Based on an admittedly small sample size, May does not appear to be the panacea that Blue Jays fans might have been hoping for. After a pretty excruciating road trip through Chicago and Minnesota, the Jays return home to face last year's surprise team, the Kansas City Royals, which this year has been looking unsurprisingly awful. Tony Pena's club is doing its best to prove that last year's successful campaign was, in fact, the fluke that it appeared; sound familiar? Lefty Jimmy Gobble faces The Illustrated Man, Justin Miller, in a 7:05 pm start.
About the Blue Jays so far, I'll say this: when teams are on a roll, it seems that someone different makes the key contribution every night, that a different aspect of the team comes to the forefront to carry the day. Winning breeds confidence, which gets everyone loose and positive, which improves their performance, which breeds winning: it's a virtuous cycle. "A different hero every night," the announcers say, but the real hero is the spirit of a team that has somehow temporarily forgotten how to lose. There are few things more buoyant and more enjoyable than a team on a winning streak.
When teams are in a funk, it's exactly the opposite: something different happens every night to cost the team the game. One night the bullpen gives away a lead, the next night the batters can't drive in anyone from scoring position, the next night the starter doesn't get out of the third inning. Slumping batters cause their teammates to try too hard, resulting in more slumps; pitchers get too careful in an effort to minimize the damage (or overthrow, in an attempt to do it all themselves) and end up going away from their strengths. The absence of confidence is far more contagious than confidence; it's a malaise that seeps inside the heads of everyone on the club, and baseball is very much a head game. It happens to the best of teams; the Blue Jays, not the best of teams, are mired in it right now.
The smallest or unlikeliest thing can snap a funk; no one would ever have expected the Jays' gigantic comeback against these same Royals at home last May, a comeback that virtually everyone associated with the team pointed to as the turning point of an eventual 85-win season. It could happen tonight, a single event that superstitious players silently and thankfully believe marks the end of a torment whose beginning no one could really pinpoint. This team badly needs a break, maybe especially a lucky break, and it needs the irrational confidence that such breaks can deliver. Once the dam breaks and the tension is released -- and it will happen, sooner or later -- this talented team could easily shift out of its vicious cycle and into a virtuous one in the blink of an eye. Watch for it.
https://www.battersbox.ca/article.php?story=20040503052425999