Rebounding pitching staff makes the Blue Jays the AL East favorite

As the pitching staff rebounds, the Toronto Blue Jays have emerged as the best team in the tight AL East.

The American League has been weird this year. There’s only been one consistently dominant team in the entire league this year: the Royals, who many wrote off after the offseason departures of James Shields and the seeming over-achievement of last year’s team.

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After them, the next two teams record-wise are the Astros and the Twins–the Astros and the Twins!!–followed by 12 teams that could accurately be described as “pretty good.” Yes, you read that right. 14 of the 15 AL teams are pretty good right now, in some form or another. There is no one in the league who can be written off just yet, and no one with much of an inside track on a playoff spot. Contrast that with the NL, where the Phillies and Brewers are already toast, and the Cardinals have a vice-grip on their division lead.

This mediocrity goes double in the AL East, which feels like it houses five .500 teams at the moment. Only seven games separate the first place Yankees from the last-place Red Sox, and every team seems somewhat likely to win the division. If the Red Sox pitching can get on track, if the Orioles’ pitchers can get it together, if the Rays can muster up some offense… there are a lot of “if”s in the AL East right now, but none of them seems too far away from coming true.

Which brings me to the Toronto Blue Jays. Coming into the season, the Blue Jays were seen as a team with a good shot at winning the division after acquiring Josh Donaldson and Russell Martin in the offseason. However, they weren’t the favorites (that would be the basement-dwelling Red Sox, which tells you all you need to know about the parity in the AL East), as they were seen as having too many question marks on the roster.

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It didn’t look good when the season started. First, breakout candidate Marcus Stroman tore his ACL in spring training. Then, things got off to a rocky start, especially for the pitching staff, which was decidedly below average. The team spent the first two months of the season largely ensconced in the AL East basement.

But things have turned around since then. Toronto is currently on an eight-game winning streak that has propelled them above .500 for the first time since May 19. They’re only 3 games back from the division lead right now; and in fact, they should be considered the favorite in the division going forward.

There are three main reasons for this:

The offense is stellar

The aforementioned acquisitions of Martin and Donaldson have paid off in a big way. The Donaldson trade looked like a steal at the time, but there was always the chance that Billy Beane knew something the rest of us didn’t. But even the best of GMs make mistakes (just ask Dave Dombrowski if he misses Doug Fister), and this seems to be one of Beane’s. Two months in, Donaldson is the major leagues’ third-best position player according to Baseball-Reference WAR, having slammed 17 home runs to the tune of a .592 slugging percentage, while continuing to be an excellent defender at third base. Martin, always a strong hitter and defender, has continued to deliver the same production he did in Pittsburgh. They join the always-stellar Jose Bautista and the power hitting Edwin Encarnacion to provide a lineup that rivals any in baseball.

The pitching staff is rapidly improving

Things started out poorly for the Jays’ pitching staff, with the team getting sub par performances from pretty much every member of the rotation. Now, things have settled down a bit, and it’s been the key to their recent success. Jays pitchers have held opponents to three runs or less in 10 of their last 12 games, and the starters have lasted six or more innings in 19 of the team’s last 22. The pitchers have also curbed their walks allowed from 3.5 per game in mid-May to two per game since. It should surprise no one that this improvement has coincided with the team’s 13-4 stretch.

They’ve been unlucky so far

Toronto shouldn’t have had to claw their way out of the basement. Were luck in their favor this season, they would have been on top of the division long ago. The team should be sporting a 37-24 record according to ESPN’s Expected Win Total stat. However their 5-12 record in one-run games, a product of poor bullpen work to start the year, had a lot of say in the matter.

Though it’s the summer, we’re still at the point where run differential tells us much more than a team’s record does. Record can be overly impacted by hot and cold streaks, luck in one-run games, and plenty of other factors. Run differential tells the real story, and the Jays’ differential of +59 is best in the A.L., and is currently second to only the St. Louis Cardinals in all of baseball. Contrast that with the Rays’ differential of +10, or the Yankees at +34.

The luck should turn around, and if that happens, the Jays should storm to the top of the division.

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