GhostofPotvin29
New member
Andy007 said:Potvin29 said:Corn Flake said:Potvin29 said:How is this team slightly worse than last season's?
IMO:
Overall, they need some bloody good luck with injuries for once. Shaky parts of the team were made just that much worse by them.
Defense should be much improved after the complete gong show at they had at 2b for the first 4 months. Reyes/Goins as the everyday middle infield brings hope.
Offense will be all around good to very good, plus the subtraction of JPA can be nothing but helpful. Will see if the situational hitting improves overall, which would take the offense up another level.
Bullpen should be dominant again as long as they aren't overused and run out of gas towards the end like last year.
Starting pitching remains the big worry. The positive right now is that there are a ton of arms healthy (so far) and competing for the 3 open jobs. It should mean they can take the 3 best out of camp to start the season but have plenty of backups at AAA to bring up if any of those 3 falter.
But like you said, who knows.. could go either way. I'm not really holding out a lot of hope. Will sit back and watch and see how things go.
One year it will break positively right? Right!?
But I think the problem is that the Jays have absolutely no depth and have gone with abysmal benches for years now. So when all the injuries hit, which happens every year to almost every team, Toronto is unable to cope and we see seasons like..well..the last three years. For things to break positively everybody has to stay healthy and all the players have to play at or near their respective ceilings. I think we're going to have to wait for a looong time.
You can have injuries, but the amount the Jays had last season was pretty ridiculous, even taking into account some of those guys' histories. Not just that some got injured, but the sheer number of key players who got injured and many at the same time - not a likely thing to happen again, and not really something that happens to every team. It really was a case of everything breaking poorly for them, so even with a bit more luck on their side the team should see an improvement. Johnson's ERA was over 6.00 last season. You could trot out a whole lot of average pitchers and probably not have them repeat those numbers.
Not saying they are going to be great, but a LOT of things went crazy bad last season, and if you can have that bad luck, you can have things go the other way too - look what happened in Boston. A whole bunch of their key contributors to their World Series win were coming off bad (or even awful in some cases) seasons in 2012 (Ortiz, Ellsbury, Pedroia, Lester, Buchholz, Lackey).
Just because they were bad doesn't mean they will see their fortunes turn around, but they shouldn't be THAT bad again.