Blue Jays 'embrace the crap' after long flight home following ugly road trip

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As if the recently completed six-game road trip wasn’t enough of a nightmare for the Blue Jays, there wasn’t nearly enough sleep when it ended, either.

Let’s just say Bo Bichette’s two-run homer to give the Jays a 2-0 win over the Rangers late on Wednesday night, deep in the heart of Texas, had to feel massive for a team on the brink of going 1-5 on a truly ugly stretch of games.

Piling on to make the results of the trip worse, the Jays had to take a late night charter flight from Dallas to Toronto, lose an hour in time zone and get ready to play again on Thursday. Sure, the opponent is the struggling Athletics, but the Jays have been grinding, which only furthered the exhaustion.

“That’s a lot,” said Jays manager John Schneider, who said his head hit the pillow at his downtown residence at around 5:15 a.m. “We talked about it with the guys (prior to Thursday’s game.)

“You’ve got to kind embrace the (crap) on this one and then just go out and play. It’s not ideal.”

To be clear, Schneider wasn’t tolerating — or making — excuses, even if the four-game series against the Athletics will finish off a gruelling stretch of 13 games in 13 days.

“I mean, we signed up for this, but it’s not ideal,” Schneider said. “Today’s the toughest day. You’ve got to kind of grind through it.”

To help lighten the load some, players weren’t required to show up to the Rogers Centre until later than usual on Thursday and the Jays scrapped batting practice. As well, Jose Berrios, the starting pitcher for the Blue Jays on Thursday, flew to Toronto ahead of the team and was well-rested to face the Athletics.

Major League Baseball has regulations governing the playing of games on consecutive days in different cities, but Schneider said the charter home — a flying time of two hours and 20 minutes — was just under the cutoff.

All the better then, that Bichette came in as a pinch-hitter and hit that game-winning bomb to let the Jays escape the six-game Tampa-Texas roadie with a 2-4 record.

“Yeah, the flight was going to be awful there for a while,” Schneider said, of the prospect of another brutal loss. “But that swing made the beer a little bit colder.”