Brass needs to figure out who these Jays are — and quickly
Before this Toronto Blue Jays season began, before they began to defend their relevance for the first time in a very long time, there were several generally accepted truths.
The starting pitching looked iffy. The bullpen was deep. And there was one sure thing: an absolutely killer offence.
And so, a capsule review of 2016 after 67 games: what the hell?
Up and down the roster, the Blue Jays have been as unpredictable as R.A. Dickey’s knuckleball. The would-be ace, Marcus Stroman, who crams seven feet of swagger into his 5-foot-8 frame, has struggled for most of the past month and holds the worst ERA among the starting pitchers. Aaron Sanchez, who wasn’t named a starter until late spring, has been great, and J.A. Happ and Marco Estrada, two late-blooming starters who had the distinct whiff of regression about them, have instead both been stellar.
The bullpen, meanwhile, has been largely a gasoline refinery. The relief corps has lost more games (16) than the starters (15) and the bullpen ERA is more than half a run worse than in 2015. The relievers have already turned seven save situations into losses, after only doing that eight times all last season, and they have allowed five walkoff losses after just seven in the entire of 2015.
And then, the offence, which has gone from killer to, maybe, criminally negligent. Toronto’s top-ranked OPS last season has slipped to seventh in the American League, which has turned its historically good run differential of 2015 (+221) into just passable. Heading into Tuesday’s matinee, an 11-3 blitzing of the woeful Philadelphia Phillies, the Blue Jays had scored nine more runs than they had allowed. Last year, they mashed their way to 37 victories by five or more runs and this season they had, until Tuesday, done it nine times, on pace for 21 such wins on the year. Somehow, in a lineup full of proven sluggers, the most reliable offensive force on the team through two-plus months was Michael Saunders, the guy they almost traded in the off-season. Oh, and Troy Tulowitzki was hurt. So not quite everything had changed.
All of this has presented some difficult challenges for the Management Group Formerly in Charge of the Cleveland Indians, president Mark Shapiro and general manager Ross Atkins. They need to figure out who these Blue Jays are, and they need to do it quick.
As analytically inclined as the new Toronto front office is known to be, we can be certain that they are aware of the vagaries of sample size and the hazards of drawing firm conclusions from a relatively short body of work. Thus, they know that thumpers like Jose Bautista, Edwin Encarnacion and Josh Donaldson, all of whom are off last year’s wildly productive pace, still have room to improve, while Russell Martin and Tulowitzki won’t end up looking like replacement-level scrubs over the course of the whole season. There is reason to believe, that is, that the battering ram that was the Toronto offence last year will eventually show up.
This is essentially what happened in 2015: the Jays muddled their way through the first half of the season and then started crushing the ball on the way to the American League East title. Toronto’s two best months of offence, in terms of OPS and runs scored, were August and September of 2015 and their worst was April. This year, they hit better and scored more in May than in April, and have improved again in June from May.
But mixed into that 2015 surge was the furious dealing from former GM Alex Anthopoulos. The question facing the new guys is not whether they intend to load up in a similar manner, but whether they will be the ones looking to deal proven players for promise.
The pending free agency of both Bautista and Encarnacion would be a lot easier to address if the Blue Jays had yet made it clear whether they would be playing pennant-race baseball in the late summer for the second year in a row after a two-decade absence from such things. Instead, with just 37 games to go until the end of July trade deadline, the outlook is decidedly murky.
The Blue Jays should be good enough to at least make things interesting in September, and they might be good enough to go on another late-season romp. But might and should won’t give the executives a lot of comfort. Their worst-case scenario is that the Jays fail to make the playoffs, two of their best hitters walk, and the Toronto baseball revival is over almost as fast as it started. It’s not the most likely scenario, as things presently stand, but it’s in play.
Tuesday, though, was more an example of the best-case scenario. Stroman was sharp, and the offence boomed in an 11-3 victory over the Philadelphia Phillies, with four home runs including a grand slam from Donaldson and Encarnacion’s fourth in five games. Manager John Gibbons said that with his hitters, sometimes it’s just a matter of waiting for their pitches, and then letting it go. When they do, this is the team everyone around these parts thought they would see.
“It’s really that simple,” he said. “But it’s not that simple.”
If only it were.