Half-Way (Half-Way) Blue Jays (Blue Jays): Let's Play Ball?

 

You've Got: A Diamond
You've Got: Nine Men

Eighty-one games down! Eighty-one to go! And where do we stand? What better place to determine that than the literal standings, which have our forty-four-win, thirty-seven-loss Blue Jays a mere three games back of the less-than-amazing-so-far New York Yankees, and three-and-a-half games ahead of the pretty okay Cleveland Guardians (the best-performing team not currently tucked all comfers/cozers into a tidy little playoff berth [our present tucking has us at "Wild Card 2"]). There are several things to note about the Blue Jays' collective first-half performance, I think, and the first is that it took last night's nine-nothing win over the Red Sox to push the Blue Jay's stubbornly poor run differential into positive territory; this is to say, on the level of scoring runs and also preventing them (this is a very important level! of baseball!), this is really not a team that should be playing at a .543 clip, an eighty-eight-win pace. Outperforming your run differential, or badly underperforming it, can just be a function of weird luck, of course, but it can sometimes be a function of either a particularly well-performing or especially unbearable bullpen situation, but I do not think this is the case here? Among the characteristics that have defined our first half, you would not list "a lockdown closer ensuring we win all the one-run games" among them, right? And yet the Blue Jays have in fact been winning all kinds of close ones, even with an overworked and not-always-so-sharp bullpen, and winning lots and lots of comeback games, too, which is obviously a super exciting kind them to win. It is entirely possible that this has just been noise, statistically, and that the Blue Jays, without really regressing in terms of run differential (bro, they are the mean), will play a little under .500 in the second half and end up almost exactly the eighty-three-win team FanGraphs projected them to be. However! The value of early-season wins is greater than ones that come later! In that it is first-half wins that compel teams to add ahead of the trading deadline rather than ship guys off! The second-half is often characterized by strong teams, now stronger, running—if not roughshod, than at least roughershod than before—over weak teams that have become, at least in the short term, weaker (owing to a deepened lack of guys). I think maybe the 2025 Blue Jays are a more-or-less .500 team, who have by luck or guile snuck out of the first half with enough wins to convince the front office to add a couple arms and maybe even a bat en route to what could be an oddly understated ninety-win season? I feel like this is where I would really like the rest of this summer to go: I would like the 2025 Blue Jays to be the least impressive ninety-win team in Blue Jays history. I have begun to think that nothing, in a way, could be finer? 

KS