This team’s a blast from the past

The 2022 roster reminds us of a previous post-season club, just not the one we expected

When the Blue Jays reported to spring training earlier this year as the perceived front-runner in the American League East, their roster drew a lot of comparisons to 2015.

The Jays from seven years ago were an offensive juggernaut that outscored every team in the majors by 100-plus runs. Led by the trio of Jose Bautista, Josh Donaldson and Edwin Encarnacion, crooked numbers were expected on the scoreboard just about every time they stepped onto the field.

That team didn’t have any trouble scoring runs, it had trouble preventing them, at least until David Price, Mark Lowe and LaTroy Hawkins were among those acquired at the deadline. The upgrades fuelled a second-half surge and a berth in the post-season, but it didn’t change the Jays’ identity. They were still all about the bats.

The 2022 Jays seemed destined to become a younger version of that team. Vladimir Guerrero Jr., Bo Bichette, Teoscar Hernandez and George Springer were poised to form the heart of a dominant lineup. Depth wasn’t supposed to be an issue, with guys like Matt Chapman and Lourdes Gurriel Jr. hitting in the bottom half. Barring injuries, this group should have been a lock to cause nightmares for opposing pitchers.

There’s still a lot of time for those predictions to ring true, but perhaps a lot of baseball insiders and fans — myself included — picked the wrong team to use as a comparison. Maybe these aren’t the 2015 Jays; with each passing day, it’s starting to feel like the team that came just after.

The 2016 Jays were expected to be every bit as effective on offence as their predecessors, yet they spent the bulk of that season trying to live up to the hype. That team didn’t make it back to the AL Championship Series because of its lineup, it advanced on the backs of a dominant starting rotation.

The Jays finished the 2016 season with 89 wins, and all but 20 came when their staff surrendered three runs or fewer.

A rotation that was supposed to be a question mark following the offseason departure of David Price was anything but after Aaron Sanchez became the AL’s ERA leader, J.A. Happ won 20 games and Marco Estrada continued his run as one of the league’s most effective finesse pitchers.

In 2015, the Jays’ offence ranked first in the majors with 891 runs. The following year, they dropped to ninth with 759, almost 120 fewer than the Boston Red Sox. What saved that group was an AL-best 3.64 ERA from the rotation.

Through the first six weeks of 2022, the script has been similar, yet even more extreme. The Jays ranked third in the majors last year with 5.2 runs per game, and an even higher number was expected this season. Instead, their average has dropped to 3.6 and their 142 runs are in the bottom third. Much like 2016, the saving grace has been a 3.44 ERA from the starters.

It never felt like the 2016 Jays were as good as they should have been, but if you threw away the external expectations, they were still pretty darn impressive. They held onto first place for the span of about two weeks in late August and later survived a September swoon to advance just as far as the Jays had the year prior.

But most of that year was spent waiting for the bats to break out, including in the ALCS against Cleveland, when they scored eight runs across five games and were shutout twice. At the start of that season, nobody would have predicted the offence would have led to the Jays’ undoing, yet in the end that’s exactly what sunk the ship.

The comparison between these two teams is an easy one to make, but they’re not carbon copies of each other either.

The 2016 Jays were one of the oldest rosters in baseball, and when they struggled to score it wasn’t entirely clear whether it was a prolonged slump of Father Time starting to creep in.

Those concerns don’t exist with this group because, outside of a few key veterans, the core hasn’t even reached its prime. They should be getting better, not worse, and presumably they will over time. Still, there haven’t been too many signs of that lately. The 4.5 runs per game they averaged in April has dipped to 3.1 in May.

That’s going to lead to a lot of games like Friday night against the Reds, when Hyun-Jin Ryu needed to be almost perfect to win. Despite some hard contact, the 35-year-old pitched six scoreless innings. It wasn’t until the fifth that the Jays broke a 0-0 deadlock with an RBI single by George Springer and an RBI double by Bo Bichette to squeak out the 2-1 victory.

This has been a year when the margin for error doesn’t exist. Any miscue with the glove, on the basepaths or out of the bullpen gets magnified because of the tight scores. That formula has worked before when backed by a strong rotation; it’s just not the one any of us expected the Jays to use in 2022.

The results haven’t always been pretty this season but, despite a sluggish first six weeks, the Jays are still in possession of a wild-card spot, just like they were in 2016. The comp to one of the Jays’ post-season teams still makes sense; perhaps we just picked the wrong year.