Do you feel like you have too much luck in your life? Give the Toronto Blue Jays a call. they can solve it for you.
On Saturday, the Jays came back from six runs down to defeat the Minnesota Twins. All the sluggers who weren't hitting extra-base hits did. Their 10 points were the most for Toronto this season. Have a good time wherever you are.
Alec Manoah started Sunday.
Manoa became a major proponent of baseball's “looks-better-than-grades'' philosophy of pitching. On any given day, the odds of him knocking the mascot unconscious are about the same as the odds of him getting 10 strikeouts.
A year after we last saw him, All-Star Manoah showed up Sunday. He had three hits and no runs until the sixth inning. Most importantly, this wasn't a start where every out was a line drive to the warning track and a guy walked half the batters he faced. Manoa looked comfortable and in control. The match was a draw with no goals conceded.
At that moment, you could have argued that this was the Jays' best weekend of the season. The attacks are back (albeit temporarily). Their prodigal Cy Young candidate is back (again, briefly). Finally everything worked out.
But this Blue Jays team can't get a W when an L is also offered.
Manao hadn't pitched seven innings as a major league starter in over a year. In between, he yo-yoed between the majors and minors, suffered a series of mysterious injuries, and experienced a comeback worse than KISS.
This is probably not the guy you want to keep throwing out there right after you have a psychological breakthrough. He forgets about the results. Six clean innings is an investment in Manoa's future.
So the Jays threw the current Manoa back there anyway, and the usual Benny Hill nonsense broke out.
Toronto third baseman Ernie Clement stared at a bouncing ball that was an easy out from his bat to the heel of his glove, but then the ball briefly spun between his legs. Manoa's expression changed.
A few batters later, trying to get four outs from the inning, Manoa allowed a three-run home run to Carlos Santana.
Sanmu is not the end of the world. This was a perfect opportunity for the Jays' offense to get back on track for the second day in a row.
Instead, Toronto finished with two hits. The Jays lost 5-1.
So what changed in the offense from one day to the next?
“He's a different pitcher,” manager John Schneider said.
Well, if I explain it like that…
Manoa didn't seem depressed after that. He never does. Even when things were at their worst, he sounded like a guy going through a mini-downfall instead of endlessly falling into a smoking crater.
His cliche game remains the best in the league. After Sunday's game, he said, “…the defense made some big plays behind me…” among many of his teammates' best quotes.
If Manoa is back to near his best, that's good news. And even if the offense continues to play like this many nights, it's not going to make much of a difference.
The Jays are a quarter of the way through the season. With 18 wins and 22 losses, they are comfortably at the bottom of the AL East Division.
They have the 27th best offense in baseball in scoring. In terms of runs allowed, pitching (26th) is almost the same. Their bullpen is shockingly bad, and their rotation is starting to wobble. None of the stars are playing like stars. Some star players (Bo Bichette, George Springer) seem to have gotten hit in the head in the offseason and forgotten which side of the bat they should be holding. Everybody else is not a star, and they don't play like a star.
Mid-May is a little early to start figuring it out, but the Jays are already there. Despite getting off to a terrible start this year, Vlad Guerrero Jr. has been good for about a dozen games. Will he save them?
The results of the past three seasons suggest otherwise.
It is in the nature of baseball that teams who thought their season was over change their character midway through the season. All of a sudden, you can't stop them.
But those kinds of teams usually have problems in one area of their game and either fix it or improve through personnel adjustments. The Jays are bad in every part of the game.
In order to revive Manoah's career, the Jays wanted to quietly slide him into the fifth spot in the rotation. A dark and cozy place where you don't feel too much pressure. That was before Kevin Guzman started leaking like cheesecloth and Jose Berrios dropped from his early Sandy Koufax-esque levels.
If the Jays have a chance, they need a player they didn't think was very good. No one ranks higher on that list than Manoa.
It would be great if he comes out in his next start and pitches a similar game and wins.
But if he comes out and isn't at his best, it will be a bad three-game losing streak. That's not a favorable scenario for a guy who seems to be leaning no matter which direction the prevailing winds are blowing.
When things are going well, sometimes you can't lose to win. The Jays are in a different situation. It seems like the good things that happened only accentuate the bad things. What works well one day can break the next. You can never have everything working at the same time.
So what was supposed to be a celebratory weekend ends up being a bit depressing. It happens. But if it continues for another month or two, there will be no more celebrating.