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Concern over Blue Jays' ability to hit elite pitching is overblown
Although the Blue Jays have been shut down by the Yankees' top arms in recent days, their performance against playoff-calibre pitching has generally been fine.
After the Toronto Blue Jays failed to score a single run in the first two games of their penultimate series of the season, it would be reasonable to be pessimistic about the team's offence.
Gerrit Cole and Michael King dominated the Blue Jays lineup, just as they did last week in the Bronx. That duo has now allowed two earned runs in 30 innings against Toronto since September 20.
Those results, along with a season full of underwhelming offence, has brought the Blue Jays' ability to hit the kind of elite pitching the team could see in the playoffs — if they secure a wild-card spot — into question.
It's understandable to see Toronto flounder against Cole and King and come to the conclusion that a lineup featuring plenty of underachievers doesn't have the ability to handle top-notch pitching. The numbers don't necessarily back up that notion, though.
In order to test how the Blue Jays have fared against MLB's nastiest pitchers in 2023, we looked at battles between the team and the top 50 starters and top 50 relievers in the majors by fWAR.
Although fWAR is an imperfect measure that can value quantity over quality at times, it's a solid shorthand for who the best pitchers on the planet are.
Blue Jays vs. top-50 starters
In any playoff context, teams tend to shorten their rotation by at least one pitcher, and most wild-card teams are able to line up their best three options for a short series. To have any success in the postseason, you have to do some damage against top-of-the-rotation guys.
Toronto has not mashed against pitchers that fit that description, but no one does. So, a good way to get a sense of how they've performed is looking at those starters' numbers against the Blue Jays versus their season-long averages.
That gives us a comparison that looks like this:
At first glance, that doesn't paint a rosy picture for Toronto. The team strikes out less against these starters and walks more, but the run-scoring has been slightly below-average.
These figures are skewed significantly by a single man, though. Cole has absolutely mowed down the Blue Jays this season, allowing just one earned run in 28.2 innings pitched — a workload that represents 12.3% of our sample.
If we consider Cole's mastery over Toronto to be an outlier, the other top-50 pitchers the team has faced have managed a 3.84 ERA against the Blue Jays. That's a subpar mark for starters of that calibre, who collectively own a 3.62 ERA this season.
That number comes from a relatively sizeable 203.2 inning sample, too. That's not enough to be projecting that the Blue Jays are particularly strong at handling MLB's nastiest starters, but it seems like enough to indicate they aren't specifically weak against them.
Not only has the team done OK from a run-scoring perspective, the Blue Jays' ability to put the ball in play against elite starters while managing an above-average walk rate suggests that their at-bats have generally been solid — even if that hasn't been true in recent days.
Blue Jays vs. top-50 relievers
In postseason settings, bullpens tend to literally expand as rotations shrink, but managers' circles of trust can dwindle, giving high-leverage guys a disproportionate amount of the work.
That makes it worth examining how the Blue Jays have fared against top relievers as well as starters. Unsurprisingly, the story here is pretty similar.
Again Toronto struck out less than average and walked more with below-average power output.
That resulted in high-end relievers having similar run-suppression success against the Blue Jays compared to other opponents.
None of this data indicates that Toronto is likely to go off against the best pitchers MLB has to offer. The Blue Jays' solid plate discipline will serve them well at times, but a lack of pop could get them in trouble on other occasions. Possessing a quick-strike offence can be handy against guys who don't make too many mistakes.
This team ranks 16th in the major leagues in run-scoring this season, and while the lineup's ceiling is better than that, it still has to be understood as a middle-of-the-pack offence. In that context, its results against first-class competition aren't particularly surprising.
If the Blue Jays make the playoffs, they may encounter some struggles against the pitching they'll see there. That's a fair expectation based on the quality of arms that come out in the postseason, not some fatal flaw of this team.
