How Will Toronto’s Offense Fare in 2011?
An uneducated expectation is a dangerous weapon. Just yesterday, while looking over the CAIRO projections one more time, I stumbled upon the Toronto Blue Jays’ modest 74 wins. The Jays fooled me last season – I joined in the fray that figured they would finish below an upstart Baltimore Orioles’ club – with an unexpected brand of offensive voodoo that resulted in roughly 750 runs. They hit a lot of home runs (257; 46 more than the next highest total and more than the Seattle Mariners, Houston Astros, and Albert Pujols combined) and they made a lot of outs (fifth lowest on-base percentage in the league). There’s a reason the Jays are the only team in league history to hit more than 250 home runs and score under 800 runs.
Offenses driven behind low on-base percentages and high slugging percentages have existed throughout the history of the league (with league context being key in defining what a high slugging percentage defines). But recent seasons have led to a proliferation of these offenses. Perhaps we should take to calling them the Joe Carter offenses in honor of the Blue Jays’ legend with a slugging percentage of gold and an on-base percentage of tinfoil. I fully understand that even if the Jays returned the same lineup they would be unlikely to replicate their 2010 feats. Still, I wanted to know how the teams alongside the Jays fared in the year thereafter.
I focused in on recent seasons and found three comparable teams. The 2009 Texas Rangers, the 2006 Chicago Cubs, and the 2001 Milwaukee Brewers. Here’s a look team-by-team.
The 2009 Rangers
Hit: .260/.320/.445 with 224 home runs
Scored: 784 runs
The closest thing we have in recent years to the Jays’ offense, the Rangers decided to mix things up for the 2010 season and parted ways with Marlon Byrd, Hank Blalock, and Andruw Jones. They responded by hitting hit .276/.338/.419 with 162 home runs. The increased on-base percentage outweighed the loss in slugging percentage and home runs as the team scored three more runs in 2010 than they did in 2009.
The 2006 Cubs
Hit: .268/.319/.422 with 166 home runs
Scored: 716 runs
The differences between the 2006 and 2007 Cubs are numerous. The team replaced Todd Walker with Mark DeRosa, Juan Pierre with Alfonso Soriano, and Ronny Cedeno with Cesar Izturis. The team hit .271/.333/.422 along with 151 home runs while scoring nearly 40 additional runs thanks to upping their on-base percentage while maintaining their power output.
The 2001 Brewers
Hit: .251/.319/.426 with 209 home runs
Scored: 740 runs
The loss of Jeromy Burnitz combined with Geoff Jenkins missing time and Alex Sanchez becoming the fulltime centerfielder saw the Brewers’ offense of 2002 hit .253/.320/.390 with 139 home runs and 627 runs. Milwaukee did manage to steal roughly 30 more stolen bases, so there’s that.
Unless the Jays add a designated hitter, they’ll essentially return the 2010 cast in 2011, making this team the truest continuation of any team involved in this post. CAIRO projects the Jays will finish under 700 runs scored in 2011 and maybe they will. There’s something to be said for the availability heuristic, though, and that’s why Toronto’s offense is one of the more intriguing units to watch for next season.
You have to take in consideration Hill and Lind regressing back to normal-ish production, which should give the offense a huge boost.
Also, a full season of Travis Snider would be pretty nice.
Yunel Escobar has a reasonable chance to stop sucking. Bautista might hit 35-40 next year which will still be nice…
The Jays did get lucky with Buck/Gonzo/Jose last year on offense, but with Lind and Hill hopefully remembering how to play baseball it should even out.
Ditto on Snider. Serious power to all fields. Lind, Hill and breakout Bautista may be more recognizable names at the time of this writing, but my focus will be on the young bopper, Snider in 2011. If healthy, it will be interesting to see what he is capable of through a full season.
i cant believe theyre projected at 77 wins. They are at least a .500 ballclub with a slugging offense and good young pitching. The bullpen did leave in free agency, but they still have frasor. I think they should break .500 again this year. Man the AL east is scary! I can see every team there breaking .500 with some luck, especially if they were in another division and didnt have to play each other. Yes, even the retooled orioles, assuming buck can get the young guys to perform like he did last year.
they lost bullpen and their best SP
plus it looks like they are going to start drabek and stewart
2 rookies in a rotation is always shady
3rd best SP. Marcum was behind both Romero and Morrow in WAR last year.
They lost Doc the year before and didn’t get much worse…
The only real loss in the bullpen was Downs. Frasor’s coming back, and I don’t expect Dotel to be much worse than Gregg was.
It’s gonna be tough to replace Marcum’s innings, but getting another 40-50 extra out of Morrow and 150 or more out of Drabek should help a bit.
Not having Brian Tallet pitch 77 innings of -1.5 WAR should help a bit too.
Any regression from Wells/Bautista, and not having Buck should be made up for by Hill/Lind/Snider/Arencibia.
Why exactly would stewart be up with the big club???
Cecil, Morrow, Romero are the top 3
4th/5th spot will go to 2 of
Drabek, Rzepyzyski, Litsch. .. Stewart could be a midseason/injury replacement.. but I doubt theres any chance he starts with the big club giving his inning limits since moving out of the pen..
I personally think Drabek and Rzep will be a formidable 4/5.. people keep writing off rzep, he had a tough year but has the stuff to rebound .
Escobar has never really projected to be all that good with the bat tho, right?
either way, JB should regress imo, as will production from C, and Vernon Wells probably isn’t going to have an MVP April again since he stinks. I see a big drop in this offense’s numbers. This is all depending on how the lineup fills out obviously, but there are a lot of question marks for the season as of right now.
Once again, you can’t say the offense will drop off considering the likely bounce-back years from Hill and Lind.
You also have to consider that a healthy Travis Snider looks like a lock to hit 30 homers.
assuming JB hits 57 HR’s again, yeah, sure. But I don’t think we can safely do that. Same with assuming Hill and Lind return to form. Maybe last year was their true talent levels, and they just regressed back to where they were supposed to be. I don’t think anyone will argue that AH’s 2009 was an outlier.
Aaron Hill’s 2010 is a bigger outlier than his 2009 — he won’t return to 2009 form, likely, but to assume that 2010 somehow represents his true talent level is to ignore too much career information. Lind is a slightly different case, being younger, so 2009 might be a huge outlier, but at this point it’s impossible to say that 2010 was closer to his true talent than 2009 — the truth lies somewhere in the middle.
Expecting Bautista and Wells to regress to the mean, but not allowing the same possibility for Hill and Lind is pure foolery.
Career wOBA:
1) SS Y.Escobar (27): .338
2) 1B E.Encarnacion (27): .344
3) 3B J.Bautista (29): .346
4) CF V.Wells (31): .346
5) DH Lind (26): .341
6) 2B A.Hill (28): .327
7) LF T.Snider (22): .331
8) C J.Arencibia (24): .232 (37pa)
9) RF R.Davis (29): .326
A young lineup who projects as an average to above average offense even just based on career numbers (which probably underrate the young lineup overall).
And of course most of the guys in the lineup have either shown that they can hit signficantly better than those career averages recently, or are very young players with the minor league track record to suggest much better MLB numbers going forward….for example…
best wOBA in last 2yrs:
1) RF R.Davis (29): .354
2) SS Y.Escobar (27): .357
3) DH Lind (26): .394
4) 3B J.Bautista (29): .422
5) CF V.Wells (31): .362
6) 2B A.Hill (28): .357
7) 1B E.Encarnacion (27): .339
8) LF T.Snider (22): .331
9) C J.Arencibia (24): .232 (37pa)
now that’s not going to happen, but those are all numbers that these players have put up within the last two seasons.
Those numbers give Toronto a chance to “get lucky” in any one season.
The way these guys approach hitting, I don’t see much of a drop-off from last season’s production.
Watching these guys play my D-backs last year in Phoenix was like a live BP session.
Every batter was taking HR cuts, and many were connecting.
It reminds me of how softball leagues play, actually.
Entertaining…….
I’d say it was one of the Arizona games the defined this team, in a nutshell: six homers, six runs scored. Nobody was doing anything but mashing the ball; E5 put on one hell of a show as well, with three homers, all of which were amongst the longest hit in Arizona that season.
If I was resigned to watching a mediocre team, I’d want them to play like Toronto.
However, I’d rather see them mix in some better OBP guys between mashers and improve the pitching staff if I was serious about having them compete.
I really don’t see a huge drop-off in offense for them, even though Bautista will come down to earth some.
^series of the possessed Edwin Encarnacion
6 solo HRs vs Dan Haren in a loss lol..there are some records in that game too
“…the Joe Carter offenses in honor of the Blue Jays’ legend with a slugging percentage of gold and an on-base percentage of tinfoil.”
Nicely said!
I think the wild cards are Hill and Lind with Bautista almost certainly coming back to earth a bit.
I expect the Jays to lose some of that power but I think the team will put up a better OBP if Lind and Hill bounce back. A full season of Escobar .350 OBP will help instead of Gonzalez sub .300 but they sacrifice homeruns for more OBP which is not really a bad things. The line-up definitely needs it.
I think the offense will be mediocre. But that’s OK. I’m optimistic about the path AA has the organization on. I’m more interested in seeing how the 2011 draft goes, how the young talent develops, and whether AA makes any interesting deadline deals. I’m also hoping for a rebound year from Hill and Lind, and a strong year from Bautista (the latter would be a great story and could help the team in the long run, via a better trade return or draft compensation).
In the “3 comparables” section, shouldn’t it be noted that the guys you listed were all replaced with someone that was an overall better player?
In other words, the team made upgrades. They didn’t just switch out home runs for walks.
Just two words – Yunel Escobar. This player has so much potential, he just needs a chance to prove himself. You know, to wake his full potential!
In any rate, I am very optimistic about Toronto’s offense.
Just two words, and a phrase – Yunel Escobar, neither fish nor fowl.
Yunel has a big powerful body but hits like my mother’s sister – not so great. He was trained to be a slap hitting OBP guy with great speed. BUT – deep inside he knows he can be a middle of the order type guy – so – in reality he’s neither. He floats between styles and – as I say – he isn’t fish nor fowl. Over rated.
nice malid that prormous fleding with buction and raphy iverefe. actul all loncy from cilly tractiod from cuctiophe and baccery.