Clock is ticking on Blue Jays’ competitive window: ‘If we don’t play well, this team will not be together for much longer’

Toronto failed to win a third consecutive game, a feat they’ve only accomplished once thus far. At 21-26, the club remains firmly in last place in the AL East, dropping their playoff odds to 17.5 per cent per FanGraphs — the fourth-lowest in the American League.

If they don’t turn things around quickly, the roster could look very different in a few months.

“The reality is if we don’t play well, this team will not be together for much longer,” right-hander Kevin Gausman told the Toronto Sun ahead of Tuesday’s 5-0 loss to the White Sox. “It might make another year. It might make another year and a half. It might make a couple of months. That’s just the reality.

“If we want to [have success and be competitive] with these guys, we’ve got to do it now. We’ve got to go.”

The Blue Jays are beyond the point of concern. This team hasn’t won a series in over a month, dating back to their road trip to San Diego from April 19-21. They’ve lost or split each of their last eight series, losing 16 of their previous 25 games. But they can end that drought with a win over Chicago on Wednesday.

That’d be a positive step forward for an organization that’s watched its playoff hopes dwindle significantly since Opening Day, where it held a 49 per cent chance of qualifying for the post-season.

“We need to have a good month,” Gausman said. “We need a month straight. We have to win 20 games in a month. We dug ourselves in this hole and now we have to find a way to play ourselves out of it.”

As poorly as the Blue Jays have played, they enter Wednesday’s slate 3.5 games back of the final wild-card seed in this way-too-early-glimpse of the AL playoff picture. So, they could push themselves back into the mix by taking advantage of this soft portion of their schedule.

However, the club’s competitive window will likely be in serious jeopardy if things trend in the opposite direction.

The front office would have to consider every possible scenario at that point. How far would a potential selloff go? Would it stop with pending free agents like Yusei Kikuchi, Yimi García and Danny Jansen, or become a full tear-down centred around franchise cornerstones Bo Bichette and Vladimir Guerrero Jr.?

One way or another, these next 11 games, 10 after Wednesday, should tell us a lot about the Blue Jays’ direction as a franchise, whose players — including Gausman — remain committed to righting the ship and making up for past post-season failures.

“I think about it all the time,” Gausman said. “If we were able to make a run here, this country would be crazy. I want to feel that.”