Blue Jays Mailbag: Answering Questions About the Shitty Team in Toronto
7 years ago
The Blue Jays have face-planted out of the gate, managing to put their playoff hopes in legitimate jeopardy within two weeks of Opening Day. Is it all already hopeless? Is it time for fans to crack each others’ heads open and feast on the goo inside?
I’ll tackle the answers to those and many other equally soul-crushing questions in this week’s edition of our Blue Jays mailbag!
And if you have a Blue Jays question you’d like me to tackle for next week, be sure to send it to stoeten@gmail.com. Now on with the show! As always, I have not read any of Griff’s answers…
OK, small sample size and it’s early and all that but also what about these two theories: 1) The book is out on Jays hitters: pitch ’em away away, mostly soft stuff. And Jays don’t adjust. 2) They got old fast. What other team has so many thirty-somethings in starting lineup?
Terry from Toronto
Yeah… no. I mean, if you’re really desperate to shit your pants about this team and this season being irrevocably fucked, I guess I understand the appeal of those kinds of one-size-fits-all theories, but I don’t think it takes a whole lot of investigating or thought to pretty well blow them apart. Like, did it really take pitchers until 2016 to figure out that Jose Bautista is going to damage them on the inner half of the plate? Is that fact that Devon Travis has so far looked abysmal because of age?
I think not.
Those are just two small examples, of course, and it’s certainly possible that Bautista, Russell Martin, Steve Pearce, and Troy Tulowitzki are suddenly showing the signs of deep, age-related decline, or a total lack of ability to adjust to what they’re seeing. But the truth is, we haven’t seen enough of any of these hitters so far in 2017 to have picked up on trends we can have any sort of confidence in.
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