Toronto Blue Jays: Report Card for first half of 2020 season
By Ryan Patrick
Offence continues to provide spark
Coming into the 2020 season the expectations weren’t exactly sky-high for Toronto’s offence. Looking up and down the batting order, it was clear there was young talent emerging but no real proven offensive threats in the middle of the batting order.
To determine a grade for this year’s performance, let’s first take a look at some of the key offensive stats from last year to see where there’s been an improvement.
2019
.AVG: .236 (30th)
.OBP: .305 (27th)
.OPS: .733 (23rd)
HR: 247 (9th)
RBI: 697 (23rd)
SB: 55 (26th)
K%: 24.9 (25th)
BB%: 8.4 (T-18th)
Toronto was in the bottom 10 of the league in almost every key offensive category with the exception of home runs and walk percentage. Again, no surprise here especially when remembering that the team finished the season with a 67-95 record, fifth worst in the entire league.
Now here’s what they’ve done through 30 games so far this season:
2020
.AVG: .250 (11th)
.OBP: .316 (23rd)
.OPS: .772 (9th)
HR: 54 (4th)
RBI: 140 (15th)
SB: 17 (8th)
K%: 22.1 (11th)
BB%: 8.6 (20th)
This is much better, and the surge has been led by three main contributors: Randal Grichuk, Teoscar Hernandez, and Cavan Biggio. Throw Bichette in there too, because he was absolutely tearing it up before his injury, batting .361 with five home runs in 14 games. Looking at what Grichuk and Hernandez have done this season compared to last is like night and day. Here are those stat lines.
Grichuk:
2019: 151 games (586 AB) .232/.280/.457, 31 HR, 80 RBI, 75 R, 26% K rate, 5.6% walk rate
2020: 26 games (106 AB) .311/.348/.613, 9 HR, 23 RBI, 18 R, 22.3% K rate, 5.4% walk rate
Hernandez:
2019: 125 games (417 AB) .230/.306/.472, 26 HR, 65 RBI, 58 R, 33% K rate, 9.7% walk rate
2020: 30 games (112 AB) .295/.350/.661, 12 HR, 20 RBI, 20 R, 28.5% K rate, 8.1% walk rate
Obviously these look like small sample sizes, and in a normal season you would have to take these stats with a grain of salt. However, this isn’t a normal season and the term “small sample size” doesn’t really apply here.
The fact is the season is 50 per cent over and if Grichuk and Hernandez can keep this up the rest of the way, the Blue Jays should continue to win ball games.
Grade: B+