‘They aren’t going anywhere’
and give his manager gastro-intestinal pains while doing it.
From that, though, Toronto ended up with its best asset in 2016. Sanchez turned into a star, Happ won 20 games, Estrada was solid again and Stroman overcame a midseason swoon to pitch well down the stretch. Dickey was Dickey, and was replaced late in the season by veteran addition Francisco Liriano who, reunited with pitcher whisperer Russell Martin, threw as well as any of them.
That group remains intact for 2017, and the curious thing about Toronto’s starting staff is how it defies the traditional one-throughfive ranking of pitchers. Sanchez, at 24, is the presumptive ace, after he was stellar for long stretches in his first full season as a starter. But Stroman was the presumptive ace last spring, before his summer wobbles. For an indication of his potential, consider his performance in the World Baseball Classic on Saturday night, where, pitching for the United States, he held the mighty Dominicans scoreless for four-plus innings, including a punch out of Jose Bautista that will probably be mentioned all year in the Blue Jays clubhouse. Teammates rave about Liriano’s stuff, and they talk about him like Toronto happened to stumble across a wallet full of cash on the sidewalk, which is sort of what happened: Pittsburgh was so desperate to get out from under his US$13-million salary that they gave the Jays two prospects to take him in exchange for Drew Hutchinson.
And, while neither Happ nor Estrada have quite the sparkle of their young rotation-mates or the history of Liriano, who was an AllStar starter at 22, both were very effective last season. Happ posted a 3.18 ERA and Estrada was at 3.48, both behind Sanchez’s 3.00 but still very good considering their home park is very offence-friendly. The knock on Happ and Estrada is that opposing batters had unusually low batting averages against them on balls in play in 2016, suggesting their ERAs could inflate this season. But if you use that argument to discount the Toronto rotation, you have to factor in that Stroman’s opponents had a high batting average on balls in play last season.
The four returning starters who were with Toronto all last season had some weirdly similar numbers: all posted between 161 and 166 strikeouts and all had FIPs — fielding-independent pitching, like an adjusted ERA — of between 3.55 and 4.15.
The team, not surprisingly, views this consistency as a plus.
“We feel like we have five really strong starters in this rotation, so any night, if we lose a game we have a chance to go right back into the