The team defense is exactly league average at the moment.

The Jays and Pythagoras are on speaking terms this season. The team is 10-11 while the ancient Greek has them at 11-10.

I wonder if that shouldn't be the strategy for Stroman at this stage of his career. 30-32 starts, 180-190 innings. Then post-season.

Not sure when he'd be ready for a Halladay workload, but it doesn't feel like now is the time.

I wonder if that shouldn't be the strategy for Stroman at this stage of his career. 30-32 starts, 180-190 innings. Then post-season.

Not sure when he'd be ready for a Halladay workload, but it doesn't feel like now is the time.

Maybe, Chuck.  It might be that J.A. Happ and Marco Estrada are better suited to the "good pitcher, 210 inning" thing.    It would take a lot of creativity to disentangle the conflation of "best pitcher" with "the one suited to throw the most innings". 

Yes, absolutely. And given Stroman's tenacity, he'd perceive anything shy of an 8-inning outing as evidence of unwarranted mollycoddling. And many fans might feel this way as well.

If Dickey can pitch well enough to warrant it, he should lead the team in (regular season) innings pitched.

I think Stroman's workload might eventually be lightened not by prescribed 6-inning outings, but by skipping starts altogether periodically during the season. He can then do his bulldog thing, but maybe 28-30 times rather than 32-34.

I would think that simplicity is the main reason, with the assumption (right or wrong) that pitches-per-inning average out over a season for a given pitcher well enough that innings can be used as a proxy.

Also, once you start throwing pitch counts into the mix, you should also take it a step further and weight the stress of those pitches. Pitches beyond 20, say, in a given inning might be deemed more harmful to a pitcher than pitches 1 to 20.

I think this subject matter is not always as sciencey (new adjective) as we like to pretend. Pitchers are different from each other. They are different from versions of themselves within a given season and from season to season. All of these things that we are counting are not provably linked to specific outcomes, except in the extreme. I think that the approach is for coaching staffs to (a) measure each pitcher individually, if possible and (b) to use logic that "feels" correct, even if it unfortunately only means doing what everyone else is doing.

Why 100 pitches as the time to take a starter out? Surely it's because we have 10 fingers and 10 toes (Alfonseca not included) and it "feels" about right. There's no actual science behind it. And even if there were, what would it look like? Now, there is plenty of evidence that supports pulling a starter after a couple of turns through the opposition lineup, because of diminished effectiveness, but that's different than doing so to prevent injury.

Just an observation: everyone on your list, save for Stroman, is simultaneously efficient and strikeout-inclined.

While the comeback was terrific, the bad news is that there even had to be a comeback. This is the first round against a weaker team, at home. This should have been a boring blow-out. If a Herculean effort is required to get past the first round, it's tough to be optimistic about the second.

What, not 22-0?

Beyond Smoak, the Jays entered the season with an entirely replacement level (or worse) bench despite having a thoroughly unpromising cast of position players in Buffalo other than the still-unready Pompey. They are an injury or slump away from disaster at every single position.

I think this is true of almost every team (except for the Cubs, who have insane levels of depth everywhere). It's hard to find good bench players on the free agent market - if a player is any good, someone will sign him to start for them (for example, Navarro). The pennant race is often a health race - the team that is lucky enough not to lose starters to injury is the team that wins.

It's still too early to panic. It wouldn't shock me at all if the Jays go on an extended hot streak soon. But some of the stuff we have seen so far is a bit troubling.

The worrisome part is that the players who are struggling the most - Tulowitzki and Martin - are the ones who are signed long-term. They'll both bounce back - I think they're just trying too hard, and it's throwing off their timing - but I am concerned about it.

All of the other hitters are doing about as well as expected. Goins has turned back into a pumpkin, but I suppose that this was always going to be a possibility.

The bullpen has been horrible except for Osuna, but most of them are new, and Gibbons is still sorting out who can do what (assuming that some of them can do anything, which might be unrealistic). The troublesome part here is Cecil, who has gone from invincible to very very vincible. He's been charged with four losses already - it's possible to argue that he, by himself, is responsible for the unexpected slow start in 2016. The late-2015 Cecil might have been able to preserve all of those wins, and then the Jays would be 14-9 right now instead of 10-13.

As for last night's game: it was a trick of cruel Fate that the player who was up with the game on the line and Estrada starting to tire was the one man who knows Estrada's stuff better than any other human on the planet.

we were scared to even let dickey pitch in the playoffs.

In defense of Dickey, at least he kept his spot in the rotation and wasn't relegated to relief duty.

They're no doubt happy to have moved a guy with a huge contract in pretty steep offensive decline and they got paid handsomely to do it.

And the Jays are no doubt happy to have Tulowitzki's defense at shortstop instead of Jose Reyes's.

We shouldn't be expecting that much from Tulo on offense anyway - his career road numbers are .272/.346/.459. That's pretty good, especially for a shortstop, but it's possibly not what some people are hoping for.

I'll be curious to see whether Hoffman can overcome the almost insurmountable obstacle of pitching in Colorado and become a quality pitcher. The Rockies have never been able to develop any.