Quiet offence continues to cost skidding Blue Jays in series finale vs. Astros

HOUSTON — Several things are concurrently true about the early returns of the 2025 Toronto Blue Jays.

For starters, they aren’t hitting for power. The Blue Jays entered Wednesday’s game with only 13 home runs, the second-fewest across MLB and only half that of a league-average team. Their .105 ISO was also second-last; their 5.7 per cent barrel rate, dead last. The team leader in home runs — Andres Gimenez with three — hasn’t hit one this month.

And yet, the Blue Jays knew the early part of their season would be difficult, chock-full of frigid, outdoor road games against contending teams. In just the last seven days, Toronto hitters have had to contend with Spencer Schwellenbach, Spencer Strider, Bryan Woo, Logan Gilbert, Luis Castillo, and Hunter Brown. Not an easy assignment among them. Most lineups would struggle under the circumstances.

Still, the offensive returns against that competition — the Blue Jays hit only two homers while OPS’ing .562 and scoring 2.3 runs per game over that stretch — felt familiar. This offence’s 2025 sample is small. But the personnel wasn’t dramatically different during an as-large-as-it-gets 2024 sample, either, when the Blue Jays scored the eighth-fewest runs in the league while hitting the fifth-fewest home runs.

But the club overhauled its hitting department over the winter and signed a free agent who clubbed 44 homers last year. League-wide offence reliably starts slow and improves gradually through late spring and summer. There’s no questioning the power potential of the top three hitters in Toronto’s lineup. Give it enough time and it ought to come.

Of course, now the Blue Jays are struggling to produce against definitive non-aces such as Ronel Blanco and Ryan Gusto — the definition of gettable guys for an offence with designs of contending. Yet, every team goes through cold stretches like this at some point every season — this one’s only magnified because we’re in the first month.

But these April games count just as much as the September ones. Shouldn’t the Blue Jays have more urgency to correct this? Sure, but what you see is all there is, and we’re barely through 15 per cent of the season. Who’s to say what the remaining 85 per cent will look like?

Well, it’s not like the pitching or the competition is going to get any easier — this is the best league in the world. If the Blue Jays can’t hit now, why should anyone have hope that they will in the future? Well, why should anyone have hope about anything in this silly game heavily influenced by random chance and statistical variance? Are a hitter’s outcomes not the result of untold variables within a massive, interconnected system we couldn’t possibly begin to comprehend, much less predict?

Are you having fun yet? Probably not if you’re a Blue Jays fan who watched all three games of this week’s series in Houston and saw the team get swept, mustering only two runs on nine hits and five walks in the process.

Wednesday’s loss — a 3-1 result that didn’t feel that close — was Toronto’s fifth consecutive and dropped the team a game under .500. It’s not necessarily the way you want to go into a weekend series in The Bronx. On Wednesday alone, the Yankees scored more runs (5) on more hits (11) and more walks (8) than the Blue Jays did over three games in Houston.

“Yeah, we’ve faced some good pitching. But I think that our at-bats have been a little bit quicker than they were earlier in the year,” said Blue Jays manager John Schneider. “And probably guys are pressing a little bit, wanting to get this thing turned around. We just have to go back to getting our pitch. You get a good pitch to hit, put a good swing on it, good things happen. They had our number this series, though, for sure.”

So, let’s talk about what happened. After working around a pair of first-inning singles, Blue Jays starter Bowden Francis took heavy shots in the second, as Christian Walker took a hanging curveball for a ride into the Crawford Boxes before Yanier Diaz tripled on a long lob into the right field corner that Addison Barger couldn’t come up with. Diaz scored on a single five pitches later, and four pitches after that, the bases were suddenly loaded.

Francis ultimately contained the damage to only three runs, the final one scoring on a 399-foot Yordan Alvarez sacrifice fly to the warning track in dead centre. And he found a groove from there, retiring six of his next seven to keep his pitch count contained and get into the fifth.

But he didn’t see the end of that inning, turning things over to Toronto’s bullpen shortly after Alvarez worked him for an 11-pitch leadoff walk. Francis, typically effective working to the edges of the zone, left a number of fastballs up and over the plate throughout his outing and, in fairness, got away with more of them than he paid for. But his splitter became a more effective weapon as the night went on, which helped him keep the Astros off his heater.

“I thought the splitter was pretty good. But fastball command just took me an inning or two to get it dialled in, command-wise,” Francis said. “I just couldn’t really get it arm-side. I couldn’t get it in on righties really well early on. Which obviously opens up the outer half.

“If I can establish in earlier, I can get some uncomfortable swings on my other stuff. But it’s just one of those days.”

Scattering eight hits and a walk while allowing three runs over 5.1 innings isn’t what Francis set out to do — but it can be good enough for a win on many nights like this one, with a rested bullpen behind him and an off-day looming. But anything short of near perfection hasn’t been enough for a Blue Jays starter of late as the club’s offence continues its journey through the wilderness.

Silencing Toronto’s bats this time around was Gusto, a 26-year-old rookie making his third big-league start who struck out six over his 5.2 innings of one-run ball. The right-hander worked up-and-in with fastballs and down-and-away with sweepers to right-handed hitters, while trying to stay away from lefties with fastballs, changeups, and curveballs. His fastball sat at 94-m.p.h. with good ride, and none of his secondaries were overwhelming, but he mixed and matched them effectively enough to navigate a rather stress-free night.

“There were pitches that I think guys usually hit and they weren’t getting to,” Schneider said. “And then I think guys wanting to get something done and maybe being a little bit antsy, that was kind of the difference today.”

The Blue Jays did well not to chase Gusto off the plate, but they whiffed through eight pitches that caught the strike zone and put only five balls in play at 100+ mph, two of them outs off Barger’s bat. Their only run came in the fourth when a hustling Vladimir Guerrero Jr. took advantage of Jose Altuve’s lacklustre arm to score all the way from first on a George Springer double up the left field line.

From there, Gusto and Astros relievers held the Blue Jays without a hit until Bo Bichette’s two-out single in the eighth, which was quickly followed by a soft, inning-ending groundout by Guerrero as he chased a two-strike slider off the plate.

George Springer, who walked, and a pinch-hitting Ernie Clement, who doubled on the first pitch he saw, did light a quick spark against Astros closer Josh Hader in the ninth, putting two runners in scoring position with one out. But Alejandro Kirk struck out and Myles Straw flew out, bringing an end to another quiet night for a Blue Jays offence that’s hardly been heard from in over a week.

“You understand that it’s a long season and you try not to deviate from the norm too much. These guys, the way they battled this whole series, the way they hung in there today — you’re one swing away from tying it or taking the lead,” Schneider said. “You trust them. It’s a tough stretch. It’s a tough series. But you can’t panic by any means. It’s way too early to be talking about doing anything drastic. And it takes one game to get out of it, really.”

More from Sportsnet

Blue Jays’ Daulton Varsho goes hitless in first rehab game with triple-A Buffalo

Blue Jays bats stifled again by Astros’ Blanco as offensive woes mount