During every one of the Toronto Blue Jays‘ last 14 final homestands of the season, I walked through the team’s clubhouse and talked to everyone in uniform – player, coach or otherwise – to ask for their anonymous votes for team awards in four categories.
In every year but this one, it’s been a handshake for the winners, an offer of congratulations and a question about their October plans in an attempt to arrange an appearance on The Blue Jay-A-Day Pre-Game Show during the playoffs. This year, I finally got to finish each conversation by wishing them well in the post-season.
There were 43 voters, though only 41 votes were cast for Pitcher of the Year because of a pair of abstentions. That’s what happens when a team’s best pitcher arrives at the trade deadline — some people aren’t quite sure how to vote, even though voters are allowed to divide a vote between two players (one even divided his into thirds!).
There was no surprise as far as the voting for Most Valuable Player went. The electorate gave the award to third baseman Josh Donaldson almost unanimously. Donaldson, acquired last November from Oakland in exchange for Brett Lawrie, Kendall Graveman, Sean Nolin and Franklin Barreto, hit .297/.371/.568 for the season, belting a career-high 41 home runs. Three of those were walk-off shots.
Donaldson led the league in extra-base hits, total bases, runs scored and RBIs and finished second in WAR, third in home runs and OPS and fourth in doubles. Of his 41 homers, an astonishing 30 were hit with the game tied or within one run.
In his third full season in the major leagues, Donaldson will finish in the top eight in league MVP voting for the third time. In fact, he’s likely to become only the second Blue Jay ever to be named American League MVP, joining George Bell, who turned the trick in 1987.
The Blue Jays 2015 Pitcher of the Year was a more tightly-contested ballot. Every voter deliberated seriously about how much to weigh season-long contributions against the two months of awesome from David Price, as well as how much to consider starting pitchers over relievers.
When all the counting was done, it was another first-year Blue Jay who wound up at the top of the list, with Marco Estrada pulling in more than twice as many votes as the runner-up, closer Roberto Osuna. Estrada was one of the least-heralded acquisitions of the off-season, coming over from Milwaukee in a straight-up trade for Adam Lind, and he wasn’t even in the Blue Jays’ rotation to start the season. But when Daniel Norris was optioned to triple-A Buffalo at the end of April, Estrada stepped into his position and has killed it ever since.
Estrada may well be at the top of the “where would the Blue Jays be without…?” list. He stabilized what was then a very shaky starting rotation and went out and had a career year. Estrada went 13-8 in 34 games, 28 of them starts, posting a 3.13 ERA that was good for fifth overall in the American League and a sterling WHIP of 1.044 that trailed only Houston’s Dallas Keuchel league wide. The righty led the league by holding opponents to a .203 batting average – the second-best in Blue Jays history. Estrada also hit .333 in six at-bats.
The free-agent-to-be didn’t get a prize for being voted Pitcher of the Year by his teammates, but he figures to cash in rather nicely this winter.
There likely would have been a down-to-the-wire vote for Blue Jays 2015 Rookie of the Year had Devon Travis not been betrayed by his aching left shoulder. Travis started the season like a house afire, winning the American League Rookie of the Month for April in which he hit .325/.393/.625 with a team-leading six home runs, but on the final day of the season’s first month he was drilled in the collarbone by a hard one-hopper off the bat of Cleveland’s Brandon Moss and fought shoulder problems for the rest of the season, finally undergoing surgery in September. He wound up hitting .304/.361/.498 in a terrific first taste of big-league action, but missed 100 games.
The injury to Travis meant that there was no debate over who the Blue Jays would select as their Rookie of the Year; Roberto Osuna walked away with the award.
The 20-year-old was never expected to make the team out of spring training, but he and fellow youngster Miguel Castro blew the doors off in the Grapefruit League and couldn’t be held back. Osuna made his major-league debut at Yankee Stadium in the second game of the season, coming into a one-run game with the bases loaded and one out and retiring both batters who stood in against him. He struck out the first hitter he ever faced in the major leagues — some guy named Alex Rodriguez — all while becoming the youngest pitcher in Blue Jays history.
By the middle of June, Osuna was the shining light in an otherwise very shaky Blue Jays bullpen. He had an ERA of 2.25 and a 0.938 WHIP in his first 30 appearances, striking out 35 batters in 32 innings while holding opponents to a .184/.246/.281 line and was named the closer. Once in that position, Osuna recorded 20 saves in 22 opportunities. In 68 total appearances, he allowed more than one run only three times.
Blue Jays fans learned quickly that “Osuna Matata” means no worries for the rest of the game, as the freshman wound up posting an incredible 0.775 WHIP for the season, averaging 9.7 strikeouts per nine innings with opponents hitting .191/.241/.351 against him and running away with the Blue Jays Rookie of the Year Award.
The last award, for Most Pleasant Surprise of the Year, always winds up with the most names on the list, and it was a big surprise that neither Estrada nor Chris Colabello ranked highly among the voters. Estrada’s story has already been told, and no one could have seen a year like that coming out of him. Likewise Colabello, a 31-year-old waiver pick-up who had spent seven years in independent ball and had only had a cup of coffee in the major leagues in which he shot the lights out for a month but then fell back to Earth hard because of a thumb injury.
Colabello got called up in early May, ostensibly to fill in for a week or so for the injured Michael Saunders, whose comeback from knee surgery had been temporarily (we thought) slowed by some irritation. Saunders never played again and Colabello, though eventually and mercifully moved out of the outfield, never turned into a pumpkin. The slugger had an 18-game hit streak in late May and early June and wound up hitting .321/.367/.520 for the season with 15 home runs in 333 at-bats. It’s impossible to believe anyone saw Colabello providing a near-.900 OPS over two-thirds of a season, but he and Estrada garnered only three votes each, tying for fourth in the voting with medical miracle Marcus Stroman.
The winner, Ryan Goins, got the support of his mates not because of his extraordinary work with the glove at both second base and shortstop — his magic afield was no surprise — but because of his offensive transformation over the final two months of the season and the fact that he was able to succeed when asked to bounce between the two middle infield positions all year long as a starter.
Goins didn’t make the team to start the season, losing out on a roster spot because Steve Tolleson was out of options, but he was back up by mid-April to serve as a super-utility man. Not only did he play both middle infield positions, Goins saw action at third base and in both outfield corners by the first week of May.
In Goins’ first game up from Buffalo, Jose Reyes broke a rib swinging and Goins had to take over at shortstop for almost a month. He moved to second base when Travis could no longer play through his first shoulder injury and spent a month there, then moved back to his utility role for another month until Travis re-injured the shoulder. Goins moved back to shortstop when Troy Tulowitzki missed three weeks with a broken shoulder blade and will play second base in the playoffs now that Tulowitzki is back healthy.
In the middle of all the bouncing around, something clicked offensively for the 27-year-old, who was hitting .222/.268/.314 with 13 walks in 230 plate appearances at the end of July. He became a much more selective and disciplined hitter, working his way into good hitting counts and reigning in a tendency to go fishing outside the strike zone and was the one of the toughest outs in the American League in the month of August, ranking sixth with a .442 on-base percentage while also hitting .314. Goins walked 16 times in the month, while striking out the same 16 times having gone into August with 42 strikeouts against those 13 walks.
Goins didn’t maintain that level of success into September, but still hit .279/.347/.384 for that month, with 10 walks and 22 strikeouts, posting an OPS of .731 — almost 150 points higher than he’d managed from April to the end of July. With his otherworldly defence at both middle infield spots, Goins went from all-glove, no-hit to a legitimate big-league weapon.
