On schedule

Manoah helped rotation weather season’s toughest test Wilner,

Somewhere around the middle of the fifth inning of Sunday’s series finale against Joey Votto and the Cincinnati Reds, the Blue Jays will reach the quarter mark of the season.

When they do, they’ll be a team with a winning record and holding down a playoff spot, though by a lot less than pretty much everybody expected on both counts.

It’s very easy to look at the first quarter and see where things went right (starting pitching, high-leverage relief ) and went sideways (hitting with runners in scoring position, offence in general), but there’s a lot more to the story.

For example, hands up everybody who thought Santiago Espinal would be the Jays’ team leader in wins above replacement on Victoria Day weekend. Anybody? You’re lying, put your hand down.

There’s a general downturn in offence across the game, but it’s fair to say even with that nobody expected the Jays to be at this point without a single hitter with an on-base-plusslugging percentage as high as .850. They had four last year, nearly half the lineup, with Vladimir Guerrero Jr.’s league-leading 1.002 at the top of the list.

The 23-year-old wunderkind continues to be the team’s best hitter, though most recently without the thump we’re used to seeing.

The average OPS in the major leagues is just .685, down significantly from last year’s .728 mark. Thank the humidors or the squishy balls for that. Still, the Jays have four regulars below .685 right now in Bo Bichette, Matt Chapman, Lourdes Gurriel Jr. and Teoscar Hernández; Alejandro Kirk is basically right on it.

That leaves only Espinal, Guerrero and George Springer as betterthan-average big-league hitters this season — with all due respect to Danny Jansen, who has been the best of the bunch but because of an oblique injury has barely come to the plate 20 times.

Say what you will about this team being dead last in the American League at hitting with runners in scoring position, but that will correct itself in time; it always has. What massively defies expectation is that they only have three aboveaverage hitters so deep into the season.

That’s not going to last, general

manager Ross Atkins said on this week’s episode of the Star’s “Deep Left Field” podcast.

“You can feel it,” Atkins said. “We’re getting deeper into counts, we’re making it harder on starters and the contact has been harder. (I’m) really excited about what’s ahead of us offensively as that starts to improve, and I’m exceptionally confident it will.”

There have been complaints about the bullpen, especially in the wake of blown saves by Yimi García, Tim Mayza and Jordan Romano on an ugly 2-7 road trip through Cleve- land, New York and Tampa Bay, but that’s some pretty heavy recency bias at work.

Romano still leads the league in saves, while García’s season stats are badly skewed by one awful outing against the Red Sox in April, in which he got dinged for four runs while only recording one out. Throw that outing away and his ERA drops by 2 1 ⁄ runs. Mayza will 2 be missed while on the injured list with elbow inflammation, having been one of the best relievers in baseball for the past calendar year.

The truth of the bullpen is that the highest-leverage relievers — Romano, García, Mayza, Adam Cimber and David Phelps — have been outstanding. The only issue one might have is that they haven’t been perfect and with the offence rarely providing any sort of breathing room, they’ve had to be just that a whole lot of the time.

It should get easier as the schedule opens up, and that might be the most important factor in evaluating the club as it puts the first quarter in the rear-view mirror.

That quarter was some kind of tough.

After a shorter-than-normal spring training thanks to the offseason lockout, they played 30 games in 31 days. Twenty-five of their first 35 were against the Yankees, Red Sox, Astros and Rays — all 2021 playoff teams.

“I think what gets lost on a lot of people is (that) we just had a long stretch and played some very, very tough teams,” Springer said after game 32 of that run, a second straight loss to the Yankees in New York. “(We) had some close games, had a lot of mentally draining games, a lot of physically draining games. It’s not an excuse for why we’re not doing what we expect to do as a team, but it happens. (Playing) 30 (games in) 31 days to start the year against really good teams is hard to do.”

To emerge from that stretch with a winning record is even harder to do, but the Jays managed to do it, albeit by the slimmest of margins having won 18 of 35.

Ross Stripling, who more than ably filled in for Hyun-Jin Ryu when the big lefty was down with a forearm injury, has missed the playoffs only once in his seven years in the big leagues, and that was with last year’s 91-win Jays team that fell just short. He’s very happy with how the Jays emerged from the toughest early schedule in the majors.

“We’re going to have stretches that are tough moving forward,” said the righty, “but nothing as tough as that one. It’s now over with. Thirty (games) in 31 days against the calibre of teams that we played and we had a winning record. I think we’ve got to feel really good about that and hold our heads high … and that’s what you see in our locker room. I don’t think any of us are feeling down or feeling like we didn’t come out of it in a good spot.”

And while the schedule has played a major role in falling short of what were some oversized expectations early on (remember, they’re still in a playoff spot), it could very well play just as large in the recovery over the final 75 per cent of the season.

According to powerrankingsguru.com, the Jays have played the toughest schedule in the major leagues to this point and will have the fourth-easiest schedule the rest of the way. Things are looking up, indeed.