Blue Jays among the first-half flops

Reigning champ Cubs’ fall from grace also noteworthy

This baseball season, like most, has been full of surprises.

Aaron Judge of the New York Yankees has burst on to the scene as one of the league’s best sluggers, becoming the first player since 2013 to hit 30 home runs during the first half of the season. Washington Nationals ace Max Scherzer is following up his 2016 Cy Young campaign with an even better season, striking out a career-high 35.5 per cent of batters while walking just 5.5 per cent, a differential that if maintained would be the fourth best since Pedro Martinez was on the mound 17 years ago.

But not all the surprises are positive. Here the five biggest flops and failures of the 2017 season.

Get up, everybody, and greet the underwhelming, soul-crushing, disappointing Mets. The team some expected to compete for the NL East title is 39-47, with five losses in six games, including a 6-0 defeat at the hands of the St. Louis Cardinals to end the season’s first half. Win projections have dropped from 87 to 74 since the pre-season. The Mets have some excuses — starting pitchers Noah Syndergaard and Matt Harvey plus closer Jeurys Familia are all on the disabled list — but the hitters are just average, at best. As a team, the Mets are batting .249 with a .765 OPS, creating runs at a rate just twoper-cent above the league average after adjusting for park and league effects (102 wRC+). The pitchers who are healthy have allowed 90 more runs than expected based on the men on base and number of outs recorded. Only the Oakland Athletics are worse at the all-star break.