TORONTO – The end of a season is a reflective time, a chance to look back on the year that was, and it’s an annual tradition for me to go through the Blue Jays’ clubhouse, talk to every one of the players and coaches (and the manager) and have them choose who stood out the most in a Blue Jays uniform in the season gone by.
The Blue Jays themselves – on an anonymous basis – selected their team MVP, Pitcher of the Year, Rookie of the Year and Most Pleasant Surprise of the season and, as always, I was impressed by how seriously they took the job and how much time they spent thinking about their selections. Not so much for MVP and Rookie of the Year, those were pretty obvious, but there was much consideration given to making their choices for the other two awards.
Please note that the numbers don’t all add up due to the vagaries of the process. Some players abstained from voting for some categories.
MOST VALUABLE PLAYER
1. Jose Bautista – 26 ½ votes
2. Melky Cabrera – 5 ½
There was really no mystery here. Bautista had his first healthy season since 2011, playing in 155 games, and had the Blue Jays not bowed out of the playoff race with two weeks to go in the season, he’d be getting some strong consideration for the American League MVP award, as opposed to just his own team’s.
Bautista wound up hitting .286/.403/.524 for the season. He finished second in the A.L. in on-base percentage, fifth with 35 home runs, third with 101 runs scored, second in walks with 104 and in the top 10 in the league in total bases, slugging percentage, extra-base hits and RBIs. His 12 outfield assists placed him fourth in that category.
Bautista was the only one of the Blue Jays’ starting position players to be on the active roster every day of the season (Josh Thole was, too), after missing basically the second half of each of the last two seasons with an injured wrist and hip, respectively. He spent 2014 re-establishing himself as one of baseball’s elite offensive players, but too often, he was doing it with Dioner Navarro or Juan Francisco hitting behind him in the batting order.
PITCHER OF THE YEAR
1. Mark Buehrle – 14
2. Marcus Stroman – 9
3. R.A. Dickey – 5
4. Aaron Sanchez – 1
T5. Drew Hutchison – ½
T5. Todd Redmond – ½
This ballot is the one that wound up the most surprising result, for me anyway. I really thought that Dickey would win it, or at least split it with Buehrle, and maybe these results are more of an indication of what the players think of Buehrle, who has been known for a long time as one of the great teammates in the game.
Buehrle got off to a sensational start to the season, going 10-1 over his first dozen starts with a sparkling 2.10 ERA. From that point on, though, over his final 20 starts, Buehrle pitched to an ERA of 4.25, a 1.467 WHIP and opponents’ OPS of .797, averaging barely six innings per start. As he always does, he answered the bell every fifth day, pitching through aches and soreness and getting big-league hitters out with a fastball that very rarely touched even 85 miles per hour.
He did lead the team in ERA (among qualifiers) when all was said and done, and closed out his season with a Buehrle-esque tour de force – eight shutout innings against the Mariners that got him over 200 innings pitched for a 14th consecutive season, breaking a tie with some guy named Cy Young for the most consecutive seasons with at least 200 innings pitched and no more than 61 walks.
Dickey finished the season with a higher ERA than Buehrle(3.71 to 3.39), but had Buehrle beat in innings pitched, WHIP, strikeouts, starts and complete games. The knuckleballist did give up almost twice as many home runs as Buehrle did, 26 to 15.
Still, if I had a vote it would have gone to Dickey (Stroman was incredible, but wasn’t on the team for two months and didn’t join the rotation until mid-June), and it’s interesting to see just how much the uniformed personnel went the other way. I believe that speaks volumes about how the people in that clubhouse feel about Mark Buehrle, the person.
ROOKIE OF THE YEAR
1. Marcus Stroman – 26
2. Aaron Sanchez – 3
3. Ryan Goins – 2
There was no way this vote was going to go any differently, except maybe to have Stroman win it 30-1 (you’re not allowed to vote for yourself, after all). Stroman had a fantastic first taste of the major leagues, not only stabilizing the Blue Jays’ rotation once he joined it in mid-June, but outperforming the veterans in front of him. Among Blue Jays’ starters, Stroman had the lowest ERA and WHIP and was second to Drew Hutchison in strikeouts per nine innings. He’s the only Blue Jay to have thrown nine innings twice this season, though he only got credit for one complete game because his first nine-inning outing was in a game that wound up going 10.
It’s rare for a highly-hyped prospect to come to the big leagues and actually deliver on the hype, but Stroman did it, and did it in a big way. His performance showed the Blue Jays that they could very well have a big piece of what promises to be a strong, homegrown rotation in the future. Speaking of which…
MOST PLEASANT SURPRISE
1. Aaron Sanchez – 13
2. Dioner Navarro – 6
3. J.A. Happ – 3
T4. Drew Hutchison – 2
T4. Marcus Stroman – 2
T6. Dustin McGowan – 1
T6. Todd Redmond – 1
T6. Danny Valencia – 1
This last one was the closest race by far, and the one that required the most thought from the respondents. The most pleasant surprise often comes down to “I heard the guy was good, but not this good”, and that was certainly the story with Sanchez. The then-21 year-old opened plenty of eyes with a spectacular Spring Training, leading to calls for him to break camp with the big club despite the fact that he’d had all of 86 1/3 innings in high-A ball to his credit in four years as a pro.
Sanchez stayed back in Dunedin, joining the New Hampshire Fisher Cats’ spring training crew, when the Blue Jays headed north (well, south, they opened the season in St. Petersburg, after all), but rocketed through the system and found himself in the bigs in August, where he was thrown right into the fire.
The kid was good, but he’d never been this good. Sanchez was the Blue Jays’ best reliever over his tenure with the big club – he was in the bullpen in order to keep his innings total manageable and wound up with a total of 130 1/3 innings pitched at three levels this year.
His numbers out of the bullpen were, for lack of a better word, silly. Sanchez allowed just 14 hits and only nine walks over his 33 big-league innings for a WHIP of 0.697. Opponents hit .128/.202/.165 against him. That’s not a typo. He was fearless in pressure situations, calling for many to suggest he’d be the answer as the Blue Jays’ closer of the future, but that seems a waste of an arm that one expects can provide 180 or more quality innings per season, as opposed to just 50 or 60.
The hope was that Sanchez was going to be good, but he blew the doors off in his two months in the major leagues. A most pleasant surprise, indeed.