I hear you, but Gibbons is still batting him 4th or 5th, which is a definite sign of confidence. Saunders + reverse split + fence about 300 feet away... sounds like a good reason to keep him in. There would still be plenty of other PH opportunities for Martin in this game. It didn't have to be in that at-bat.

It has certainly seemed like the struggling version of Saunders has been much worse than this.

I am guessing that a future answer to this question will be Vlad Guerrero Jr.

You can still be an optimist and concede that there is room for at least a little doubt, especially when there is currently a dead heat for first place.

Something untoward about the Red Sox beating up on a guy named Clemens last night.

Travis breaking out of this defensive slump he's in would certainly be a positive development.  Not inspiring a lot of confidence at the moment, I must say.

When traded, his OPS+ was 131.

Yes, that was very clear in the broadcast and commented upon. It looks like he perhaps tweaked his back, although in retrospect it could have been his knee, which was the center of attention as the night wore on.

2015: 79-60, 5.50 RPG (1st), 4.14 RAG (5th), 1.4 diff (1st)
2016: 77-62, 4.86 RPG (4th), 4.17 RAG (1st), 0.7 diff (2nd)

Given that scoring in the AL has increased by 7% since last year (4.29 to 4.58), I will present the RPG and RAG as percentage of league average, to better contextualize the team's new profile.

2015: +28% RPG, +3% RAG
2016: +6% RPG, +9% RAG

In both 2015 and 2016, the team's run scoring and run prevention were better than the league norms (though of course the offense in 2015 was insanely better than the norm). In 2016, the run prevention has been more prominent than the run scoring, which surprises no one around here.

We know the pitching improved because Sanchez, Happ and Estrada have exceeded expectations (maybe not everybody's, but many people's). But what of the drop in offense?

At the team level, the team's OPS+ has dropped from 115 to 102 and we can certainly identify specific players responsible for this decline. But I have argued in the past that the 2015 offense was not merely a function of better individual performances, but a function of a level of clutchiness that could not be expected to be repeated.

2015: bases empty 735, men on 879 (men on 44% of time)
2016: bases empty 743, men on 790 (men on 43% of time)

For context, this is what the AL did:
2015: bases empty 711, men on 756
2016: bases empty 735, men on 767

In 2015, the Jays got more than the league-wide 45 point bump with men on base. They went crazy, with a 144 point bump. They were clutchy far beyond reasonable. The thing about being clutchy, though, is that it seems much less a repeatable skill than a byproduct of chance.

Fast forward to 2016 and we see the AL bump is 32 points, slightly exceeded by the Jays' 47 point bump. That the Jays are even on the clutchy side of the ledger in 2016 feels very different to what we have been experiencing the past couple of weeks.

Not sure that there is a moral to all of the above, expect perhaps that the business about the team being "elite" hitters needs to be tempered somewhat, since this is based on their 2015 performance which the baseball gods infused with a heapin' helpin' of clutchy goodness.

In context of what? Their OPS+ is 102 and they are scoring 6% more runs than league average.

I don't dispute those non-stellar scrub numbers, but wonder how much of the brunt they bear versus the decline in performance from the regulars.

Over-30 crowd:
Bautista 146/110
Encarnacion 149/136
Martin 113/101

20-somethings:
Travis 132/106
Smoak 106/91
Pillar 94/81
Goins/Goins+Barney 84/70

Improvers:
Donaldson 152/155
Tulowitzki 90/104
Revere/Saunders 102/124

I'm not sure I am as sold on this new-look Yankee team just yet. For all the talk of the energizing effect of the young players (Buck's mantra these past few days), only one non-pitcher has been performing (and how!) and he is sure to regress a huge amount. But the others? Judge? Austin? Torryes? Refsnyder? Hicks? Are there any locks among them? Any reason for true excitement?

Bird will surely be a big improvement over the guy currently wearing Teixeira's uniform. Severino could perhaps step in to the role of 8th inning guy. Those are two to keep a close eye on in 2017.

But Gardner? Ellsbury? Castro? Headley? None of them really enthuse me, and I don't know that they are going anywhere.

I expect McCann will fall victim to the purge (with the Yanks eating much of his contract).

I am interested to see if Cashman reverts to cash-man with newly freed up money. Or will lessons have been learned about old guys and how the age? Will he now take a different approach to team-building? (some could argue that he already has)

Your conclusion makes sense were you describing the team ranking last in WPA, not in the middle of the pack.

Indeed it is. And a huge reason that their offense is down so much (their luck is merely normal now). But your argument was hyperbolic which was masking your true point.

It's your prerogative to present your opinions as you choose, but know that hyperbolic assertions will be greeted at face value and treated as sincere rather than satirical.

I agree with all of this. If indeed problems are no longer "solved" with fat paycheques to 30-something free agents, then a new day will be upon us.

Huh? Travis is on a 4-5 WAR pace this season.

They may not regret the past, but my hunch is the Steinbrenner pups are less inclined to spend money than their dad was, especially now that the core of players from their glory days is all gone. There is no one on the current roster that needs to be extended for expensive, sentimental reasons.

Not where I lived. I didn't know anyone cheering on the Yankees. Fox Mulder summed up a lot of people's feelings about this particular race.

As perhaps Garth Iorg's greatest fan (I went out dressed up as Iorg for Halloween in either '85 or '86}, I have never quite gotten over him making the final, miserable out of that awful season (and his career, as it turned out).

It's the nature of the lineup. They win with homers and they haven't been hitting them.

I think it was during one of the radio broadcasts this past weekend that it was noted that the Jays have won a grand total of 8 games this year in which they did not hit a homerun, a number which does not require any updating.  Obviously, that is to some degree correlated to the fact that they have a lot of home runs overall, but it does speak to the difficulty they have scoring enough runs to win (despite effective pitching) when they are not cashing runs through the longball. 

When stats like this get mentioned, why are the never placed in context? How many games has the average team won without hitting a homerun? Maybe 8 is close to normal. Maybe it's not.

As for homeruns, the average AL team is on pace to hit 199 (up from 176 last year). Even in 2000, when teams averaged 5.3 runs per game -- 0.7 more than teams average now -- AL teams averaged just 192 homeruns. So homeruns are a huge part of most everyone's offense these days, not just Toronto's.

I'd love access to the data to see if if the current ratio of homeruns to runs is the highest it's ever been. Odds are it isn't, but I wouldn't be surprised if it were.