The crowd at Rogers Centre arrives annoyed.
Owing to new, league-wide security measures, getting into the pillbox by the lake when it's full has become a serious hassle. Lines are stretched out forever long after first pitch.
Over the weekend – two afternoon sellouts – many fans were just getting to their seats a half-hour after the start.
Therefore, nobody was in the mood for the Blue Jays' shenanigans. The game was 100-proof shenanigans.
Poor starter Scott Copeland – who has Moonlight Graham written all over his major-league career – started things off poorly.
He muddled through the first. He started the second by giving up three consecutive singles. By the fourth, the crowd was grumbling. After a fifth single – to No. 9 hitter David Lough – they'd begun to boo. Someone shrieked, "Oh, come on!" – which should be the motto of Toronto sports fandom.
After giving up his sixth – SIXTH – Copeland looked into the dugout, signalling for someone to bring him a wheelchair and a jar of ether. Baltimore's Jimmy Paredes ended his misery with a three-run homer.
Copeland's second inning – seven hits, seven earned runs, one out. He was optioned back to Triple A post-game, never, ever to return.
It's possible that Orioles starter Chris Tillman owes Copeland some great debt. Maybe he saved his life or something? Because that would explain the Orioles' reply.
Trailing by seven runs, the Jays clawed back six of them in the bottom of the second.
In all, the 13-run second inning lasted 48 minutes. This wasn't baseball. It was batting practice.
It settled into a languorous trudge for the next two hours. The Jays didn't decide to hand it over until the ninth, when it was tied 9-9.
In that inning, "closer" Brett Cecil walked a pair. J.J. Hardy hit a soft single up the middle. It looked like a double-play ball. Jose Reyes curiously slowed to admire it as it passed him on the way into centre field.
"I got a little bit confused," Reyes said. "But that's no excuse."
Reyes has slipped several rungs as a defender, but this was still a bizarre lapse. It's one thing to lose your mobility. It's another for your instincts to desert you so comprehensively. The crowd wasn't sure what to do with that. They decided on a direction – inarticulate rage – when Ryan Flaherty followed with a game-killing triple. It ended 13-9.
"I'm trying a different hand position," Cecil said. "I thought I might be tipping some pitches. I'll have to go back and see if I'm still doing it."
It doesn't really matter if Cecil is telegraphing his pitches or not. Once you start believing batters know what's coming, you're in the wrong head space to be a big-league closer.
Three-and-a-half hours is an awful long time to wait for bad news you knew in your gut was coming all along. Worse yet, Sunday's game was the extended director's cut of Saturday's loss, which also featured a ninth-inning Toronto collapse.
It's just two games. But you feel as if it's two games the Jays will really regret in a few months' time.
"We got a great offence," manager John Gibbons said afterward. No mention was made of the pitching.
We've reached a position of unsustainability on that front. Along with Copeland, relievers Phil Coke and Ryan Tepera were manually ejected for Buffalo on Sunday. Who's up next? Do you really want to know? Because the answer won't make you feel any better.
It's probably Todd Redmond, in an emergency long-relief role. The Jays will use Thursday's off-day to skip a start. Then they can construct a series of altars in the corporate offices, where they can pray to multiple gods that Aaron Sanchez is ready to pitch in a week's time. Otherwise, it's someone worse than Copeland.
We've seen this play out before. Any arm will do now, because there are none left.
General manager Alex Anthopoulos continues to say that, given the option, he'd prefer to improve the rotation. That makes sense. It'd be better to improve both ends of the problem.
In order to get something they can use right now, the Jays will have to give something up. It will be something they really don't want to let go – left-hander Daniel Norris at the least.
So we've reached another one of those teasing moments that arrive around this time in every single one of the Jays' seasons. Do they go for it now? Or are they going to wait?
There's a decent argument to waiting. The Jays have a lot of young pitching talent. Who knows what they'll be in three years if given a chance. The sell-sell-sell philosophy was counterpointed this past week by the presence of former Toronto prospect Noah Syndergaard. He fills out a New York Mets uniform pretty nicely. Like, well enough to make you want to cry. No one would do the Syndergaard/Travis d'Arnaud-for-R.A.-Dickey trade again.
Yet that's the sort of chance the Jays will have to take if they want to upgrade their arms significantly.
There is no right answer in the present or near future. You can't know if it works until it's either worked or it hasn't. Whether to sell or stand pat also has a prisoner's dilemma element – standing pat and losing is a whole lot better than selling and still losing.
You suspect that's what they'll choose – do nothing, trust in the wretchedness of the American League East and try to hit their way to a playoff spot. It's very unlikely to work, but it does have a low downside.
Everybody around here is used to losing. What they hate is being robbed of future hope. Usefully, they never seem to expect that it will actually work out.