Will surging offence be enough to power Blue Jays through roller-coaster season?

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The realist in Blue Jays manager John Schneider is well aware that the best way to navigate a 162-game season is understanding the baseball truism that you’re only as good as your next day’s pitcher(s).

With that in mind, some of the good feelings of a four-game win streak would have taken a shot to the chops when starter Jose Berrios allowed four runs in the third inning and closer Jeff Hoffman surrendered a grand slam among the five runs he gave up in Tuesday’s 11-9 loss to the Tampa Bay Rays.

That said, the manager is not about to dispute the notion that momentum can have some mystical power, especially on offence. And it remains possible that the Toronto bats are on to something.

“I think that the guys have understood that (the recent burst) has kind of been a byproduct of what has been happening slowly over the past couple weeks and you got to kind of just stick with it,” Schneider said of a four-game winning streak on the West Coast, an impressive snapshot in which the Jays bats collectively went off.

A four-game stretch is by no means a sign that all is well with the Jays — as Tuesday’s demoralizing loss affirmed — especially given the tumultuous run they’ve been on thus far.

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As snapshots go, the Jays 20-21 season has been all over the map. There have been a pair of four-game winning streaks. There were losing streaks of four and five games. And there was a 1-8 run bracketed by a pair of three-game winning streaks.

The hope, then, is that at some point that those modest winning stretches are less of an outlier and more of a definition of what type of team the Jays can be. If that happens, perhaps consistency follows.

Scoring nine runs on Tuesday (matching a season-high set on Sunday in Seattle) in defeat still stings, but it continues the offensive surge the Jays have unleashed through the past five games, a sign that there is at least confidence when Jays hitters get to the plate. Will the momentum be real? We shall see.

“The competitiveness has definitely ticked up and they are at the point where they are expecting more out of themselves,” Schneider said of the team’s sudden attack mode. “(There have been) some pretty intentful swings and obviously some big homers. I think the last couple weeks, we’ve been kind of going in the right direction for sure.”

That they have.

Consider that in that miserable April at the plate, the Jays average 3.5 runs per game. Flip the calendar to May and they’ve exploded to average 5.5 through the first 11 games of the month. There has been production from the bottom of the order, the continued renaissance of George Springer and the emerging thump of Addison Barger.

And then there’s Daulton Varsho, who missed most of the first month, yet with his pair of big blasts on Tuesday — the latter a three-run shot to give the Jays a 7-6 lead in the electric eighth — now has a share of the team’s home run lead with five. And he has done it in just 10 games.

Even in that gutting Tuesday loss, the Jays showed a dimension that will serve them well if sustained. But an offence that is clicking doesn’t overcome 4-0 and 6-3 deficits in a game that was theirs for the taking with a 7-6 lead heading to the top of the ninth on its own.

In their past five games, the Jays have scored 38 runs powered by 13 doubles and nine home runs — four on Tuesday alone.

Of course, it’s understood that when a team scores nine runs, it has to win. With that, the sting of the blown Hoffman save will leave a mark and is the latest dip in this roller coaster of a 20-21 start.

Accordingly, Schneider is surely well aware that any optimism should be of cautious, given the wild swings his team has shown already.

“It seems like there has been a roller coaster of stuff,” Schneider acknowledged. “But such is life in the big leagues.”

Turning back to the glass-half-full view, at least the Jays find themselves in a situation where the American League playoff slots are there for the taking, even with a losing record.

“A lot of teams have improved and there’s a lot of close games,” Schneider said. “I think there is a lot to be decided in this division and in this league. It’s very wide open and very evenly matched.”