Michael Saunders – home runs at the break – 16 – previous SEASON high – 19
Russell Martin – 8 home runs in August – most EVER in a month
Edwin Encarnacion – personal bests in 2016 – hits, HR’s; RBI’s,
Number of key players lost due to injury for an extended period during the season – NONE [The Yankees had 4 of their 5 starters go down and traded off their bullpen studs and finished ONLY 5 games behind]
Regular season record – 89 and 73
When playoff berth clinched – game 163
All of the individual stats above were needed JUST TO HAVE A CHANCE TO GET INTO THE PLAYOFFS. The wild card game is not the playoffs – it is a penalty game for not being in the top 3 teams.
What the win total would have been if Happ and Sanchez pitched to their averages – 20, maybe 25 tops. That makes the team wins at 73 to 79. A .500 team at best.
THAT IS WHAT THAT TEAM IS AND WAS. A .500 team. What they did this year was pure unadulterated LUCK.
That is the takeaway.
So if anyone thinks this team is a great team – like all the players, management, the insufferable broadcasters, the lapdog fanboy sycophantic ‘sportswriter’ – is more clueless than Forrest Gump.
And what is next for this vastly over rated team? They will go deeper into the wilderness. With hatchet men Mark Shapiro and Ross Atkins in place, this team will likely match the futility of the Maple Leafs in rebuilding years. Shapiro and Atkins are hatchet men. They were in Cleveland and they were brought in by Rogers Communications for that express purpose. Cut salaries and hire a bunch of ignorant advanced metrics people to try to be the Oakland A’s of the baseball in the east. Rogers is getting hammered by the foreign exchange rate and know the Canadian dollar will continue to depreciate against the USD and thereby will cost more in salaries. And so they must cut costs. They have already done so in the organizational changes they have made and they will do so with players’ salaries. Ergo – there is no way in hell that Encarnacion, Bautista, Saunders, and Cecil the sea-sick sea serpent will be re-signed. By Victoria Day weekend 2017 they will be 15 games out and the trades of Donaldson and Tulowitzki will follow.
Rogers is delusional in that they think the ignorant stats boys will create a roster that will succeed at all let alone the American League East. They will attempt to compete with the Tampa Bay Rays for the bottom of team salaries. Rogers is further delusional in that they think there will be bums in the seats of the tractor pull dome. There is a greater chance of baseball going back to Montreal than that to happen.
All of those ignorant ‘sportswriters’ who wrote countless articles of how great this team is and the great promise is has along with grotesque articles about the revitalization of Toronto sports teams will apoplectic by next June – or earlier. The Leafs are not even close to being there. The Raptors are so over rated it is sickening. And the Jays will go back to obscurity. So much for Toronto sports team renaissance. [Toronto FC does not count as it is really minor league – better would be the Toronto Maple Leaf Baseball Team]
So that is what awaits the Toronto Blue Jays. And it looks great on them. The team ownership is moronic, the management are dickheads, and their fans are ignorant to the extreme as well as not being baseball fans. Never has this organization ever attempted to court teal baseball fans to ensure a solid attendance base regardless of the team’s record. They seem to support minor baseball but they don’t. They just use it as a marketing tool – and a poor one at that.
The organization has always been a joke and will continue to be so. Not until there is new ownership, a new name, new uniforms, a new yard, a new team culture, and development of a solid fan foundation with real baseball fans will this organization be anything but a joke.
