Prepare yourselves Metsrospectus readers, we are going to start talking about the Blue Jays a lot. The Blue Jays were in fact not all that bad of a team last year. They finished with 73 wins ,ahead of eight other teams, while playing in the toughest division in baseball. They did this while also missing their star player for a good portion of the year and having pretty much one sort of OK pitcher (Morrow). However as you may know, the Jays got a little better this year, let's examine how good using the ever useful WAR.
|
Player
|
fWAR
|
|
Cabrera
|
4.6
|
|
Reyes
|
4.5
|
|
Itzuris
|
0.7
|
|
Buck
|
1.2
|
|
Bonifacio
|
0.6
|
|
Johnson
|
3.8
|
|
Buehrle
|
2.1
|
|
Dickey
|
4.6
|
|
|
0.8
|
|
Total
|
22.9
|
The Jays traded away about 2.5 wins worth of talent to acquire this group and I excluded some less important acquisitions from this list so we can settle and say they added about 20 wins worth of talent. If these players had played for the Blue Jays last year they would have finished with 93 wins, tied with the Rangers and O's for the AL Wild Card spots.
This has got to down as one of the greatest off season's any team has ever had. I mean we are barely talking about the fact that they added Melky Cabrera who was one of the best players in baseball last year. That alone would have been a huge coup in addition to the entire starting rotation and batting champion SS they also threw in. However they did add Mike Nickeas, who could be worth -21 WAR and just negate the whole thing.
The Blue Jays were really lucky in that they recognized that the Mets and Marlins were two finincially desperate clubs and so they were able to get that load without giving up much. Good job by them.
ReplyDeleteI still don't believe in the Melk man, im convinced he was juiced the past couple of years. I usually don't wish ill on a player, but I hope he fails because cheaters need to be punished.