchers had a particularly tough time.

Chris Bassitt battled, but couldn’t find the first out in the fifth inning and was tagged with five runs on nine hits. Schneider always says that Bassitt “does weird well,” adapting to any situation, but Sunday’s environment clearly impacted the Blue Jays more than the Rays.

“You’re trying to get into the dugout and get into the clubhouse, then hopefully the offense stays on the field for a long time just to calm down,” Bassitt said.

What Bassitt alludes to here is something Schneider highlighted, too. In the second, Bassitt threw 25 pitches in a long, slow inning, but the Blue Jays’ batters saw just four pitches in the next frame, forcing Bassitt right back out there. That, along with Jonatan Clase getting picked off at first, were “careless mistakes” that the manager was not happy with.

Schneider knows these environments well from his life in the Minor Leagues, and many in the organization were around in 2020 and ‘21, when the Blue Jays played many of their regular season games out of their spring home in Dunedin, Fla., through the COVID-19 pandemic.

“It sucks. I remember being here in the Florida State League and the Gulf Coast League, it’s brutal,” Schneider said. “I know they’re doing everything they can to keep the dugouts a little bit cooler and I know we have a lot of ideas. We went through it in Dunedin a couple of years ago. We went as far as putting extra jerseys in freezers in the tunnel to change between innings.”

Regardless of what the thermometer said, though, the Blue Jays’ frustrations lie in their inconsistencies. This would be different if they were an average team hovering around .500, but that’s not what’s happening here. They look incredible for a weekend, then step right back to where they started, constantly hovering near .500 with these peaks and valleys.

“We’re better than that,” Schneider said. “It’s frustrating coming off the series at home against San Diego.”

There’s no secret sauce to consistency. Even some of the best teams in the league go through their own extremes like this, but if that’s the way a team is going to play, the good needs to far outweigh the bad.

Right now, it feels like the Blue Jays have equal weights on each end of the scale, which just continues to see-saw back and forth, back and forth.

The schedule shows that their next game will be played in Arlington, Texas, which is where they’ll look to get this back on track, but at this point, it might as well just read “anywhere but Tampa.”