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TORONTO — When they kicked off a stretch of 28 games in 27 days on Friday, it was clearly a make-or-break portion of the schedule for the Toronto Blue Jays.

Buyers or sellers at the Aug. 31 trade deadline?

The next two weeks will tell that story, and it got a whole lot tougher Sunday when Bo Bichette surprisingly landed on the 10-day injured list with a right knee sprain.

The injury was revealed after Saturday’s game was suspended due to rain, with the locked-in 22-year-old shortstop telling the club he "felt something" in his right knee while stretching.

Proceeding with a tremendous amount of caution, the Jays sent Bichette for a battery of tests, including an MRI, which led to the diagnosis.

It wasn’t a good day, overall, for the Blue Jays.

In bumbling fashion, Charlie Montoyo’s club dropped both of Sunday’s games to the Tampa Bay Rays, leaving the second-year manager once again searching for on-field answers on the same day he lost his on-fire star.

"I don’t really have a timeline," Montoyo said of Bichette. "It just wasn’t good news, of course, for everybody when we heard it."

The Jays’ bats have started to heat up a bit all across the lineup, but Bichette has been the clear catalyst — as well as the most consistent — slashing .356/.387/.678 with five homers and four steals in 13 games.

Bichette has a hit in all but one of those 13 games, and he’s been on an absolute tear since his only oh-fer, posting a .441/.486/.941 slash line with all five of those bombs since Aug. 5 in Atlanta.

He heads to the IL with homers in four straight games, a streak he won’t be able to pick up until at least Aug. 26 when the Jays host the Boston Red Sox in Buffalo.

If the injury allows for it.

At this point, Bichette is out indefinitely, leaving the Jays without a player who has been their best hitter since the day he was recalled last July.

Through 274 career trips to the plate, Bichette is batting .322 with an elite .961 OPS and 16 home runs.

Now, the Jays will piece together the top of the lineup and give rookie Santiago Espinal time at shortstop, with veterans Joe Panik and Brandon Drury also capable of standing at the position if needed.

Late defeats have unfortunately become the norm for this young ballclub.

If you’re a glass-half-full kind of person, that means they should have a much better record than the 7-11 resume they’ll take to Baltimore for the start of a three-game series with the Orioles on Monday.

On the other hand, good teams find ways to win and bad teams find ways to lose.

Montoyo continues to remind everyone it’s a young team that’s still rebuilding, and that will lead to mistakes, evidenced by right fielder Teoscar Hernandez lazily giving the Rays life with an outfield misplay in the seventh inning that ended up costing them the game.

"Stay positive and keep working at it," Montoyo said when asked how they clean up the mental mistakes and physical errors that have led to some late heartbreak. "That’s all we can do.

"Nobody wants to make errors and lose games, what just happened today. That’s the third best team in baseball, that team we’re playing there. If you don’t play clean baseball, you’re not going to beat them. And that’s what happened."

After scoring just 39 runs in their first 13 games (3.0 runs per game), the bats woke up once they arrived in Buffalo and the Jays put up 35 runs across five games (7.0 runs per game) against the hotbed teams, the Miami Marlins and Rays.

The issue, however, is despite that surge of offence, the Jays finished the "homestand" just 2-3.

On a dramatic day that saw Bichette land on the IL and the Jays drop a pair of very winnable games, the second game of the truncated double-header was also punctuated by starter Matt Shoemaker getting tossed for arguing balls and strikes, with Montoyo following shortly thereafter in defence of his veteran.

There was some clear signs of frustration in the Jays’ dugout.

"We are so incredibly close to being an unbelievable team, it’s just that we’ve got to do a lot of the little things better," Shoemaker said afterwards.

Approaching the one-third mark of the 60-game schedule on Tuesday, there’s no time to waste in getting back to .500, but doing it without their best player will be daunting.​