Ok so I was waiting until the final game of the Colorado vs. Toronto series until I posted this so it was more evident that what they were doing was for real and not just a one or two game thing. Ok so whats happened to the Jays in the last week? Well they seem to have turned things completely around in all areas. First off over the last month the Jays have the most hard worked bullpen, however they are also the best bullpen in baseball at the moment now too. In the last month both Steve Delabar and Brett Cecil have an ERA of under 1.50, which is amazing to have in two guys who aren't the set closer or 8th inning pitchers. In addition to this ever since the 13th their starters have been playing the way we expected, giving up about an average of 2 runs per game. Now I don't take the games against Chicago into account here because when you look at the box score you can see that both sides had a large number of hits and some of the runs that the Jays got were due to errors made by the Chicago defence. Now for months now I have been preaching that Toronto was having a hard time because they had such a horrible average with runners in scoring position, meaning they hadn't been able to take advantage of when runners were on second.
Well that is not the case any more, if we look at the series' against the White Sox and the Rangers (home series) , which covered 5 games the Jays went 8/47 with runners in scoring position, which equates to an average of .170, which is pretty bad considering how many innings were played and how many times runners were in scoring position. Then if we look at the previous 7 games, the series against the Rangers (away series) and Colorado it seems like the Jays have completely flipped over completely going 15/42, which translates to an average of .357 yeah thats more than two times better than before. Now whats even more surprising about this is that Bautista is still swinging at bad pitches and Arencibia is still playing in his terrible 'swing at whatever the fuck I feel like' approach, meaning two of our high output hitters aren't hitting well and we're still doing this well.
Now this outcome was nice but not terribly surprising when they knocked the Rangers down a rung and the reason for this was because they were in a slump and had lost 4 games before they came to face Toronto. On the other hand the Rockies series was much more impressive for a few reasons, first being that the Rockies were on a winning streak hitting very well leading up to their games against the Jays, second reason is that like the hitters of the Rockies the pitchers all season have been playing MUCH better than they were expected too, as could be seen in the very close first game with Jorge De La Rosa on the mound against Josh Johnson. The third and final reason is because our starting pitchers have turned it around, as the starters for these 7 games all limited the opponents to 2 runners per game and 10 hits over the entire game, this as well was done by only 3 of our start of the season starters (Dickey, Buerhle and Johnson) in addition to Chien-Ming Wang and Esmil Rogers, both of which haven't started in a long time and the former not having played in the majors for years..
Now the most impressive one was Josh Johnson's return where he went 7.1 innings, striking out 10 and only allowing 5 hits and no runs, which is vintage Josh Johnson and what we were seeing in spring training. And this doesn't seem to be going down anytime soon as like I've said several times they have several players on the mend and likely to return soon, especially Kyle Drabek and Drew Hutchinson. Jose Reyes as well has played in one rehab game so far and went 3-5 in the first game and is moving up to a AAA start within the next couple days and could very well be back by the start/middle of next week. Now what does this mean? Better defence and better offence at the shortstop position, not to knock Munenori Kawasaki, and in addition we will have our true lead off hitter back despite Melky doing a have decent job (Reyes is just at a much more elite level). So for Jays fans out there keep tuned in because if the Jays can continue to play at this rate they will be in an exceptional position given that their next few series are against other AL East teams.
-Eric
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