After the additions they’ve made this winter, the Blue Jays will score at least 117 more runs than they did in 2017 and finish 2018 with over 800 runs scored.

Let’s take a look at how.

As we know, the 2017 season was a nightmare. It seemed like, unless your name was Josh Donaldson or Justin Smoak, you hit like shit or got hurt for an extended period of time. What’s amazing is that they still managed to win 76 games. Now before you comment something dumb about .469 ball, I don’t think anybody actually thought they were good enough over a full 162 to win that many games, especially with all the things that went wrong. But somehow, they were still in the race – and I use that term lightly given the amount of teams they had to pass – until mid-August, when they went into Wrigley Field three games back of the Twins and Angels, who were tied for the second wildcard spot. The Cubs sweeping them in three games was probably for the best as it put our delusional playoff hopes to bed for good.

The team was bad last year. Everybody got hurt and the depth that they did have wasn’t really major-league level talent, regardless of what people who call into post-game radio shows think. No MLB team should ever let Darwin Barney and Ryan Goins combine for 821 plate appearances unless they’re intentionally tanking. And I guess the stress of watching both of them in the lineup on a daily basis had the same impact on the front office as it did on all of us, because they spent all winter trying to acquire as much major league depth as possible. That leads me to my next point.

Instead of focusing too much on the guys like Rob Refsnyder, Chris Coghlan, and Nori Aoki, who didn’t really combine for that many at-bats, we’ll talk about the new guys and who they’ll be replacing.

Jose Bautista

686 PA .203/.308/.366 80 wRC+ -.5 fWAR

Goins

459 PA .237/.286/.356 69 wRC+ -.3 fWAR

Barney

362 PA .232/.275/.327 58wRC+ -.6 fWAR

Randal Grichuk

600PA .240/.291/.483 99wRC+ 1.9fWAR

Aledmys Diaz

600PA .265/.318/.433 97wRC+ 1.7 fWAR

Yangervis Solarte

600PA .272/.335/.442 105wRC+ 2 fWAR

At first glance, your reaction might be “meh,” and you wouldn’t be wrong. Guys like Grichuk, Diaz, and Solarte could all outperform those projections, but just for arguments sake, let’s just pretend they’re going to happen, which is a much safer bet than say, guessing that Diaz will return to his 2016 all star form.

But what I like about those moves is that there’s real depth there now. And Grichuk, strikeouts be damned, can rake. Unless the strikeout rate becomes a huge problem, Grichuk should get enough plate appearances to hit 30 home runs for the first time in his career. What the Jays essentially did by moving on from Barney, Goins, and Bautista, and replacing them with Grichuk, Solarte, and Diaz, is cut the dead weight and replaced them with hitters that can actually produce at a league-average level. It would be lunacy to just assume that guys like Barney and Goins could produce a wRC+ of 100 over a full season, and unfortunately it looks like Father Time has caught up with Jose Bautista. Solarte and Diaz aren’t your full-time starters going into the regular season, but they’re both infielders and we know what the track record is with those types of players on this team, so they should get their fair share of starts.

So do those three add up to 117 extra runs over a full season? Probably not, but that’s a start.

Another thing to consider is something I wrote over at Baseball Prospectus Toronto at the end of the season. The Blue Jays were really unlucky last year, even outside of their injury struggles. Their batting average on balls in play with runners in scoring position was .258, which ranks eighth worst among all teams since the 2000 season. That’s 8^th out of 510 teams. That led to a horrific .229 average with runners in scoring position, which changed the outcome of games for them. On average, teams that hit less than .231 with RISP scored about 85 more runs the next year.

The team has moved on from Bautista and Edwin Encarnacion over the past two seasons, but Donaldson and Justin Smoak should be able to fill that void, with guys like Grichuk, Kendrys Morales, and a healthy Devon Travis pitching in offensively.

Does an 117 run increase seem out of the question now?