Despite a quiet winter, the Jays’ current roster is viewed as a serious threat.
TORONTO: An off-season that began with a great deal of drama, excitement, travel, and big-game hunting is probably going to end very quietly.
The Toronto Blue Jays are still a very good baseball team despite a quiet winter in terms of roster building. Whether that was intentional or not is still a very valid question.
The Jays are projected as one of the top five teams in baseball by opposing teams and front offices that lean heavily toward analytics, and they are seen as a real threat.
Compared to social media opinions and the initial disappointment fueled by expectations, which were set by Mark Shapiro and the front office group back in October, that’s a far better gauge of reality.
It makes sense that fans anticipated more spectacular additions considering the talk of a competitive window and the disappointing results of the previous two postseasons.
However, the Jays’ needs in the free agent market never matched this one, and it was never clear how general manager Ross Atkins would improve an offense that failed to live up to expectations in 2023 in almost every aspect when it mattered most.
From the beginning of the winter, it was clear that internal positive regression would play a major role in this team’s offensive improvement and ability to win the toughest division in baseball, barring any significant core-swapping trades or unexpected events.
How many of the Jays’ main hitters had bad seasons last year?
Nobody could have predicted that Daulton Varsho, Alejandro Kirk, George Springer, and Vladimir Guerrero Jr. would all fall short of expectations at the same time.
Just that quartet’s fWAR decreased from 15.8 in 2022 to 6.9 in the previous year. Their number of home runs scored fell from 98 to 75.
Even with projections suffering from the lack of offensive production in the previous season, that group of bats is much closer to the former than the latter in terms of true talent level and future expectations.
Positive regression is on the horizon, and when you account for negative regression from a pitching staff that was extremely healthy and placed fourth in baseball last season with an ERA of 3.73, the Jays find themselves back in the 89-win range.
This is where the anxiety and distress that permeate social media these days comes into the discussion.
Do the Jays have it all?
Is there any remaining cash?
That response has a lot of moving parts.
The Jays don’t have a lot of extra money to spend because they are already in the Competitive Balance Tax for the second year in a row after reaching that mark in 2023 for the first time as a team.
The heavy lifting is probably done after giving veteran Justin Turner $13 million on Tuesday to be the starting designated hitter. A few depth additions may be made in the upcoming weeks as they take care of the roster’s fringe players.
That will not make anyone happy, but it
That is the nature of baseball.
In the world of social media, opinions and perceptions can shift almost instantaneously, making it the most predictable and unpredictable sport available.
The Jays are currently in a mode of searching for deals, which leaves room for an alternative response to the query, “Are they done?”
Given the amount of talent still available (the only real game-changers remaining are Cody Bellinger and old friend Matt Chapman), the Jays may become involved in the closing stages of the trade if Scott Boras’ demands aren’t satisfied. They haven’t been met as of yet.
The Jays won’t meet those contract demands either, but if an obvious upgrade is still looking for a place to call home in two weeks, there may be some flexibility, according to people with knowledge.
An additional nuance is that opening day is rarely approached by a front office with a fully functional team that won’t require some kind of transformation to reach their desired destination.
At this time three years ago, the rotation was in shambles, but they could still make ends meet with their offensive capabilities.
After a few months, Alek Manoah surfaced, and the trade for Jose Berrios was arranged.
Poof. Issue resolved.
Currently, pitching might need to sustain the offense in a similar way as it did during the previous summer.
