How Are The Blue Jays Any Good?

Well they were for a while, but after last night's near-comeback against the Angels they sit today at 27-22, fourth in the American League East.  That's a tough spot to be in with a record that good.  Any arguments that suggest playing in the AL East absolutely sucks need only gander at some of the numbers below:

-The Blue Jays have 27 wins.  That's tied for third most in the American League and tied for FOURTH IN THE MAJORS.

-The Major League home run leader is Jose Bautista with 15.  He's tied for fourth in RBI's, putting him on pace for a 49 HR, 128 RBI year.  No big deal.

-They have three players (Bautista, Vernon Wells, Alex Gonzales) on pace for a 30 HR, 100 RBI season.  John Buck is on pace for 30 HR, 99 RBI's.

-The team leads the Majors in doubles, HR (by 14 over Boston), RBI's, Runs Scored, SLG %, Total Bases and, obviously, Extra Base Hits.  That's the MAJOR LEAGUES.

-They've done all this with the following stellar performances: Aaron Hill (.154/.268/.324), Lyle Overbay (.200/.281/.337) and Adam Lind(.228/.293/.391).  Hill is coming off a hamstring injury but nothing is stopping Overbay and Lind from hitting like Major Leaguers any time now.  Hill and Lind were the team's second and third best players last year so they have a longer leash, but Overbay is a free agent and a prime asset for a rebuilding team to move for, well, anything.  Right now he has no value and that's disappointing.  They'd surely love to move him and give Brett Wallace some at-bats.  Anyway, the point is that for how good they've been offensively, they could be better.  That's unlikely of course, Hill and Lind will probably heat up as Bautista and Gonzales cool off, but it goes to show how over their heads they've been to this point.

-Some good signs from the pitching staff.  They've given up the second fewest HR's in the American League, fourth fewest earned runs, lead the AL in strikeouts, second in strikeouts/flyouts ratio (always a good sign), third in slugging % against, and have caught the second most runners attempting to steal (a shared pitcher/catcher stat).

-The defense has also been good, they have the third best fielding percentage in the AL, fourth in double-plays turned, third fewest errors (they have 25, behind the Yankees with 20 and the Twins with, holy crap!  9!), second in assists credited and first in put-outs (any caught ball, tagged out, or thrown-out.  No strikeouts, basically). 

So that's the good, and lots of it as you can see.  There's some bad though...

-The batting averages are terrible.  Nobody is over .300 (Wells is .299), six regulars (played over 30 games) are below .260.  That would fine, except for...

-The on-base percentages are awful too.  For perspective, a good-to-great hitter will have three slash line number (batting average/on-base percentage/slugging percentage) of .300/.400/.500.  Bautista leads the team with a .361 OBP and four are under .300 (important guys too, Gonzales, Lind, Hill, Overbay).  The indicators are bad for guys like Gonzales, who's hitting .263 but has an OBP of .296, Wells, who's hitting .299 but has an OBP of .355, and recent pick-up Fred Lewis, who's hitting .283 but has an OBP of .316.  To me a good sigh is a hitter with an OBP of about 70 to 100 points higher than his batting average.  That's arbitrary of course, but that indicates a player who will still get on base if his hitting slumps or he runs into bad contact luck.  These three aren't walking enough and when the hitting drops off the team will suffer.

-Overall, the team is 22nd in the majors in walks, 10th in the AL.

-They strikeout A LOT.  Second most in the majors.

-Their OPS (On-base % plus slugging %) is fourth in the AL.  That's pretty good, except when you consider how many other categories they lead the league in.  Specifically, the fact that they lead the entire MLB in slugging % but are fourth in their own league in OPS (8th overall) speaks to how disproportionate their offense is.  In other words, they're hitting a LOT of homeruns proportional to their walks, singles, etc.  That's good though, right?  Kind of like a skinny girl with big boobs?  "In proportion" isn't always best!  Well yeah, except that when you aren't walking enough to keep up with your homeruns and doubles, you're prone to offensive slumps when the ball isn't dropping between fielders or landing in their gloves at the warning track. Or you lose even when you hit six homeruns in one game.

-There's some poor pitching indicators too, mostly in the bullpen.  Overall, the pitching staff is 8th in American league ERA and only have one complete game (tied for second last).  That's starting to tax the relief corps who've finished 48 of 49 games, have needed to record to fourth most average outs per game, have thrown the fourth most average pitches per game (all AL stats) and have already blown 6 saves.  The bullpens' ERA is a little higher than the team's, 4.49 vs. 4.36, but that's only 0.02 points higher than the league average.  They've done a good job of overworking individual relief pitchers; they're below league average in back-to-back relief appearances as well as relievers pitching over one inning.  So Cito's managing his bullpen well enough but the starters have to start pitching deeper or the bullpen ERA will creep higher and higher every month.  And there's no Stephen Strasburg to pick first overall.

 

Basically, you've got a team that kills baseballs when it makes contact, misses a lot, has a lot of players putting up hilariously unexpected offensive numbers, fields pretty well, and pitches okay but is overworking its relief pitching.  The fact that they don't walk enough and are using the bullpen so much indicates that they won't maintain their success level, especially with 12 straight games against divisional opponents, six of which are against Tampa Bay who have the game's best record.  We know this already though, don't we?  This team was supposed to finish last or lower, right?  Probably, but when you look at where they'd be in other divisions, whether in the AL or NL, it's frustrating because it's the same story every year.  

When you talk about re-alignment, it very much depends on the salary structure of the sport.  In the NHL, re-aligning the divisions because one is weaker than the rest is pretty silly; a hard salary cap ensures some degree of balance and fairness so that if you aren't winning, well, too bad because everyone's rules are the same.  Major League Baseball, with it's capless spending, regional TV channels and flimsy luxury tax, should have to deal with the periodic re-alignment question because teams are playing by such dramatically different rules.  You can point to low-revenue success teams like Tampa Bay or the occasional Florida Marlins run, but those both flukes and exceptions to the rule.  Florida had much bigger payrolls in their World Series wins before stripping them down to nothing and Tampa had years of not just high draft picks, but high draft picks that worked out.  They're the Pittsburgh Penguins of MLB, but with no protective salary structure to keep the Yankees from signing away Carl Crawford next year, and whomever they want after that.  It's a well-stated argument that the MLB salary structure is unfair, I'm not going to get into it again, but it spills into the re-alignment debate.  If you won't institute some player salary restrictions, can't you at least let the Yankees and Red Sox beat up someone else for a while?  You got to toss the mid and low-revenue market teams a bone, don't you? Hello?