DINGERS FROM THE 6IX
by Quinn Sweetzir
To put it lightly, the start to the season for this year’s Toronto Blue Jays has been quite mediocre. Although the 1-6 record is nothing to get excited over, it does not mean the season is already a failure, or show that the team is not a playoff contender as would be suggested by some, but rather proves the erratic predictability of a baseball game from day to day. Though several fans and a few analysts – most notability Jon Morosi – are concerned with the Jays early season performance, the fact of the matter is in baseball good teams lose once in a while, and in any particular major league baseball game, anything can happen. But it wouldn’t be right of me to tell you that the Jays are in fine shape without giving you some other examples, so here is every Jays team to make the postseason (plus the 96 win team in 1987) and their biggest slumps.
This shows that even the best teams can have stretches where they don’t play well, as even the best teams in Jays history had stretches where they were 1-6. All but two had even worse stretches. It just shows that putting too much thought into a slow start to the season does nobody any good. Panicking over a mediocre start to the season is an easy thing to do, but the fact remains that this club is still very much in contention. Fangraphs gives it a playoff probability of 30.0% and while this number is far from ideal, an average start is far from a deal breaker for the Jays. All we can do is hope for some improvement from the Jays in the meantime which is probably given the amount of talent on the roster (and Russell Martin can’t possibly go 0 for the season right?), and the volatility of baseball itself day to day. In a 162 game season, things balance out and worrying now does nobody any good, and panicking over some struggles from a good team is simply irrational. |
Photo used under Creative Commons from Keith Allison