Lessons from 2015 and 2016
What does a successful season of baseball look like? There are two rather different examples in the Blue Jays' recent past.
The Blue Jays lost back-to-back games to the worst team in baseball to start the week, giving them a head start toward their first losing month of the season. The Jays are now 1-5 in July, after having gone 14-8 in April, 14-12 in May, and 15-13 in June. The way some fans have been grumbling of late you'd think those marks would be considerably worse. Expecations were high for this Blue Jays team and while they've yet to live up to them, what exactly does that mean about where they are and where they're going?
I decided to take a look to the past for some answers...
I don't think it's unfair to say that Blue Jays fans don't remember the 2016 Jays nearly as fondly as they do the 2015 version of the club. There are several fairly obvious reasons for that. The head-spinning win-now moves made at the 2015 trade deadline, the two-month curb-stomping of every team that stood in their way, and the sense that after years in the wilderness this was a genuine team of destiny made the final months of 2015 something incredibly special.
Then, almost as quickly as it started, the bottom dropped out.
Mark Shapiro arrived with not just an eventual rebuild but a complete organizational overhaul as his clear imperative. Alex Anthopoulos left and was reportedly scolded for the reckless trades that helped turn a 50-51 club into a juggernaut. Re-signing David Price became a non-starter and J.A. Happ became his uninspiring replacement. Bloodthirsty media goons shamelessly, and with transparent contempt for their audiences, cloaked themselves in the maple leaf as they hunted clicks, fuelling vitriol as they gleefully poisoned the well for the new guys rather than having the balls to do their jobs fairly.
Oh, it was a scene, man.
But bigger than all that, I think, in shaping how we feel about those two seasons was what happened next: 2016 was a grind.
Not only was it a grind, it was a grind played out under the weight of massive expectations. Where, on the other hand, by late July of 2015, expectations had long since faded into faint hope and resignation.
April 2015’s promise, buoyed by the big ticket arrivals of an elite catcher in Russell Martin and an MVP-calibre third baseman in Josh Donaldson, perhaps didn’t snap in unison with Marcus Stroman’s anterior cruciate ligament, but a whole lot of it did. The rest slowly eroded over a summer of José Reyes throws and one-run losses — the Jays were 3-12 in one-run games by the end of May, and 10-22 in them after a July 28th loss to the Phillies that marked the beginning of the post-Reyes era — that belied how good the team had been at scoring and preventing runs. The FYRE GOBBONS! brigade was full-throated that summer, and the knives were out for Anthopoulos, too. Paul Beeston’s time as club president was winding down after an ugly and wholly characteristically ham-fisted attempt by Edward Rogers to oust him in late 2014, and with it would go AA’s shield, by extension Gibbons’ shield, and fans generally seemed to be very OK with that.
Then, as if by magic, the team transformed almost overnight into the ‘27 Yankees. The hitting clicked. Stroman steamed toward a practically miraculous September return. David Price pitched like a guy who would eventually be robbed of the AL Cy Young. Aaron Sanchez levelled up out of the 'pen after returning from injury and a wayward attempt to hold down a rotation spot early on. LaTroy Hawkins gave the bullpen a boost, too. Ben Revere was somehow not awful, and Chris Colabello kept doing Chris Colebello things somehow.
Of course, we all remember this, because the 2015 Blue Jays season may as well have started on July 29th, when Troy Tulowitzki went 3-for-5 with a pair of doubles and three RBIs while Anthopoulos worked in the background on the Price trade, which would shock the baseball world the following morning.
Opening Day starter Drew Hutchison labouring through 28 starts — twenty-eight! — with a 5.57 ERA does not endure psychically. The fifteen games started by one of Dan Norris, Félix Doubront, Scott Copeland, Matt Boyd, or Todd Redmond don't really register. Uncle Loupy's wild ride, 2013 All-Star Steve Delabar flaming out but good (Lisa needs braces), Canadian legend Jeff Francis soaking up some innings, 20-year-old Miguel Castro being thrown into the deep end out of desperation, Colt Hynes, Chad Jenkins, Andrew Albers, Phil Coke — did these things even happen?
There were obscurities in the 2016 season too, of course. That group just didn’t have the luxury of losing our attention before suddenly exploding into the greatest team in god’s own universe. The year started as a grind and remained a grind throughout. The success of 2015 demanded more success, and though the Jays eventually got there by returning to the ALCS for a second year in a row, it wasn’t easy. And it wasn’t always fun, either.
The 2016 Jays season was bookended by rough months — an 11-14 April and an 11-16 September that left them a game back of Baltimore, with Detroit and Seattle just a half-game and a game back respectively, as the calendar flipped to October for two final regular season games.
In game 161 at Fenway Park the Jays broke a tie in the ninth behind a Michael Saunders walk, a Kevin Pillar sac bunt, a wild pitch, and an Ezequiel Carrera sac fly, while the Orioles lost to the Yankees in the Bronx. Losses sent the Tigers and Mariners out of the picture, but game 162 would still determine which team would get home field advantage in the wild card game. The Blue Jays held the tiebreaker because they'd won the season series with Baltimore 10-9, but needed a win to be sure of a return to Toronto. They got exactly that as Sanchez outduelled old friend David Price in a tense 2-1 game that saw the Jays' best hitters come through against Brad Ziegler in the eighth, culminating in a Tulowitzki RBI single.
We all remember what came next. But it's worth remembering those previous October games too — as well as that September stumble. R.A. Dickey finally pitched his way out of the rotation that month, as Francisco Liriano surprisingly found his footing and, much like Joaquin Benoit, saved the Jays by pitching his ass off. The Joe Biagini and Jason Grilli magic wore off (ERAs of — I shit you not — 6.94 and 9.64 in 11 and 12 appearances respectively), though not so much that they wouldn't both be used in the wild card game. Marcus Stroman pitched well enough, but was somehow the losing pitcher in five of his six September starts. The magnificent Marco Estrada, still dealing with a back injury, continued to struggle to find his first half form. The closer was being ground into a fine paste, appearing in a season-high 16 innings over 14 appearances, but managing just 11 strikeouts over that span.
Offensively the Jays had Tulo (92 wRC+) and Martin (77) struggling at the plate. Donaldson (110) was dealing with a late-August thumb injury that brought him well below his usual standard. Pillar (86) was his typically unproductive self at the plate — except when he wasn't, like when going 2-for-3 with three RBIs and that sac bunt in game 161 against the Red Sox. Saunders (24) and Melvin Upton Jr. (47) combined for 129 mostly brutal plate appearances.
This was a flawed team that wasn’t running on all cylinders at all times, let alone as the season came to an end. It was also an incredibly successful team. This team humiliated the Texas Rangers in the ALDS and absolutely could have gone on to the World Series had they got anything from their best hitters in four close losses to Cleveland in the ALCS (José Bautista, Edwin Encarnación, and Troy Tulowitzki combined to produce a .446 OPS over 61 plate appearances).
This team had more wins than all but one Blue Jays team since 1993. They won more games than 2021’s World Series champions. Obviously they don’t stack up to the 2015 team, which was realistically closer to playing in the World Series — a stupid dropped ball, a kid stealing a home run, and a couple of bullshit calls are certainly much more tangible interventions of fate than “well, if José, Edwin, and Tulo had simply hit better…” — but vanishingly few teams do.
A team playing at a 114-win pace over 61 games is not usual. Yet I get the sense that a lot of Blue Jays fans, perhaps understandably, still find themselves searching for the feeling of invincibility the 2015 team gave them before they can be ever be satisfied that things are OK — believing that that’s what success in baseball looks and feels like.
It’s not. At least, it’s not if you forget about the part where the 2015 Jays spent four listless months banking too-few wins for comfort as they sorted out who they were and how to fix it. Or the part where, because this is at the very core of baseball’s nature, a few bad breaks and quirks of timing led them to lose once too many times to an objectively worse Royals team.
If we think about all this and the 2022 Blue Jays — which is obviously what we’re here to do — it doesn’t take the sting out of the difficult run they’ve been on or the fear that the Yankees might simply be too good for any of this to matter. The flaws, once they’ve been exposed, can’t be unseen, and we don’t know from here whether they’re going to be able to grind it out with a few tweaks like in 2016, or if there are 2015-like destiny-altering trades still to come this month. But what I think it should tell us is that the “this team is good”/”this team is bad” binary is awfully reductive — a trap that too many a fan, and too much armchair analysis, falls into.
The 2015 Blue Jays were one of the greatest teams this country has ever seen, but they sure as hell weren’t great on May 23rd, when they’d lost 11 of their last 14 games, or when they went into the All-Star break losing 11 of 16. The 2016 Jays could never shake the sense that they were stuck in first gear, and that their rough start revealed their true Shapiro-y nature — which their rough finished seemed to prove. Then they went to the ALCS anyway.
The 2022 Blue Jays have banked a lot of wins already. They have a ton of internal improvement that could realistically materialize for them. They have weeks to setup their moves as we progress toward the trade deadline, and a farm system more than healthy enough to make them players for any available target they see fit. Counterintuitive as it may feel right now, they are in an incredible place.
So to watch fans go through this stretch of the season in a fog of malaise like we’re back under the crushing expectations of 2016 is tough. I wouldn’t say that it’s puzzling, because it’s not a whole lot of fun investing hours and hours of time and mental energy in a team that doesn’t yet — and may never — look like the no-doubt contender that was promised. But it’s tough watching knees jerk and frustrations mount unnecessarily. Particularly, at least for me, when that takes the form of absolute statements at a time of the season and in a sport where nothing is absolute.
The 2022 Blue Jays have “good bones.” The front office is not going to have to move heaven and earth to make the team look significantly better than it looks now. Provided, I suppose, the guy they moved heaven and earth for last summer, José Berríos, eventually gets himself right — still an easy outcome to bet on, even if his struggles this season so far have truly dragged on uncomfortably long. Relief pitching is the trade deadline’s easiest commodity to acquire, and the Jays will unquestionably be acquiring some. Rotation depth is also needed, of course, though that’s not going to be the priority, or the game-changer come playoff time.
Relatedly, something these Jays have that the 2016 team didn’t is youth and time. A young team can certainly be more volatile, and we’ve seen that on occasion already this year. But to go back to some of what I was saying off the top, the sense surrounding the 2016 Blue Jays was that the party was over, or at least winding down. Where 2015 had been the whirlwind, epic night on the town, 2016 was the afterparty at someone’s dingy apartment. The $80 two-four from IDrinx got there eventually, but you groused about the jacked-up prices and gritted your teeth through the wait. The booze wasn’t even all that satisfying and by the time you left the sun was coming up.
Not that I, uh, know anything about doing stuff like that for a solid decade.
Anyway, with that, with the age of the team, with the disappointment of not following through on Anthopoulos’s plans, and with the constant honking of “Shatkins” morons all as backdrop, it’s little wonder that the 2016 Jays didn’t capture the imagination the way those two glorious months of 2015 did. How could they have?
But I think we’d all do well to remember that, even while shrinking under the weight of expectations somewhat and — like the 2021 Jays, I should add — often being tough to watch, that was an incredibly good and successful team. Because success can be a grind. It can take all kinds of shapes, and far more often than not that shape doesn’t involve waking up one day and your team suddenly being unbeatable. The season is a process. Everything about this one — everything — is genuinely still up in the air right now, except that you’d rather be the Jays right now than a whole bunch of other teams, and the Jays haven’t even really hit their stride yet.
I don’t know… chill the fuck out maybe?
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Thanks. I needed this.
Holy remembering some guys/some months, this is a fantastic read! As a lunatic who went to every home game my memory of those seasons was 2015: I love this team no matter what and 2016: why do they stop serving beer in the 7th *cries* And to me, nothing felt play-off bound until August in either year. They were fun years because the fans wanted them to be fun (not iou's).