Blue Jays Missing the Good Fortune That Powered Their ALCS Teams

After Marcus Stroman left Wednesday night's Blue Jays game in New York, but before he assured reporters that he'd be making his next start, it seemed for a brief time that the No. 3 pitcher in the club's rotation was Mat Latos.

Mat Latos!

Mat fucking Latos!

Now rather unceremoniously (though not incorrectly) designated for assignment, Latos was a free agent signed to a minor league deal on the eve of spring training, paying him just a $1.5 million salary in the majors. After three starts he sported a 6.60 ERA. He struck out 10, walked eight, and allowed 19 hits (including five home runs) through 15 innings. PITCHf/x data clearinghouse Brooks Baseball tells us "his fourseam fastball is straight as an arrow," and that "his sinker is basically never swung at and missed compared to other pitchers' sinkers, has surprisingly little armside run, results in somewhat more fly balls compared to other pitchers' sinkers and has virtually no sinking action reminiscent of a true sinker."

Brooks is kinder to his cutter, but the point remains. This was a grim situation. Latos as this club's fourth starter would be a grim situation! And now they've decided to look beyond Mat Latos for answers.

How in the everloving fuck did the Blue Jays end up here?

Well, for starters, it's easy to forget that most teams end up here. The Blue Jays used just seven starters in 2016, and two of those—Drew Hutchison and Francisco Liriano—were traded for each other. That kind of good fortune when it comes to pitching health is practically unheard of—and their run of it goes back even farther.

From the 2015 trade deadline all the way through the 2016 season, the names of the Blue Jays' starters were remarkably consistent. At that point it was R.A. Dickey, Mark Buehrle, Marco Estrada, David Price, and Hutchison. Stroman eventually got healthy and supplanted Hutchison. Price and Buehrle left after 2015 and were replaced by J.A. Happ and Aaron Sanchez. Hutchison spent most of 2016 in Buffalo but made two starts around the time that Aaron Sanchez was having his innings limited, before being dealt for Liriano.

Nobody outside of that group started for the Blue Jays for a span of 258 games—the last 61 of 2015, all 162 games of 2016, the first 15 of 2017, and 20 playoff games over the past two seasons. Nine starters. Nine starters! Two of whom were traded for each other! And two more (Happ, Sanchez) who were straight replacements for guys who departed (Price, Buehrle).

And then Mat fucking Latos.

It was such a long and incredible run of health that most Jays fans probably don't remember who was on the hill for them the day that everything changed—the day the rumours broke that the Jays had traded for Troy Tulowitzki, signalling that the club, despite its record, was really going for it. It was Felix Doubront!

Yep, the game before Tulowitzki made his Blue Jays debut—which took place the night before word broke that the club had traded for Price—was started by Doubront. And it was his fourth start in a row for the club!

Doubront was hardly the only cannon fodder the Blue Jays sent to the hill early on in that magical season. Scott Copeland and Todd Redmond also made starts for the club. None of those three pitchers has pitched in the majors since 2015, and those who remember the end of their Blue Jays tenures surely understand why.

The Jays that year, of course, also used Sanchez (who, like Happ, joins a long list of key Toronto players currently on the DL) for 11 starts before he got hurt and came back as an otherworldly reliever. As well as Daniel Norris, who broke camp in the rotation but was sent to Buffalo after five starts, and an especially green Matt Boyd, who was decent despite allowing all the runs in a 4-0 loss to Texas in his first start, but then couldn't record an out in his second outing, allowing six hits (two homers), one walk, and seven earned runs. Those two, of course, ended up going to Detroit in the Price trade.

Unfortunately for the 2017 Jays, they don't have any analogues to Boyd or Norris—guys who could come up from the minors and give the club some up and down performances, but ones tinged with genuine hope for the future. All they've got now is dreck.

Partly that's because of things like the Price trade, not to mention the Josh Donaldson trade (in which they gave up Kendall Graveman), and the Tulowitzki trade (Jeff Hoffman)—deals that no Blue Jays fan would ever want to see undone.

I mean, in that light, dreck is fine! Those trades worked out incredibly well.

Which brings us to another thing that Jays fans here in 2017 may, unfortunately, have to get used to: not everything is going to go the Blue Jays' way the way that it has over the past two years—especially 2015. Because it was far from just the starting pitching that went unusually, unbelievably right for this organization then.

Jon Shell noted several of these things in a recent piece at BP Toronto: the Donaldson trade working out beyond anybody's wildest dreams; Roberto Osuna coming out of A-ball to be a lights-out closer; Estrada transforming into an absolute ace ("Would the hopes for him have been markedly different than the hopes for Jesse Chavez?" Jon asks); Kevin Pillar suddenly becoming an all-world defensive centre fielder; Devon Travis arriving as what looked like a fully-formed All-Star second baseman (when not hurt or, as he is currently, scuffling); and "the Troy Tulowitzki trade, especially in light of what happened to Jose Reyes afterward."

Is this start to 2017 some kind of karmic repayment for all of the Blue Jays' recent good fortune? I tend not to believe in bullshit, but if I did I'd say, "maybe yes!"

Where it is exceedingly difficult to go out and find such good fortune, unfortunately, is when it comes to starting pitching depth on the free agent market. And that's the reality the Blue Jays are grappling with right now. Or at least one of the many realities they're grappling with.

Few, if any, free agent starting pitchers good enough to pitch regularly in a big league rotation are going to happily sign on to wait their turn in Buffalo. There are better opportunities elsewhere for the better pitchers, because there simply aren't that many good pitchers to go around. In 2016 there were 27 pitchers who threw at least 120 innings and had an ERA above 4.75. Twelve of them had ERAs of 5.15 or above. Big league opportunities abound for any pitcher who can be just a shade above utter crap!

The Blue Jays front office did what it could this winter to try to build in some depth knowing that it couldn't possibly continue its run of great health, but in reality there's only so much you can do. They took a flyer on Latos, who isn't that far removed from being wholly serviceable, though he doesn't look like the same guy as he was even in 2015. They signed T.J. House as a minor league free agent—a guy Mark Shapiro and Ross Atkins knew from the Cleveland organization, and who has pitched very well for Buffalo, though he's far more likely to get the T.J. Maxx jingle stuck in your head than he is to ride in to save the Blue Jays' season. They managed to keep Mike Bolsinger in the organization, who is also pitching very well for the Bisons, but who made six starts for the Dodgers last season, allowing 33 hits, nine walks, and seven home runs in just 27.2 innings. And they've turned a couple times to Casey Lawrence, a 29-year-old rookie who first tasted Triple-A in 2013 and has floated between there and Double-A since then, posting pedestrian numbers with pedestrian strikeout rates and probably not enough of a groundball rate to make that work.

This is what depth starters look like, and it ain't pretty.

Neither has 2017 been so far for the Blue Jays. And with apologies to Donaldson, who is obviously vital, the only way it's going to start looking any better is if the club's actual big league calibre starters get healthy and back out on the mound. And by "looking better" I don't necessarily mean looking playoff bound, I just mean actually watchable. Because Mat Latos ca. 2017 or whoever else comes next?No, thank you. Hard pass.