The Toronto Blue Jays opened the season with a steady diet of their American League East opponents. The first 17 games of the season were all in the division, with at least one series against each of the Orioles, Rays, Red Sox and Yankees.
That run is done and the Blue Jays have emerged a disappointing 8-9, but somehow it feels a lot worse.
This wasn’t the kind of performance anyone expected to have seen from a group that blew away the rest of the big leagues last season, scoring almost 900 runs, even though the sample size is just one-tenth of the schedule.
The 2016 Blue Jays have struggled to string together hits, let alone score runs. The team that scored at least seven runs in basically one-third of its games last year (53 of 162) has managed that feat only twice in 2016, with the offence returning basically intact, and there have been three or fewer Blue Jays cross the plate in almost half (8 of 17) of their games so far this season.
The starting pitching, which was supposed to be the Jays’ weakest link, has been outstanding. Marco Estrada, J.A. Happ and Aaron Sanchez have allowed a total of 12 earned runs over their first nine starts combined, for a sparkling ERA of 1.89. The Jays have won three of Marcus Stroman‘s four starts, the young righty having posted a WHIP of 0.99 to this point, and in the one start of his they lost, he left with a five-run lead. R.A. Dickey has been off to his typical slow start, it’s true, but the other four have been outstanding and the knuckleballer has pitched well enough to win nearly every time out – had the offence performed as expected.
That’s the mystifying thing, through the opening 17 games – the bats seem to be stuck in neutral. Josh Donaldson is hitting even better than he did in his MVP season, Jose Bautista hardly ever gets out, Edwin Encarnacion isn’t walking as much as he typically does, but is still hitting .299 and his power stroke has come around in the past week or so, so The Gauntlet is holding up its end of the bargain, but aside from fits and starts from everybody else except for Michael Saunders (.321/.390/.509), there’s not much else happening.
That means very few sustained rallies – the Blue Jays have only had six innings all season in which they’ve scored at least three runs – and the line-up not turning over as often to get back to the big bats so that they can get things going again.
Troy Tulowitzki has been at the top of the list of the underachievers with the bat. He has hit in some bad luck, to be sure – he was robbed of a three-run home run by a leaping Joey Rickard in the first inning Thursday night and is sporting a career-low .175 batting average on balls in play – but his line drive rate is hovering below 10 percent, by far the worst it’s ever been.
Tulowitzki has a more-than-impressive track record, and players’ production doesn’t generally fall off a cliff at any point in time, never mind at 31 years of age, so it’s very difficult to see him not rebounding and becoming a contributor on offence sooner than later.
Kevin Pillar appeared to spring back to life once he was moved out of the leadoff spot, going 6-for-7 with a walk in the first two games after being dropped down to the bottom of the line-up, but he’s 0-for-12 since. Ryan Goins had just two hits on the road trip through Boston and Baltimore and is hitting just .212/.255/.269 and the Smoakabello platoon is batting just .133 to start the season. Justin Smoak does have an insane .481 on-base percentage to go with his .222 batting average, but Chris Colabello is off to a 2-for-29 start with just two walks.
The other member of the bottom of the line-up, Russell Martin, seems to be coming around. He started the season in a 2-for-31 rut, but the catcher has reached base in eight of his last 19 plate appearances.
With the bottom half of the batting order really not doing anything at all, it’s kind of astounding that the Blue Jays sit 12th in the major leagues in runs scored (5th in the A.L.).
The hitting can’t be expected to be this poor all season long. Martin, Tulowitzki and Pillar, at least, are going to wind up hitting a lot better than the combined .173 that they’re hitting right now, maybe even by as much as a hundred points. Donaldson will slow down a touch, but Bautista will heat up and if history tells us anything, it’s that Encarnacion is going to have a streak or two during which he’ll carry the team on his back.
Just as the hitting won’t stay down, the starting pitching won’t stay up, but it’s been the starting pitching that has enabled the team to tread water through a 17-game stretch in which it’s gotten basically nothing from half the starting line-up. There will be a run wherein the hitters compensate for the deficiencies of the pitchers, and then there will be times when the Blue Jays’ pitchers and hitters both click, and those are the times to put some daylight between them and their opponents.
The first tenth of the season has been frustrating and disappointing for most Blue Jays watchers, and not just the ones who expected them to pick up right where they left off last October. But there they sit, just one game under the break-even mark while they wait for things to start to go right.
It’s certainly not what anyone would have hoped for but given the way they’ve played so far, it’s a pretty solid place to be.