In a wild-card wilderness
The Jays are still in race, but numbers aren’t in their favour
The Blue Jays can’t be exactly sure whether they are in or out of the wild-card race but one thing of which they seem certain is that right-hander Marco Estrada will be part of their rotation as long as they have a playoff pulse.
A report in the hours leading up to Estrada’s start against the Rays on Tuesday declared that the backand-forth veteran right-hander had been claimed on revocable waivers from the Jays by an unidentified team. So what did it mean to Estrada’s immediate future with the Jays? An August waiver claim typically is news that’s only reported if the claiming club is in fact able to work out a trade with the player’s original team.
“Nothing’s going to happen, we need him,” a confident manager John Gibbons said prior to the game. “Most guys go through that and many of them get claimed, don’t they. Yeah, nothing’s going to happen. My gut tells me nothing’s going to happen, or maybe my inside information. I’d definitely keep him. That’s not my department but (Gibbons and general manager Ross Atkins) talk about things like that.”
Yes, the truth is that the Jays would need a healthy Estrada to be a part of the five-man rotation in September if indeed they were still to be in any wild-card hunt. But are they realistically in a wildcard hunt?
The Astros, Red Sox and Indians lead their respective divisions in the American League with another three AL teams — the Tigers, White Sox and Athletics — having come to terms with reality, playing as much for next year as for the remainder of 2017. Everyone else is in the hunt for two wild-card spots with less than five games separating nine teams as of Tuesday afternoon. That’s wild.
Gibbons admits that it’s impossible to participate in a time-honoured, age-old baseball activity shared by pseudocontenders with this many teams involved.
“You can’t scoreboard watch because there’s so many teams ahead of us, so many teams in it from that angle,” Gibbons said. “This might be one of those years something goes down to the final game somewhere.”
Surely, with so many different analytic breakdowns, one of the Jays’ front office stats guys has broken it down for the manager in terms of what has to happen for the Jays in the final 47 days.
“No, because I don’t want to know,” Gibbons said, proudly sticking to his old-school beliefs. “It would be too confusing and I’m easily confused. I guarantee that they’ve got it (broken down).
“You look at it, Seattle got hot, then they cooled off. Anaheim is rolling now. I think Minnesota cooled off and then they got hot. Kansas City got hot, then they cooled off. They’ve won a few in a row right now. We’re playing pretty good ball.”
So how do you handicap a nineteam race, where nine fan bases believe they still have a chance? Here is a layman’s guide:
How many wins have historically been required?
The one wild-card system existed from 1995 to 2011, with a second wild-card added in 2012. Excluding the strike-shortened 1995 season, there have been 26 wild-card qualifiers in 21 seasons.
The average AL win total for a wild-card team has been 92.6 wins, while the average for the NL has been 91.3. The past five seasons, with the two wild-card format, has produced the lowest victory total required to qualify for the post-season for each league, which intuitively makes sense.
The lowest win total for a wild card has been 86, in the AL, by the 2015 Houston Astros.
What would it take for the Jays to dance in October?
Entering play on Tuesday, in order to match the lowest wild-card qualifying total in MLB history, the Jays need to go 29-15, playing .659 ball. The Blue Jays’ best 44 game stretch thus far in 2017 has been 26-18, from April 29 to June 17.
Over the past 20 games, since kicking off a sweep of Oakland at home on July 24, the Jays are 13-7 (.650), still not the percentage they need to reach 86 victories. Playing .659 baseball the rest of the way with Nick Tepesch and Chris Rowley forming 40 per cent of your starting rotation is asking a lot.
How does a nine-team race affect the standings?
Entering Tuesday, the Blue Jays had 25 of 45 games remaining against teams ahead of them in the wild-card standings, including seven against the Orioles, six facing the Yankees, and six versus the Rays. Going 13-12 in those 25 games vs. teams ahead of them in the standings will not be good enough.
Here is another stat that shows the inherent difficulty in the Jays’ playoff dream. Consider that eight teams ahead of the Jays in the wild card, headed into Tuesday, had 70 intramural games against each other remaining on the schedule — that’s 35 built-in wins for someone that the Jays are trying to catch.
This mayhem is great for baseball and good for the month of September. It says here that the Yankees or Red Sox, whoever does not win the East, will be the first wild card with the Royals, playing in a weak division that is 21 games under .500, with playoff veterans and pending free agents, also getting wild.