Stretch drive, crunch time, call it what you will. Just don’t be surprised if the Blue Jays’ lineup is a little more fluid than usual. Do we heat up at the plate like Bo Bichette, who entered Monday hitting .360/.439/.540 over the last two weeks? Go to the triple hole. Looking for something like Lourdes Gurriel Jr., who hit .167/.216/.271 in that same span? He fell to eighth place. Deep in the weeds like Whit Merrifield, who has sunk into a .163/.250/.233 funk that began four weeks ago? Started on the bench for the seventh time in Toronto’s last 12 games. Blue Jays manager John Schneider can no longer afford to give poor players a runway to get out of it. He must embrace recency bias rather than work to suppress it, weighing more heavily on what a player has done lately than what an objective view suggests he should be doing over time. He can’t worry about hurt feelings and egos. If you play, you will have opportunities. If you’re not, you’re not. “You have all the numbers, you have all the projections and you have all the plans. But performance plays a big part in what we’re doing right now,” Blue Jays manager John Schneider said Monday morning before his team took both ends of the Baltimore Orioles 7-3 and 8-4. “We try to be able to win every night.” And, wouldn’t you know it, there was Bichette right in the middle every Monday. He went 3-for-5 in the opener, helping extend the Blue Jays’ lead in both the fifth and ninth innings as his club gained some breathing room over the Orioles in a hot, hotly contested matinee. Then he came to the plate with two on and two out in the third inning of the nightcap, and made a pretty big cut on the first pitch he saw. You’ll have to push that fence back a bit to contain this one, which traveled just 412 feet at 109.4 miles per hour off Bichette’s bat. Three innings later, Bichette returned and liked the first pitch he saw again. Only this time he took it in the opposite direction. And what do you think Bichette did on his next trip to the plate? He got a pitch, of course. Then he let it rip again. Well, make those three homers in the span of four pitches you see, part of a 6-for-10 day. Give Bichette 12 hits and a walk in his first 23 plate appearances in September and a .328/.371/.595 line from August 4. That’s why Bichette will be near the top of Toronto’s order for the foreseeable future after falling to the top three less than six weeks ago. We all know that Bichette warming up and playing closer to his potential is one of the highest leverage results the Blue Jays could have in the final month of the season. But Bichette wouldn’t even call it hot. “You talk to Bo and he feels the same way. He’s like, ‘I haven’t even made it. I haven’t even come close to making it,” said Kevin Gausman, who had a sensational performance in Monday’s opener. “Bo is a guy who can change the game with any swing. And as a pitcher, watching Bo hit, there aren’t many places you can go, right? There are not many holes. Handles breakage extremely well. It can reach high heaters. And if you throw him a fastball, he has no problem hitting it to right field. Throwing-wise, he’s got to be a tough guy.” And the Blue Jays will be a tough team to deal with if they can continue to play like they have the first five games of this road trip. After beating the Pittsburgh Pirates over the weekend by a combined score of 12-4, Toronto took both ends of Monday’s doubleheader against the Orioles, 15-7. They had 25 hits in 18 innings, walked both starters in the seventh inning and got 5.2 innings of two-run relief out of their bullpen as six relievers — none of them named Romano, Bass or Garcia — combined to allow just three he strikes out and does not walk while striking out four. And, more importantly, they delivered a serious blow to a division rival that recently had gotten a little too close for comfort behind the Blue Jays in the American League wild-card race. Toronto now has a 4.5-game lead over the Orioles for the third and final wild-card spot, with a chance to bury it 6.5 games back with wins on Tuesday and Wednesday. Even with a pair of losses, the Blue Jays won’t have conceded ground to the Orioles in this series. After Gausman maneuvered his way out of several jams in Monday’s first game, Jose Berrios tried to make the same high-stakes play in the second. He stranded a runner in the first and erased a one-off single with a double play in the second. But Rougned Odor took him for a long solo shot to left, his AL-Berios-leading 28th homer allowed this season. Berrios went back to work around traffic from there, stranding runners at third, fourth and sixth. He opened the seventh with a walk, single, single to load the bases. And after a run that got passed by catcher’s interference from Danny Jansen, his night was over. It wasn’t Berrios’ sweetest outing by any means. He struck out just four batters and allowed eight balls in play at 100 mph or faster. But thanks to Trevor Richards bailing him out of that tough seventh, Berrios’ last streak — three earned runs over six innings — was the Blue Jays would get every time out of a guy starting either third or fourth contest of a seven-game playoff series. And, zooming out, it was Berrios’ fourth straight outing that went 5.2 innings or more. He pitched to a 3.70 ERA in that 24.1 innings span, striking out 21 while walking five. He wasn’t elite, but he was more than good enough. And that’s what the Blue Jays need this time of year, when small-sample success and what-have-you-done-for-me-lately take on more importance than objective projections and long-term projection. Berrios won’t be happy with his stat totals at the end of the year, but he has a chance to help his team get to where it’s trying to go by approaching his potential down the stretch. Just as Bichette won’t be thrilled with his 2022 results when all is said and done, that hasn’t stopped him from taking the wheel this month and returning to the top of Toronto’s lineup.
