Truly Foul

About 30 minutes before the Toronto Blue Jays were to play the New York Yankees on July 5, a Blue Jays employee rushed into the office of club president Paul Beeston to deliver a bulletin that had been evident to everyone else for three months: There was a power malfunction at the SkyDome. "It's a problem with the wiring," the employee said. He was referring to panel number 3 of the retractable roof, but he just as easily could have been talking about the Toronto offense.

With the faulty roof closed on a 77° afternoon, the Blue Jays were as shut out as the sunshine, losing to the Yankees 8-0. O, Canada, indeed. Through Sunday the Blue Jays had scored zero, one or two runs in 31 of their 87 games. And despite winning three of four games with the last-place Red Sox in Boston last week, Toronto (43—44) trailed the first-place Baltimore Orioles by 11½ games and wild-card leader New York by seven in the American League East—not exactly where Roger Clemens thought he'd be when he picked the Jays as a free agent last December. "We should be above .500, and we're not," Clemens said last Thursday. "That means we're underachieving. When you look at the big picture, we're not a threat."

Only spectacular pitching from Clemens (14—3), who set a Blue Jays record with 16 strikeouts on his return to Boston last Saturday (box, page 94), and Pat Hentgen (9-6) has kept Toronto on the fringe of contention. The Blue Jays' troubles extend beyond the most inept offense in the American League. The second leading home run hitter in franchise history—and one of he most loquacious players in baseball—has stopped talking to most of the local media; the manager refers to his tenure in the past tense; the president is abdicating; the absentee owners are selling; the fans are staying away; and the club continues on one of the most precipitous slides from a world championship by any team that didn't hap-Den to sell a fellow named Babe Ruth (box, left).

The landscape around the Blue Jays has appeared so bleak that you expect Pathfinder's Sojourner to come whirring through the clubhouse at any moment. That signs of baseball life in Toronto are so difficult to detect is a stunning turnaround from only four years ago, when the Blue Jays won a second consecutive World Series and, with their packed houses and the homiest environment since The Donna Reed Show, established themselves as a model franchise. "The honeymoon is over, I guess," says Joe Carter, the heretofore affable slugger who regularly bolts the clubhouse without comment.

Toronto is languishing in a purgatorial state, waiting for the fate of manager Cito Gaston to be decided; waiting for a group of local investors to purchase a majority interest in the team from the Belgian brewery that is selling it; waiting for Beeston, the first employee hired by the franchise, in 1976, to bid adieu; and waiting for the front office to start either unloading veterans or adding others for a run at the American League wild-card slot. "We're in no-man's-land," general manager Gord Ash said before the All-Star break. "We're not in the wild-card race, nor are we out of it. We're not going to run the white flag up until the last possible moment."

Said Beeston, "The sale of the club has dragged on too long. I haven't been in the clubhouse for a month because I don't know what to say. I can't lie to the guys."

Ash opened the second half of the season by imploring Gaston and his staff, at a pregame meeting last Thursday, to show more enthusiasm and to push the Blue Jays harder, because they had become "too quiet." Ash said he is "not intending to fire the manager or the coaches," but he acknowledged that "we have too many people on staff wondering where they'll be in a month, too many people wondering what their severance package will be. I felt I had to say something."

Gaston responded with typical blandness, "I'm not going to agree with that, and I'm not going to disagree with that."

Only once in their 20-year history have the Blue Jays fired a manager during the season, and that was when Beeston persuaded Gaston to replace Jimy Williams early in 1989. Gaston has become the lightning rod for the Jays' recent struggles. A Toronto Sun fax and E-mail poll published July 2 found that 49.2% of respondents held Gaston most accountable for the state of the Jays, and 66.9% said he isn't the right man to manage them. On June 25 The Toronto Star published a cartoon of Gaston sleeping in the dugout with a DO NOT DISTURB sign around his neck and a wine bottle tucked beside him in the bat rack. "That's as low as it gets," Carter says. "Now fans are running down to the dugout, yelling things at me and Cito. They get their cue from the media."

Gaston's easygoing, understated manner once suited the Blue Jays well, especially in the championship years of 1992 and '93, when strong leaders like David Cone, Paul Molitor, Jack Morris and Dave Winfield dominated the clubhouse. Gaston has been less successful with teams that require a firm hand. For instance, after a 13-12 loss to Boston on June 25, in which Hentgen was left in for eight innings and was tattooed for 11 runs and 13 hits, including five homers, four players anonymously cited by the media asked why Gaston allowed Hentgen to absorb such a pounding. "I have 2½ starting pitchers and a tired bullpen," Gaston replied, referring in part to starter Juan Guzman's rehab from a broken right thumb. "What do you want me to do?"