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The 30th Percentile Blue Jays

In this space last week, I wrote about what Baseball Prospectus’ projection system PECOTA thinks would happen to the Toronto Blue Jays in 2017 if their players would hit their 90th percentile projections. That best case scenario looked like a 119-43 record, compared to the 81-81 record the normal PECOTA projected for the 2017 Blue Jays. Today, I want to look at what were to occur if the Blue Jays were to play at their 30th percentile projections over the course of the season. PECOTA’s lowest projection available is 10th percentile, but rather than look at the absolute worst case scenarios, I think a more constructive exercise would be to examine the more reasonable downside the Blue Jays roster could hit. We’ll start with the batters:

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In the normal PECOTA values, this lineup is projected to be worth 34.4 wins above a replacement player. This 30th percentile version of the team is projected for less than half of that, at 15.4 WARP. That’s a pretty reasonable drop when we are talking about all 13 position players performing way below what is expected of them. What is interesting is the particular cases that actually seem possible. Nobody expects Jarrod Saltalamacchia to be worth negative 1.6 wins in 2017, for no reason more than he wouldn’t be on the team for too long if he was performing at such a poor level. However, some of these scenarios could happen.

It isn’t hard to imagine Josh Donaldson sliding down to just 4.4 WARP this season. That would be a decrease of only one win from 2016, and given his age and the fact that he is currently sidelined with a calf injury (something that can nag for a while), that doesn’t seem so crazy. Likewise, the same can be said for Jose Bautista. The 30th percentile projection is still a huge increase from Bautista’s 2016 production (.270 TAv, 0.5 WARP), and now that we’ve seen one year of decline from Jose, another one like it isn’t very farfetched. In fact, it actually seems generous to project Bautista for 604 plate appearances after he has managed more than that in just two of his previous five seasons.

Another guy on that list who can easily “reach” his 30th percentile projections would be Kevin Pillar. His main tool is his defense, a skill that can vary in the numbers from year to year, even if the actual talent level of the player doesn’t change at all. For Pillar, that means he can continue to put up stellar defense, but because of the makeup of current defensive statistics, it is very possible that he can provide little to no “value” in the field in 2017. Combine that with what has so far been an entirely lacklustre career offensively, seeing him shrink down to being worth just 1.1 wins in 2017 is a thought that shouldn’t be so fictional. In fact, in 2016, he was worth just 0.9 wins with a .232 TAv, while hitting 7 home runs in 584 plate appearances, numbers that aren’t so far off from his 30th percentile projection.

This is how the pitching side of things looks:

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As mentioned last week, the PECOTA projections are somewhat broken by four of the five Blue Jays starters because of the nature of how they achieve success, and thus these numbers look especially awful in the starting rotation, looking more like 10th or 20th percentile projections instead. What that means for this exercise though, is that things can get truly bad for this club in the coming year, and we wouldn’t be searching for answers on how and why that occurred.

Take Marco Estrada, for example. We all know that his success over the past two years is real and can be attributed to a few things, chief among them his “rising” fastball. But the projections still see a guy with no stuff and mediocre peripherals. So what would happen if hitters finally realized how to adjust well enough to Estrada relative to other pitchers? Well, replacement level pitching is certainly a possibility.

For Happ, the same line of thinking can be followed. He has had success by mixing his pitches and working off of different fastballs. Again, that’s closer to trickery than what we would define as natural talent. Trickery can be solved, and Happ reverting to an older version of his pre-Pirate self would be the result of that, not something the Blue Jays would like to see happen in 2017.

When it comes to Marcus Stroman and Aaron Sanchez, the reasoning doesn’t even need to be so out there. They rely heavily on ground balls, and ground balls can decide one day that they don’t want to go to infielders when they can go into the outfield. A few more ground balls getting through and all of a sudden, the two young starters who look to be anchoring the Blue Jays for the latter half of this decade, become liabilities in the rotation.

The reliever stats are a good reminder, if nothing else, that relievers are incredibly volatile and anything can happen when each player is only throwing 60 or so innings in a year. However, the strategy to building a good bullpen is to try to lower those odds as much as possible, something Ross Atkins did this winter by bringing in vets J.P. Howell and Joe Smith to complement the already formidable trio of Roberto Osuna, Jason Grilli, and Joe Biagini. But, remember that all of those players come with risks, and they could all have down seasons in 2017. Roberto Osuna was hurting in the playoffs last year, which may be a sign of overuse. Jason Grilli is 40-years-old, meaning that every time he gets on that mound it is a blessing.

This version of the Blue Jays pitchers would be worth a projected 0.5 wins, bringing this team up to just about 66 wins in 2017. Is that likely to happen? No. But will some of the players on these lists underperform their projections? Yes, and when they do, it shouldn’t come as a surprise. Baseball is a game of mystery, and anything can happen. With some of these guys, that anything isn’t even so mysterious, and all we can do is hope that these drop offs in talent don’t happen for a while.

Lead Photo: Jonathan Dyer-USA TODAY Sports

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