Casey Janssen isn’t about to close on his words.

He knows what he said. He knows why he said it. He believes it needed to be said. And as the longest serving Blue Jay, in conjunction with all-star Jose Bautista, it was all but determined who on the club would speak out, and who would have their say.

Janssen just wishes - in light of the circumstances, that the complaints made late Thursday afternoon after the Blue Jays failed to make any kind of deal at the first of baseball’s two trade deadlines - that there would be no correlation between his perceived honesty and the terrible days that followed.

In a game all about numbers, these aren’t good ones. Since Janssen and Bautista had their public say, echoing what so many fans were saying, the Jays had lost four of five games heading into Wednesday night’s game against the first-place Baltimore Orioles. And the cumulative score of those games: 31-13.

“We haven’t played well,” said Janssen of the Jays post trade deadline, prior to Wednesday's 5-1 win. “ A lot of people want that (the comments) to be more of a story than it is.

“Is there a correlation between what we said and what’s happened since? I can’t say yes or no to that. I would hope not. We’re all professionals here. We’ve gotten to this point of the season with the guys we have here. We’re in it. We’re a good team. We were a good team (before the deadline). We’re still a good team.”

Alex Anthopoulos thinks its nonsense to attribute the Jays wonky play of late to clubhouse dissatisfaction. He won’t say whether he has met with Bautista since Thursday, only to say he talks to all his players all the time.

“If I talk to players,” Anthopoulos said via text message. “I always keep that in house.

“Trade deadline is over. We have to move forward. We’re not going to dwell on anything.”

This has been a strange and fascinating, exciting and confounding Blue Jays season. One minute they look the part of contender. One minute they don’t. One minute they play terrific defence. One minute they throw the ball all over the place. One minute it looks like they can remain in race for first place without Adam Lind, Edwin Encarnacion and Brett Lawrie. One minute they look like Buffalo Bisons.

“We’re streaky,” said Anthopoulos. “We’ve been streaky all year. When we’ve got good pitching we’ve been a pretty good team.”

But there’s a little bit of hold your breath in all of that. Which is why Janssen wanted a deal. Which is why Bautista wanted a deal. Which is why so many unspoken Blue Jays have whispered they think management - and moreso ownership, whomever they may be - has let them down. You can hear Earl Weaver screaming from somewhere, an Orioles voice no less, that you always play for this year and worry about next year next year.

So many Jays players, having never contended before, were thinking the same thing.

“My thoughts were the truth,” said Janssen. “I’m not going to back away from that. I’m passionate about the game of baseball. I’m passionate about winning. I eat, sleep, drink baseball. I love it. I want to win. I want to win as bad as anybody.

“Do I wish I would have taken the words back? No. I don’t think they necessarily needed to become as much of a focus as they did. The focus is on the game. That’s all we want. We don’t want the focus to be on a line or a comment. At the same time we felt that something needed to be said. It was said. And then we went about our business.”

Problem is: It’s been reasonably bad business. And the Jays look around, this early in August, and see first place in the AL East becoming more of an impossibility and the wild-card race, in which they led they by three games just days ago, now is all crunched together.

“I kick ourselves,” said Janssen. “We were six or seven games up at some point in June. We let a lot of teams back in. New York is right in thick of things. KC is right in the thick of things. Cleveland is in right in the middle of it. Those teams could have been sellers at the deadline but now they’re relevant. Now it’s a matter of who gets hot for the next 50 or so games.

“It’s fun to be in a race. I wish we were playing better. We have to embrace the opportunity to compete against the best. How many chances like this do you get?

“Every game matters. Every series is a big series from now on. This is our team.”