Toronto Blue Jays
Key Acquisitions: Dioner Navarro
Key Losses: J.P. Arencibia, Mark DeRosa, Josh Johnson
Biggest Strength: Top of the order
Biggest Weakness: Starting pitching
Kind of like the Rays, Toronto didn’t do much in the offseason besides switch in Navarro for Arencibia at catcher. The loss of Josh Johnson is one that won’t hurt much unless he finds his groove down in San Diego. This is mostly the same team that went into last season with so much hype and basically flamed out by July. That will happen when your starters’ ERA is second-worst in baseball and you’re trotting out Ramon Ortiz and Chien-Ming Wang for multiple starts.
The top of the rotation has to anchor this team through the year in order for them to have a chance at a winning season. Brandon Morrow has shown ace-like stuff when he’s healthy, but Morrow has never pitched 180 innings in a season and has cracked 150 innings once. R.A. Dickey had a disastrous start to the season but pitched a 3.56 ERA with a 1.17 WHIP in the second half, showing glimmers of hope for 2014. If those two guys can pitch 200 innings each at 3.50 ERA baseball, this team can win games consistently. If not, this season will be a repeat of 2013.
The aging of Jose Bautista and injury concerns of Edwin Encarnacion should provide a bit of worry for the Blue Jays. Bautista didn’t look right at the plate all season and was shut down going down the stretch and Encarnacion struggled with wrist problems, something that has plagued him for his career. Along with Jose Reyes, these three guys all had significant injury concerns last year and the bats will only go as far as these three take them.
An ace in the hole for the Jays this year could be Brett Lawrie. After re-tooling his stance at the plate, Lawrie slashed .283/.346/.417 in the second half of the season (with seven stolen bases for good measure). Lawrie is a plus defender and if he can hit .280 and go 15/15 from third base, this would add another threat all over the bases in the bottom half of the order.
Without their top pitchers throwing ace-like seasons, this team will fight to get to .500. There’s much of top-end starting depth past Dickey and Morrow so the season hinges on those right arms.
Thanks to FanGraphs and Baseball Reference for their resources
