Blue Jays fans have slipped into a sort of baseball depression as the team has gotten off to their worst start in franchise history and currently have the worst record in baseball.
At 3-12, there aren’t a lot of current positives to look back at, but there are still reasons to be optimistic.
To be specific, we found 6 good reasons to keep Blue Jays fans hopeful about the team going forward.
Recent teams have had worse stretches and made the playoffs
Just last season, the Texas Rangers had a 3-13 stretch in the middle of their season, they ended up with a 95-67 record and won their division. Of course, it stands out a little more when it happens at the beginning of the season because it’s all you can really reference, but it’s not unprecedented for a team to go through tough stretches like this.
In fact, the last two seasons, the Blue Jays two worst stretches in the season in which they only won three games were 3-9 (2016) and 3-11 (2015).
Kendrys Morales vs. Edwin Encarnacion
The early returns from Morales have been great. It’s easy to point to the most significant change of the offseason and think “The Blue Jays are worse because of that!”, but realistically, Morales has contributed more on offence to the Blue Jays this season than Edwin has to the Indians (113 wRC+ vs. 109 wRC+). Morales has been absolutely crushing the ball.
According to Fangraphs, only 9.1% of Morales’ contact with the ball has been weak contact, ranking him 15th in that category among qualified hitters.
Unlucky Hitting
For a team like the Blue Jays, with several power bats and in a homerun friendly park, they usually rank among the best teams for the ratio of their balls hit in the air to home runs. In 2016, the team finished the league fifth in homeruns per flyball (HR/FB%). In 2015, they finished first. This season, they’re fourth last.
Combine that with the ninth worst BABIP in the league (A number that is only being held up by the team’s bottom of the order players) and of course a team is going to struggle.
Unlucky Pitching
While some of the Blue Jays pitchers have been more susceptible to home runs in the past, there is something to the fact that the Blue Jays have the second biggest difference between their team ERA and their team xFIP. xFIP accounds for the team’s strikeouts, walks and home runs allowed per nine innings and projects how the average team’s pitching staff with those stats on an ERA scale.
Blue Jays fans can hope for a big of regression toward the xFIP for their team pitching.
Record in One-Run Games
One-run games in baseball have been equated to as close to a coin flip as you can get. Anything can happen to allow that one extra run in and it leads to a lot of fluky endings to game. The Blue Jays are tied for the worst record in one run games with a 1-5 record.
On top of that, they are 0-3 in extra-inning games which aren’t that dissimilar.
Minor League Stars
Obviously this doesn’t have as much impact on this season, but it’s a reason to be excited for potential call ups at the end of the season and to know that the team is still set up to succeed in the future just as much as they are now.
Vladimir Guerrero Jr. and Anthony Alford are off to great starts to the season. Vladdy Jr. has walked more than he’s struck out, and is slashing .295/.426/.500 to start the year. Alford on the other hand has gotten off to an other-worldly start, walking and striking out an equal amount and slashing .475/.563/.625.
2016 draft picks Bo Bichette and TJ Zeuch have also got off to excellent starts this year.
Many of the teams’ stars have been either struggling mightly or have been placed on the DL, but don’t expect that to last all season long. There are brighter days to come in Blue Jays land.
