Donaldson puts together Jays season to remember
One of best years in team history has him as AL MVP front-runner
After keeping pace with Mike Trout through the first half of the season, the Blue Jays’ Josh Donaldson has spent the last two months separating himself from the reigning American League MVP while solidifying his own case to win the award this season.
Since the all-star break, Donaldson has 17 home runs and 59 RBI while posting a 1.085 on-base-plus-slugging percentage, while Trout has nine homers, 22 RBI and an .869 OPS.
So barring an otherworldly final few weeks from Trout, Donaldson should become just the second player in Blue Jays’ history to win an MVP, the first since George Bell in 1987.
But Donaldson — who leads the majors in runs scored, RBI and extra-base hits while sitting third in home runs — is also on pace to put together the best individual season by a position player in Jays’ history. With 19 games remaining he is already tied for the highest single-season Wins Above Replacement total ever by a Blue Jays’ hitter, using Baseball Reference’s formula, and is just 0.1 behind the franchise record using Fangraphs’ formula.
The Jays’ 29-year-old third baseman won’t break Jose Bautista’s 2010 franchise record of 54 home runs or Carlos Delgado’s 145-RBI mark set in 2003, but when you consider the pitching-dominant era in which Donaldson is playing, his numbers become all the more impressive. He also ranks among the topfive defensive third baseman in baseball this season and, while he doesn’t steal many bases, he has contributed significantly to the Jays’ offence with his baserunning, according to advanced metrics.
Whether you’re into old-school, back-of-the-base-ball-card stats like batting average and RBI or new-fangled analytics, Donaldson makes a case for the best season by a Jays’ position player ever.
And in a few weeks he could have the hardware to prove it.
For now, let’s look at how he stacks up against other Jay greats:
OLD-SCHOOL STATS
If he keeps up his current pace through the final weeks of the season, Donaldson will have 43 homers, 135 RBI and124 runs to go along with his .305 batting average.
Those first three numbers would put him in fifth, third and second, respectively, on the Jays’ all-time, single-season lists. His very-goodbut-not-great batting average, meanwhile, would tie Adam Lind’s 2009 Silver Slugger campaign for 26thbest in team history. Individually, none of the numbers rank as the franchise’s best, but taken together, and particularly when you adjust for era — teams scored about half-a-run more per game in 2003 than they have this season, for instance — you can see why Donaldson’s season is considered among the best.
NEW-SCHOOL STATS
This is where Donaldson really separates himself. Using Wins Above Replacement — which aims to quantify all aspects of a players’ contributions to his team against those of a replacement-calibre fill-in — Donaldson has already matched the top individual seasons in Toronto’s history: John Olerud’s 1993 campaign and Bautista’s in 2011. In the majors this season Donaldson trails only Washington Nationals’ phenom Bryce Harper. Donaldson’s WAR this season already ranks among the top 20 by any player in the past decade, and by the end of the year he could crack the top five.
CAPTAIN CLUTCH
While the notion of “clutch” hitting as a skill has been largely debunked — it doesn’t correlate from one season to another — Donaldson has certainly come through in some big moments for the Jays this season.
He’s hitting a major-league-best .382 with runners in scoring position and leads the league in go-ahead hits, while 27 of his 38 home runs have either tied the game for the Jays or given them the lead.
Another way to quantify these contributions is by looking at Win Probability Added, a statistic that measures how each play in a given game increases or decreases a team’s chances of winning and then credits — or debits — the player responsible with the incremental difference.
By this measure, Donaldson leads the American League this season with a 6.08 WPA, nearly a full point higher than the next-closest player.