At the beginning of the season, the Blue Jays were a clear playoff contender. In the American League, only Boston, Cleveland, and Houston had higher playoff odds than Toronto’s 52.1%. On June 1, those odds had dropped considerably, down to 36.3%, but were still near the top of the heap. The only other AL team that had passed them in those first two months of the season were the New York Yankees. Things improved briefly afterward, but then they took a turn south again. Let’s take a look:

That dark blue line on top represents the Blue Jays. Well, it’s on top for a portion of the graph on the left — the equivalent of a few weeks — before descending to roughly 25%, where it meets up with the rest of the pack. Now, Toronto’s no longer the top dog in the race for the second Wild Card, they’re just… dog.

All told, Toronto’s probability of qualifying for the postseason in any form has declined from 36.3% to 18.0%, including their loss yesterday in Detroit. In other words: not great.

But as Craig Edwards noted just over a month ago, there are quite a few American League clubs with a reasonable chance of claiming a Wild Card spot. Today, I’d like to focus on Toronto, specifically — and, in particular, why the odds might be in their favor.

No Strong Reason To Sell

Toronto doesn’t have a player who’s due to hit free agency after the season who’s also likely to bring back a sizable return. Some of their free agents to be — Darwin Barney, Chris Coghlan, Marco Estrada, J.P. Howell, Francisco Liriano, Miguel Montero, and Joe Smith — would fetch something of marginal value, but not the sort of package that’s going to kickstart a major rebuild.

Two of the club’s players, meanwhile — Russell Martin and Troy Tulowitzki — are well into their 30s and are signed to long-term contracts that will prevent a return of great substance. Tulowitzki might not even be tradeable at this point. As for Josh Donaldson, he would absolutely receive interest from many clubs. Given that he missed time this year and didn’t make the All-Star team, though, the Blue Jays wouldn’t exactly be selling high on him. The better strategy may be to let him remind everyone of his true MVP form and move him in the offseason.

Offense Can’t Be Any Worse

If you look at the team leaderboards, you’ll see that the Blue Jays appear near the bottom in terms of Offense. Specifically, they place 24th, when you take out pitchers’ hitting. But much of that stems from their horrid April. In April, the team’s wRC+ was just 71. It hasn’t been as bad since — 114 in May, 91 in June, and 85 in July. Obviously there’s a downward trend there since May, but April is still dragging down their season numbers. Also, some of the players who haven’t been hitting are either not playing now (Coghlan, Luke Maile) or are localized to one position (like Barney and Ryan Goins at second base).

More importantly, the projections haven’t given up on them. Our depth charts still see Toronto as possessing the seventh-best offense the rest of the way. Looking at season-to-date wOBA vs. projected rest-of-season wOBA, all of the team’s regulars save Justin Smoak and Russell Martin are expected to post wOBAs 10 points or more higher the rest of the way.

Second Base Can Be Upgraded

The depth-chart projections also reveal that the Blue Jays are projected to derive 0.0 WAR from their second-base situation the rest of the way. Literally replacement level. Devon Travis is an impressive talent, but he is frequently hurt. In his place, Barney and Goins have been a terrifyingly terrible platoon. Enter Dee Gordon rumors. It’s hard to know what the cost would be for the Marlins’ second baseman, given the possibility that the Marlins will take less if the team to which they deal him agrees to eat a bunch/all of his contract. Toronto has shown a willingness to do just that in the past, and may do so again. It would create a headache for the team when Travis is healthy enough to return, but the bet is that Travis could work his way into the outfield mix to stay in the lineup.

Gordon makes sense because he would not only be an upgrade for the rest of this season (0.6 WAR), but he’s signed to a cheap, long-term contract. But there could be other keystone players on the market. It’s not hard to see the Padres trading Yangervis Solarte or the Phillies dealing Howie Kendrick. Perhaps if Neil Walker can get back on the field the Mets will deal him. There will be options. When your current players are literally replacement-level players, then most anyone represents an upgrade. The Blue Jays can upgrade, in other words, without breaking into the vault.

The Bullpen Is Fine

One of the reasons the Blue Jays can avoid the fire sale for another year is that they really don’t need to upgrade their bullpen. As Jeff wrote last week, Roberto Osuna has been just about perfect, and with Aaron Sanchez back in the rotation, Joe Biagini is transitioning back to the bullpen. He’s working low-leverage situations for now, but it probably won’t be long before he’s back in a setup role. This is good news for Toronto. Biagini’s season splits for start vs. relief look similar now because he was rocked in his second relief stint back just before the break, but from the beginning of the season until May 3rd (before he was put in the rotation), he posted a 3.38 ERA / 2.82 FIP / 3.18 xFIP, with a 58.3% ground-ball rate and 19.7-point strikeout- and walk-rate differential (K-BB%).

Biagin will join Osuna, Danny Barnes, Joe Smith (who is set to return this week), seasoned-lefty killer Aaron Loup and less-seasoned lefty killer Jeff Beliveau. It’s not a group filled with household names, but they’ve been getting the job done. All told, they’ve been the eighth-best unit in the game by WAR.

Teams that need to spend big at the trade deadline to improve their bullpen are often in a precarious spot. Why make a big push to add players who may not make a huge difference in the grand scheme of things to aid a playoff push that may only result in one extra game? This may be the case for teams like the Mariners and Rays, but it won’t be the case for Toronto.

Aaron Sanchez

Last season, the California native posted a 3.00 ERA, and his 3.9 WAR was the 17th best among all pitchers and eighth best in the AL. This season, he’s made just seven starts and tossed just 32 innings while dealing with right-middle-finger issues. But he’s back now, and in his second start back from the disabled list on Friday, he threw six innings of one-run ball against Detroit. By Game Score v 2.0, it was his second-best start of the season, with his best coming in his season debut back in April. A healthy Sanchez will make a big difference for a starting rotation that has held its own without him.

Not much has gone right for Toronto this season. They started out as one of the favorites and have slunk further and further back to the pack as the season has progressed. But they should start hitting better, they have one of their best starting pitchers back, and they have a good bullpen. Second base is a major black hole, but it can be upgraded without costing them their future. Things have looked better for the Blue Jays, but don’t count them out just yet.

Each week, we publish north of 100 posts on our various blogs. With this post, we hope to highlight 10 to 15 of them. You can read more on it here. The links below are color coded — green for FanGraphs, brown for RotoGraphs, dark red for The Hardball Times and blue for Community Research.
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After this past offseason’s lack of oomph, the winter between the 2013 and 2014 seasons feels like a different time. In the span of two months, Robinson Cano, Jacoby Ellsbury, Clayton Kershaw, and Masahiro Tanaka signed $150 million-plus contracts. It’s not the last time that’s happened: the 2015-16 offseason featured the same number of deals — to Chris Davis, Zack Greinke, Jason Heyward, and David Price — above the $150 million threshold. But there’s enough distance between that earlier offseason and now that it’s possible to review the performances of the relevant players and reconsider the years ahead for them. And as a competitive Yankees club prepares for the second half of the season, it’s worth wondering what will become of former star center fielder Jacoby Ellsbury.

When Ellsbury first signed his deal, Dave Cameron examined (not for the first time) how well fast outfielders with good defense tend to age and noted that it would be dangerous to lump Ellsbury in with Carl Crawford. This was a fair and calm assessment of Ellsbury’s value. He noted that Ellsbury was projected to be a four-win player in 2014, and that over the life of his seven-year deal, Ellsbury was projected to be worth 17.5 WAR. The first part absolutely came true — Ellsbury tallied 4.1 WAR in 2014, his first with the Yankees. The latter projection, however, isn’t working out quite so well.

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Each week, we publish north of 100 posts on our various blogs. With this post, we hope to highlight 10 to 15 of them. You can read more on it here. The links below are color coded — green for FanGraphs, brown for RotoGraphs, dark red for The Hardball Times and blue for Community Research.
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We are very nearly ready for this season’s All-Star Game. Now that the rosters have been announced, it’s mostly academic. We’ll have the annual injury replacements and then the pitcher replacements and, of course, the Final Vote. By the time they line up along the bases for intros next Tuesday, many of the players who were originally denied a roster spot will have found a place by other means. That’s the nature of this process. Let’s take a look at what this year’s game is likely to offer.

It strikes me this year, as I scroll through the leaderboards, how few deserving players have been omitted from the initial rosters. In the National League, there are a couple of big snubs in Justin Turner, Anthony Rendon and Alex Wood, but Turner and Rendon are candidates for the Final Vote, and Wood is a good bet to make the roster, especially if Clayton Kershaw starts on Sunday and thus becomes ineligible to pitch in the ASG.

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Each week, we publish north of 100 posts on our various blogs. With this post, we hope to highlight 10 to 15 of them. You can read more on it here. The links below are color coded — green for FanGraphs, brown for RotoGraphs, dark red for The Hardball Times and blue for Community Research.
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Last Monday, I wrote this:

If you went to bed on the eve of the season and woke up today, you’d think everything was in order in the American League Central.

At that time, the Cleveland Baseball Club had compiled a 2.5-game lead on the Minnesota Twins. Cleveland had won six in a row and seven of their last 10, while Minnesota had lost four straight, and lost seven of their past 10. The preseason narrative looked to be crystallizing. Unfortunately, Minnesota wasn’t much interested in that narrative. The Twins proceeded to run off five wins in six ballgames, including three on the road in Cleveland, to take back control of the division.

Down south, the Brewers salvaged their week with a 7-0 win in their series finale with the Atlanta Baseball Club. Zach Davies pitched a very odd game, in which he tossed seven shutout innings, allowing just five baserunners (four hits and a walk) and didn’t strike anyone out. It was just the fifth time such a game had been pitched in the 2000s, the sixth time in the Wild Card Era, and the 129th time in baseball history.

The Brewers have been pretty disruptive to the main narrative, as well. When the Chicago Cubs won the 2016 World Series, Dave wrote a piece entitled “This Is How Dynasties Begin.” I nodded along, as it seemed, on that night, that the Cubs would be a force with which to reckon for some time to come. Today, I still believe that, but there have been cracks in the facade, certainly. Since May 17, the Brewers have been in sole possession of first place for every day save four — they spent two days 0.5 games back and two days tied for first place. They’ve had a tenuous grasp on the lead, as they haven’t pulled more than 2.5 games ahead, but they’ve been in first place nonetheless.

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Each week, we publish north of 100 posts on our various blogs. With this post, we hope to highlight 10 to 15 of them. You can read more on it here. The links below are color coded — green for FanGraphs, brown for RotoGraphs, dark red for The Hardball Times and blue for Community Research.
Read the rest of this entry »

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