Wednesday, May 27, 2009

What happened to the Jays?

We all knew that the hot tear the Jays were on wouldn't last the entire season, but I don't think many expected them to fall out of it this fast. They have lost 9 straight games and are 5-11 in their past 16 games.

It was only a matter of time before the number of injuries and the inexperience of the starting pitching began to creep up and effect the overall performance of the team. I was curious to see if there was a certain aspect that I could pinpoint and attribute to the 9 game losing skid they are on and my analysis left me with an array of results. Here are some stats from the following 9 games that have all resulted in a Blue Jays loss:

BOS: 2-1 6 LOB 1 Error Bullpen:Good
BOS: 8-3 11 LOB Starter only went 4.2 Bullpen: Good
BOS: 5-1 12 LOB Starter only went 4.1 Bullpen: Good

ATL: 1-0 4 LOB Bullpen: 1ER Pitching duel
ATL: 4-3 7 LOB Bullpen 1ER
ATL: 10-2 11 LOB Starter only went 5 innings Bullpen 8ER Offense: 10 hits and 2 runs

BAL: 4-1 9 LOB Bullpen: 2ER
BAL: 7-2 10 LOB Starter went 5.1 with 5ER Bullpen: 2 ER
BAL: 12-10 7 LOB Bullpen: 9ER

  • The 9 games were all lost on the road. The Jays are 16-6 at home while 11-17 on the road.
  • Roy Halladay is one of their only starters to give the team length in an outing. The inexperience of their starting pitching (due to injuries) has led Gaston in having to go to the bullpen early in the game. This appears to have weakened their bullpen and could be the cause for them preforming so bad as of late.
  • The offense has been leaving entirely too many guys on base. During their losing streak of 9 straight games, the Jays have left 7 or more guys on base in 7/9 games.
The pitching needs to come together and start giving the team length. The bullpen also needs to straighten up their act. The loss today was inexcusable and the fact their pen gave up 9ER is absolutely embarrassing. This is why I can not stand when people focus so much on W/L. Roy Halladay would have so many more wins if it wasn't for the Jays blowing games for him or their offense not scoring runs for him (which was the case on many occasions for the past few seasons).

5 comments:

The Commish! said...

You jinxed them Christina! All the Blue Jays fans that used to comment on your blog are too depressed to comment! Brutal loss for the Jays today.

Kyle said...

Jays have been awful lately. I'm not sure if they can recover.

Halladay was very good. 8-3 leads after heading to the 8th should be a win. The pen was lousy. Halladay has done his job. He's gone at least 7 IP each start. He's got an era under 2.7 and has an 8-1 record.

Hopefully the Jays get their act together vs Boston this weekend.

Navin Vaswani (@eyebleaf) said...

We're down, but not out.

Believe.

Bruno Von Rottweiler said...

Nice analysis ,Christina. I think that the starting pitching overall has been decent BUT two things have killed them. One;they don't hit. Two: when they do hit they don't score enough or any runs, look at the Bosox series for an example of that. In addition Cito has done a bad job managing the players AND the lineup in these last 9 games. There is a reason why he didn't get a job after being fired in 97.

Ian Hunter said...

I think Doc has really had it with Jesse Carlson blowing these games. I hope Halladay had a stern talking to him yesterday.

"Now Jesse, you don't want to see me when I'm angry ... do you?"