Are the Blue Jays playoff bound?
By: David Matchett
Canadian Baseball Network
Baseball has an overabundance of statistics that that we can follow to predict future outcomes. Batting average and ERA may have been replaced by OPS and WHIP as performance gold standards but regardless of what is used we still have a lot of tools at our disposal to project expected results. So, with the All Star Game behind us and the second half looming, how do the Blue Jays look?
Let’s start by comparing the team to last year’s edition. At the 2015 All Star break the Jays were 45-46 and on pace to break even by the end of the season. The Elias Sports Bureau recently noted that only 25 teams that were below .500 at the break have ever qualified for the playoffs so the future looked pretty bleak. The Jays muddled along at 5-5 over their first 10 games of the second half then Alex Anthopoulos acquired Troy Tulowitzki, David Price, Ben Revere, Mark Lowe and LaTroy Hawkins and the rest was history. After a July 28 loss to Philadelphia the Jays finished 43-18 to run away with the division.
At this year’s break the Jays’ record sits at 51-40, a pace to win 92 games or just one less game than they won last year. And they’re six games better than they were at the same point last year. Does that mean they’ll win 99? Or will they have a .704 winning percentage over the last two months of the season? Probably not.
Players and teams go through streaks and it is the rare athlete that can keep his game at a top level for a very long time. Josh Donaldson has been having a year as good, if not better, than his MVP season; he’s in the top 10 in most major batting categories and had been one of the team’s sparkplugs. But from May 6 to June 7 this year he batted .213 with a .687 OPS, 4 homers, 9 RBI and 14 runs scored. He could repeat that in August, or he could continue his current hot steak. We just don’t know.
One thing we can do is compare the 2015 and 2016 Jays position-by-position to get a feel for how they might do the rest of this year.
First the rotation. R.A. Dickey has looked pretty good lately and Marco Estrada has been outstanding but his back injury could slow him down. Dickey went 11-4 with a 2.80 ERA after the break last year and Estrada was 10-5, 2.78. They will be hard-pressed to repeat that combined 21-9 record and sub 3.00 ERA this year. David Price (9-1, 2.30), Mark Buehrle (6-3, 4.38), Drew Hutchison (7-5, 6.02), Marcus Stroman (4-0, 1.67) and Felix Dubront (0-1, 6.59) started the rest of the second half games last year. Price was outstanding and Stroman gave the team more than they could have hoped for but the rest were rather pedestrian.
So despite not having David Price, the 2016 rotation looks pretty solid and the combination of Estrada, Dickey, Stroman, Happ and Sanchez as a whole should be comparable to last year. If Sanchez is shifted to the bullpen and replaced by Hutchison there would be a bit of a drop but a deadline deal for someone like Jake Odorizzi would help.
Russell Martin had a career year in 2015 but struggled for most of the first half before turning it around in mid-May. His .829 OPS, seven HR and 28 RBI since then look good but it’s still a regression from last year. And Josh Thole is no Dioner Navarro as a backup. There are 56 pitchers who have at least 25 plate appearances this year and 28 of them have a better batting average than Thole. And there’s nothing much waiting in the wings in Buffalo so unless a trade is made for a new backup we’ll see a catching corps that is a significant downgrade from 2015.
Last year’s two-headed first baseman of Justin Smoak and Chris Collabello far exceeded expectations and there was bound to be some backsliding. Smoak only batted .211 after the break last year but his .723 OPS, 10 HRs and 34 RBI were a big addition given his part-time status. Does anyone expect Colabello to repeat his .911 OPS from the second half last year? He’s currently getting back into shape playing for Class A Dunedin and we’ll probably see him by the end of the month but the Jays are unlikely to get a repeat of last year’s second half, especially since he hasn’t faced big league pitching since April 20. Jesus Montero is hitting 310 with 10HRs and 52 RBI with an .810 OPS in Buffalo and he may help out in September, if not sooner.
In the middle infield Ryan Goins stepped up after Devon Travis’ injury last year and surprised everyone with a .760 OPS in the second half. Travis has been matching that level since his return from injury and we can probably consider second base a wash in terms of offence, with a slight downgrade in defense.
Tulowitzki is replacing himself, but we didn’t get the “real” Tulo at bat last year. His defense was a huge upgrade over Jose Reyes but a .697 OPS was almost 200 points below his career average. He started slowly in 2016 but since his return from the DL a month ago he has been raking a .971 OPS with 7 HRs and 20 RBI in 20 games. The 2016 Tulo is an upgrade over his 2015 self.
And speaking of upgrades, would anyone in the Jays front office trade Darwin Barney 1-for-1 for Munenori Kawasaki right now? The Cubs recalled Muni for 1 game last week before sending him back to AAA Iowa and Barney has been a revelation as the backup middle infielder. Ryan Goins is injured and his poor performance suggests a return to Buffalo when Colabello returns in a few weeks. The current middle infield combination of Travis, Tulowitzki and Barney looks better than the 2015 version.
Josh Donaldson is having a great year but after the break last year he appeared in 69 games, hit 302 with 20 HRs, 63 RBI, 57 runs and an OPS 1.011. That will be hard to repeat. We can probably expect the same or a little less; it is probably too much to ask him to improve upon an MVP season.
Kevin Pillar started last year as the team’s left fielder but after Dalton Pompey’s demotion to AAA he took over in centre field and Chris Colabello and Danny Valencia platooned in left. That changed at the trade deadline and Ben Revere was a great addition who helped get the Jays to the playoffs. Michael Saunders had an All Star first half this year, but last year Valencia and Colabello combined for a .316 batting average, .864 OPS, 14 HRs, 59 RBI and 57 runs before the break.
It remains to be seen if Saunders can keep up the pace; his BABIP (batting average on ball is play) of .377 so far in 2016 is significantly higher than his career mark of .302 so we can probably expect a regression to the mean in the second half . Considering Revere’s superior defensive skills, this will likely result in a downgrade from 2015 in left field.
Kevin Pillar is on a pace to almost exactly match his season from last year so centre field in 2016 is a copy of 2015.
Right field is the wild card. Ezequiel Carrera has done a decent job lately, but he’s no Jose Bautista. In the 69 games he played after the break in 2015 Joey Bats hit 23 HRs, had 54 RBI, 52 runs scored and an OPS of .958. He’s coming back from an injury and who knows how long it will take him to fully recover. But it’s unlikely he’ll match what he did last year and there is no way that Carrera will pick up that much slack. So the Jays are likely to get a lot less out of right field than they did in 2015.
Edwin Encarnacion has been doing a fantastic job at DH and he is currently leading the majors in RBI. Last year he missed some second half games due to injuries but after the break he still appeared in 61 games, hit 21 HRs, drove in 57 and had an OPS of 1.132. Believe it or not, his most recent 61 games have been just as good; 20 HRs, 64 RBI and an OPS of 1.002. If anyone can copy last year’s second-half production, EE can. But we probably won’t see more than he gave the team a year ago.
With Bautista’s return from the DL and Colabello’s return from suspension later the month John Gibbons has a few decisions to make. Here’s a modest proposal: leave Carrera in right field, bench Smoak, move Encarnacion to first base and have Bautista act as DH. It will help with Bautista’s recovery, get Smoak’s low production out of the lineup and improve the right field defense without too much of a downgrade at first base.
Smoak will then be a switch hitting bat off the bench and late inning defensive replacement at first and Colabello can play in Buffalo for a while and be set for a September call up. Based on recent performance the team will probably be better with Smoak as a benchwarmer instead of Carrera.
The last part of the team is the bullpen. Roberto Osuna has been really good all year and Joe Biagini has been better than expected but most of the rest of the group has been a disappointment. They haven’t been as awful lately as they were in April and May, but they have a long way to go to get to last year’s standards. Unless we see an immediate about-face this is the most significant downgrade from 2015 for the Jays. Moving Sanchez to the pen will help, but that will hurt the rotation and this may be the biggest decision Gibby and team make as the season winds down.
So in summary, if we compare the second half expectations for this year to last year’s actual performance there should be some slippage for the team as a whole. As noted, the middle infield is better, the rotation, third base and DH are comparable, catcher is a slight reduction, the outfield has the potential to be much worse dependent upon Bautista’s post-injury performance and there are significant downgrades at first base and in the bullpen. A repeat of last year’s 48-23 post-All Star Game record is unlikely.
But that’s only part of the story. The Jays never take the field alone; there is always another team there to face them. To get a full picture of the Jays’ expected outcomes we’d have to do similar analyses for each of these teams. To prevent this review from reaching the dimensions of a Steven King novel we can use a shorthand analysis and assume that they all continue to play at the level they’ve seen so far in 2016. Here are the Jays’ opponents for the rest of the year, the number of games to be played against each team, and their current winning percentages:
Oakland 3 .427
Arizona 2 .422
Seattle 6 .506
San Diego 3 .427
Baltimore 9 .586
Houston 7 .539
Kansas City 3 .511
Tampa 9 .386
New York Yankees 10 .500
Cleveland 3 .591
Los Angeles Angels 7 .416
Minnesota 3 .364
Boston 6 .563
The weighted average of these records is .488. So if a .500 team played the Jays’ second half schedule they could be expected to go 36-35. But the Jays are not a .500 team, they are a .560 team, so if they and their opponents keep doing what they have been doing the Jays should go about 40-31.
The 2016 Jays don’t appear to be as good as the Jays from the last half of the 2015 season. Last year’s team played at an incredible pace and few teams can play at that level for as long as they did. But the Jays don’t have to be as good this year; they were 4.5 games out of first place at the All Star break last year and ended up winning the division by a 6 game margin, a 10.5-game swing. They are now only two games out of first place so a three-game swing is all that is needed.
So here’s my fearless prediction: the Jays won’t have as good a second half in 2016 as they did in 2015, but they don’t need to. If they keep doing what they’ve been doing they should win about 90 games this year and that will keep them in the running for a division title and a wild card position right down to the wire. And that’s all we can really hope for.
(Ask me again after the trade deadline passes because this will change. Isn’t baseball great?!)