In the most predictable plot twist of the season, the Blue Jays have run out of viable major-league arms.

Desperate times call for desperate measures, and that was the case Thursday afternoon when Toronto handed the ball to veteran Clayton Richard. The same Richard who made just one rehab start and was limited to 50 pitches before the game even began.

Those are less than ideal circumstances during the best of times. They become even more problematic when the game in question follows a 13-inning marathon that took four hours and 30 minutes and required five relievers. Exhausted bullpen? Get used to it. Things aren’t getting better any time soon.

Richard may have returned for four innings in the Blue Jays’ 8-2 loss to the Boston Red Sox at Rogers Centre, but they are still without the services of Matt Shoemaker, Clay Buchholz and Ryan Borucki. Those three are not expected back anytime soon, which means the trend of using journeymen starters and bullpen days just to get through the week will undoubtedly continue.

“The stuff just doesn’t make sense,” Shoemaker said when asked about the injuries. “It’s all unfortunate. Us as players, we want to be out there competing. We love playing this game. It’s fun, the adrenalin, whatever you want to call it, we just love going out there competing. It sucks. It sucks for all of us.”

Except, it makes plenty of sense. Anyone who looked at the track record of the pitchers the Blue Jays committed to should have seen this coming from a mile away. There might have been upside to this starting five, but there was even more risk. More than most teams would have considered signing up for.

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Just look at the evidence. Shoemaker had not pitched more than 772/3 innings since 2016. Buchholz, despite enjoying a bit of a renaissance in limited action last year, hasn’t surpassed 100 innings during the same period. Richard is a 35-year-old on the wrong side of his career who also happened to be coming off knee surgery.

What, exactly, is surprising about any of this? The only startling thing about the rotation happens to be a positive, with Aaron Sanchez being able to grind through even more blister issues to make 11 starts. Without him, and the emotional but steady Marcus Stroman, the Blue Jays would be in even worse shape.

“That’s Major League Baseball,” Richard said. “I think if you look around, the landscape of the game, that’s what happens to rotations in this day and age in our game. It’s the teams that deal with it, have the depth, and are able to handle the adversity they are given throughout the year that succeed.”

And therein lies the problem. If most people saw these injuries coming, the Blue Jays should have as well. Sure, there has been some bad luck. Ryan Borucki going down in spring training with an elbow issue and prospect Sean Reid-Foley’s command unravelling in Buffalo didn’t help. And yet Toronto general manager Ross Atkins should have done more this winter to protect himself.

Which brings us back to Richard, who was the most questionable addition of all. Shoemaker and Buchholz made sense on short-term contracts. If they performed well, both would have been dealt for prospects before the July 31 trade deadline. If they struggled, either one would have cut loose without so much as a second thought. That’s what rebuilding teams do.

None of that upside applied to Richard, a guy who is nearing the end of his career and was coming off a season in which he posted a 5.33 ERA for a San Diego team that plays in one of the most pitcher-friendly ballparks. The year before, Richard led the National League with 15 losses. He’s the type of pitcher who should be buried in the bullpen, not the kind of upside play that’s going to net you any kind of return.

By choosing this route, the Blue Jays opted against making strong runs at Japanese lefty Yusei Kikuchi (3-1, 3.43), who went to the Mariners on an affordable three-year deal worth $43 million (all figures U.S.). Maybe Gio Gonzalez never wanted to join the Blue Jays, but he settled for a minor-league deal in late March and more money usually changes almost anyone’s mind.

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Or how about Minnesota’s Martin Perez, who signed a one-year, $4-million deal and is off to an incredible 6-1 start with a 2.89 ERA. Tyson Ross, Matt Moore, Drew Pomeranz and Lance Lynn were some of the other names that made sense and yet the Blue Jays did not come away with any of them. Not all those deals would have worked out, but the lack of creativity is still damning.

So here we are, almost a full month away from the start of summer and the rotation is already in shambles. In the last two weeks alone, the Blue Jays traded for journeyman Edwin Jackson, who was toiling in the minors before joining his MLB-record 14th team, and recalled and started left-handed knuckleballer Ryan Feierabend, who at this time last year was pitching in Korea.

“We needed a pitcher for today, that’s for sure,” Blue Jays manager Charlie Montoyo said when asked about Richard before Thursday’s game. “Nobody counted on an extra-innings game yesterday, but it is what it is.”

Montoyo was right, they needed a pitcher. And right now, apparently just about anyone will do. Rebuild or not, the team that slashed its overall payroll by approximately $50 million this off-season only has itself to blame for the lack of options.

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