30 Games Later: Readjusting Expectations

Last season, after thirty games, the following teams were leading baseball's six divisions:

AL East: Baltimore and Tampa Bay (tied)

AL Central: Cleveland

AL West: Texas

NL East: Washington

NL Central: St. Louis

NL West: Los Angeles

Only one of those teams would actually go on to win their division -- Washington. In fact, the Rays, Indians, and Dodgers missed the playoffs altogether. Meanwhile, the two eventual pennant-winners, Detroit and San Francisco, had combined to win 30 games and lose 29. So it's not like the standings in early May offer any predictive value for what they'll look like in late September.

But sometimes, the evidence provided by the season's first thirty games is enough to reevaluate what we thought we knew during the winter months. Sometimes, stubbornly sticking to obsolete perceptions of teams is counter-productive. At this time last year, the Athletics were surprisingly 16-14 and the Orioles, at 19-11, were even better; both were expected to fall back into the last place slots that had been reserved for them, but they never did. On the other end of the spectrum, the Angels were 13-18 and the Red Sox were 12-17; both were expected to snap out of their funks and contend for the World Series, but they never did. So yes, it might be early to totally re-calibrate expectations -- still, that doesn't mean that several important trends haven't already started to reveal themselves.

1. The Blue Jays are somewhere between 'Train Wreck' and 'Dumpster Fire' status. On paper, this was the best team in the AL East, maybe the best team in the league. A rotation headed by a pair of aces; a lineup anchored by a pair of elite power hitters; a solid cache of depth. There weren't many holes on the roster.

Just a month into the season, the Blue Jays are not only stuck with a dismal 11-21 record, and not only are they in last place -- they're also 9.5 games out of first. NINE POINT FIVE. Not even the Marlins are that far out of first, and the Marlins are intentionally trying to lose baseball games. No team has gotten worse production out of the #5-hole in the lineup than Toronto, thanks to inconsistency from Melky Cabrera, Adam Lind, and Colby Rasmus. R.A. Dickey's ERA is 5.36; Josh Johnson's is 6.36; Mark Buehrle's is 6.43. Jose Reyes, this team's best player in the early going, will be on the disabled list for another couple of months. In the meantime, the role of shortstop will be played by something called a "Munenori Kawasaki."  Add it all up, and you get a team that's been outscored by a total of 47 runs, second-worst in baseball ahead of only the Astros.

Now: are the Blue Jays really this bad? Of course not. The pitching will improve just because there's nowhere to go but up. Jays hitters have actually been the unluckiest in baseball as a group; random chance will be friendlier to them. But this struggling squad faces the same problem that the Angels did last year: all of these losses are permanently banked. There's no changing that 11-21 record. They're already looking at a ten-game deficit in the division. Just to get to 90 wins, they have to go 80-50 the rest of the way. Is that impossible? No. Is it likely that this uninspiring group will play nearly-perfect baseball for the next five months, without Jose Reyes for half that time? Hardly. Especially not in their hyper-competitive division. As stunning and unfortunate as this is, the Blue Jays are pretty much dead in the water already. Who saw that coming?

2. The Orioles are for real, once again. It was reasonable to expect Baltimore to regress from last year, because last year was either an unrepeatable feat of remarkable overachievement or the product of Buck Showalter's dark magic. Instead, the opposite is true: this team is better now than it was a year ago.

The pitching is still average at best, so the Orioles have just decided to outscore everybody with a suddenly-unrelenting offense. Much of it is fueled by the usual suspects -- Adam Jones and Matt Wieters and such. But there are three others who have helped transform this team into a contender. One is Chris Davis, who's successfully swapped bodies with Josh Hamilton to get from failed prospect to elite slugger (hitting .327/.425/.673 will do quite nicely, thank you very much). The second is Nate McLouth, whose career was once as dead as the 2013 Blue Jays; yet he's now the leadoff hitter for this offense against right-handers. Somehow he's hitting .313/.411/.490 with nine steals and, most amazingly, 16 walks against just 10 strikeouts.

The third is the most important, and also one of the most overlooked young superstars in baseball. Manny Machado has been largely overshadowed by the Trout-and-Harper Mania. But this guy joined the Orioles in the middle of their playoff push last summer without a single game of Triple-A experience, having to transition from his natural position of shortstop over to third base in order to accommodate J.J. Hardy. Now he's a 20-year-old shortstop playing Gold Glove defense at third while hitting .311/.350/.508 and holding down the #2-slot in the Orioles order. He's a huge reason why Baltimore is a serious contender for the AL East title.

3. The Los Angeles teams have proven that money doesn't buy happiness. Over the past year or two, the Angels and the Dodgers have spent hundreds of millions of dollars to import superstars to Southern California -- from Albert Pujols, Josh Hamilton, and C.J. Wilson to Zack Greinke, Carl Crawford, and Adrian Gonzalez. It hasn't exactly paid off yet. Both are in fourth place, with a lot of concerns up and down their rosters.

For the Dodgers, the problem is offense. With Hanley Ramirez injured, the non-first-base positions are being held down by a sad troupe of deeply flawed guys who might be good if you rolled them all up into one player: Juan Uribe, Mark Ellis, Jerry Hairston, Justin Sellers, Luis Cruz, and Dee Gordon. Those awful bats are rendering the bottom half of the Dodgers lineup useless. To wit: their current #5 hitter A.J. Ellis has only scored five runs all year despite his excellent .390 on-base-percentage. And two of those runs came from his own homers. That's how ugly this offense is right now, especially with Matt Kemp struggling (.342 slugging percentage ... yowza). Thank goodness Carl Crawford is enjoying a fantastic bounceback season (.311/.383/.495), or else things could be even worse.

At least the Dodgers have Clayton Kershaw starting every fifth day. The other L.A. team is in even worse shape. Thought to be a World Series contender before the season started, it's clear that the Angels don't have the pitching to fulfill that potential, and their hitting might not be good enough to even get them to the playoffs in the first place. Over the past calendar year, Josh Hamilton has hit .253/.321/.494, or essentially 156 games of Delmon Young-like production. He's a major reason why the Angels only rank 15th in the majors in runs scored, which isn't good enough when their pitching staff ranks 28th in ERA. Last year, the Angels fought their way back into contention by calling up Mike Trout and trading for Zack Greinke. Neither of those things are happening this time around. In a division with the Rangers and Athletics, competing with the entire AL East for a wild card spot, the Angels are in a bad place right now and it wouldn't be a shock if manager Mike Scioscia gets fired.

4. The Yankees might be better than we thought. A month ago, had you told someone that the Yankees starting lineup in early May would include Jayson Nix, Eduardo Nunez, Chris Stewart, Lyle Overbay, and Vernon Wells, that person would have guaranteed that the Yankees would be a last-place team. That would have been a smart, rational guess.

Yet for some reason, that person also would have been wrong. The Yankees have won 18 of their first 30 games and sit tied for second place in the AL East. And this is with a combined zero at-bats from Derek Jeter, Mark Teixeira, and Curtis Granderson, as well as injuries to Kevin Youkilis and Francisco Cervelli. If an injury to Francisco Cervelli deals a harsh blow to your lineup, then you know the offense is desperately seeking help.

Good pitching has basically driven New York's early success, but it's three scrap-heap pickups that have kept the lineup afloat despite the injuries. Against left-handers, Vernon Wells is hitting .333/.383/.595. Against right-handers, Lyle Overbay is hitting .328/.377/.656 and Travis Hafner is hitting .317/.414/.617. They've all suffered against same-handed pitchers, which is a problem because they've all been forced into everyday duty by other injuries. But the Yankees would be absolutely nowhere without these three, who have unexpectedly pummeled whenever they've had the platoon advantage. Oh, and that Robinson Cano fellow has a .972 OPS. He might be an okay player someday.

The Yankees still can't count on making the playoffs, not with all their aging-and-injury question marks. But given the sorry state of their lineup, they could've easily had a Blue Jays-style start to the season and doomed themselves from the beginning. Instead, they've banked 18 wins when their roster was at its weakest. And the impending returns of Granderson, Teixeira, and Youkilis should help relegate the Wells/Overbay/Hafner trio to platoon duty, where they've thrived. This team has kept itself alive, an admirable feat in its own right.

5. The St. Louis Cardinals could be the best team in baseball. This is certainly not something anyone would have predicted before the season. The Cardinals are 20-11, in first place in the Central Division with the second-best run differential in baseball. Carlos Beltran, Matt Holliday, and Yadier Molina remain a devastatingly effective trio in the heart of that lineup. Most impressively, the team ranks 6th in runs scored and 2nd in ERA across baseball, a testament to its balance.

The key to this early success has been unexpectedly dominant starting pitching. The Cardinals' five starters have combined to pitch to a crazy 2.25 ERA over 192 innings, which would seem to be several rungs above "solid." Jake Westbrook leads the league in ERA at 1.07; heralded rookie Shelby Miller is at 1.96 while striking out over a batter per inning; Adam Wainwright has announced his return to ace-dom by striking out 48 batters and walking just three all season.

On top of all that: the team has skillfully handled adversity in the bullpen, too. Incumbent closer Jason Motte is headed for Tommy John surgery, and his first replacement, Mitchell Boggs, was a disaster. The answer? Previously-unknown Edward Mujica has taken over the role with surprising ease. A year ago he was a middle reliever toiling away for the Marlins; now he's converted eight save opportunities for the team with the best record in the National League. Without Motte, or Chris Carpenter, or Albert Pujols, St. Louis is yet again a World Series contender. These Cardinals seem to know what they're doing.

How Do You Solve a Problem Like the Marlins?

Back on Opening Day, the Marlins' hopes were high. Armed with new uniforms, a new logo, and a new stadium, they were poised to be serious contenders. Their notoriously-cheap front office had spent almost $200 million in the offseason on big free agents. The outspoken Ozzie Guillen was hired to be the manager. The Marlins had finally ditched their old identity and arrived as major players on the baseball scene.

Jose Reyes, Heath Bell, and Mark Buehrle have all been
traded less than a year after signing in Miami.

Except, as it turns out, the Marlins were a terrible baseball team. They finished in last place and lost 93 games. By midseason, the front office decided to pull the plug on their failed experiment. They traded away many of their best players, including former star Hanley Ramirez, in July. They fired Guillen when the season came to a merciful end. They shipped embattled closer Heath Bell off to Arizona. And this Tuesday, the cleansing process was completed. The Marlins finalized a gargantuan trade with the Blue Jays, dealing away shortstop Jose Reyes, starting pitchers Mark Buehrle and Josh Johnson, infielder Emilio Bonifacio, and catcher John Buck in exchange for $160 million in salary relief and a gaggle of faceless prospects.

The Miami Marlins didn't take just a hatchet to their roster. They shook it like an Etch-a-Sketch, and poof--any evidence suggesting the 2012 Marlins ever existed was erased forever.

The results of this systematic purge are startling. Of all the players on that promising Opening Day roster, the following ones are no longer in the Miami organization: the catcher, first baseman, second baseman, third baseman, shortstop, center fielder, four-fifths of the starting rotation, top two bullpen arms, and the manager. The three marquee free agents signed last winter to so much hoopla--Jose Reyes, Mark Buehrle, and Heath Bell--are all gone. The payroll went from over $100 million in 2012 to a projected $25 million in 2013. And almost half of that figure is owed to one player, Ricky Nolasco, who is a free agent after next season (if he isn't traded before then). The only player the Marlins currently have signed to a major league contract in 2014 is Jeff Mathis, a catcher making $1.5 million. The rest of the roster? It's filled with somewhat-promising-but-unpolished prospects and minor league veterans making the league's minimum salary. The only notable exception is outfielder Giancarlo Stanton, who is poised to emerge as baseball's best young power hitter in a generation. But with the skeleton of a team surrounding him, why would he ever want to sign an extension to stay in Miami?

The future of Marlins baseball is extremely cloudy just twelve months after being so promising. The most hated owner in sports, Jeffrey Loria, basically just scammed the citizens of Miami for tens of millions of dollars. He lobbied for public money to fund his new stadium by promising to make the team competitive, and signed a hodgepodge of free agents to maintain his illusion. Then he dumped them all for cents on the dollar after just one tough year.

But here's the thing: from a baseball perspective, the Marlins did the right thing.

That old team, ingloriously dissolved, wasn't going anywhere. The hitting wasn't good enough, the pitching depth was awful, the bullpen was a sieve, its manager a joke. It was an expensive, poorly constructed roster, with flaws that were exacerbated by its bloated egos, personalities, and salaries. Why pretend that hideous construct of a baseball team had any shot of winning a title? Why not take that phone call from the Blue Jays and grab that opportunity to wipe the slate clean? Dozens of executives across all sports have often wished for the chance to press the 'reset' button and start over. The Marlins have been given that chance.

Yes, on paper, Miami got ripped off by the Blue Jays. They gave up five legitimate major league players, two of whom--Reyes and Johnson--can be great if healthy. In return, they received a lot of youth and no sure things. But if the Marlins aren't going to be good anyways, why continue to pay an aging and injury-prone Jose Reyes $20 million per year? Why wait around for Mark Buehrle's arm to fall off? Why not cash in on the final year of Josh Johnson's contract before he becomes a free agent after next year? So the Marlins didn't get any recognizable players back from Toronto. So what? They got $160 million off the books and brought in some interesting young players. They got a mulligan.

The problem is that it looks bad when a scumbag owner trades away all of his team's good players for a bag of peanuts. It looks even worse when that owner vowed to improve his team while lobbying for a taxpayer-funded stadium. But just like the Red Sox when they traded away Adrian Gonzalez, Josh Beckett, and Carl Crawford, the Marlins did the right thing, as lopsided as the trade might seem. They have erased the mistakes of offseasons past. Those mistakes could have crippled the franchise for years. Instead, the Marlins have been given a rare opportunity: a fresh start. A chance to learn from those embarrassing mistakes and build from scratch.

What will they do with that chance? Now that's another matter entirely.

Jays Dropping Like Flies

If this keeps up, the Toronto Blue Jays are going to be out of pitchers pretty soon.

On June 11, Brandon Morrow exited his start against the Nationals in the first inning; he was placed on the DL with a strained oblique.

One June 13, Kyle Drabek exited his start against the Nationals in the fifth inning; he tore his UCL ligament and underwent his second Tommy John surgery, which might as well be the Kiss of Death for pitchers.

On June 15, Drew Hutchinson exited his start against the Phillies in the first inning; he suffered a sprained elbow and won't pitch for at least four to six weeks.

And last night, Henderson Alvarez exited his start against the Red Sox in the sixth inning; the Jays claim he won't miss any starts, but "elbow soreness" is not something to be taken lightly.

Those two weeks knocked out four of Toronto's five starters and devastated its bullpen. If Henderson misses any time, their rotation will look like this: Ricky Romero, Brett Cecil, Jesse Chavez, Aaron Laffey, and ?????.

As insurance for that uncertain rotation spot, the Blue Jays signed....49-year-old Jamie Moyer. We've now reached DEFCON 1 in Toronto.

Ten Interesting Facts About Edwin Encarnacion

1. Edwin Encarnacion was born in the Dominican Republic.

2. He plays baseball for the Toronto Blue Jays, who acquired him in the Scott Rolen trade with Cincinnati.

3. The skill he has mastered best in this world is the ability to pull a baseball over a distant fence with frightening ferocity.

4. In 2011, his first home run of the season came on May 29th.

5. He finished that season with a grand total of 17 home runs.

6. Today is May 30th, 2012, and Edwin Encarnacion already has 17 home runs. Only Josh Hamilton has more.

7. Thus, Edwin Encarnacion is on pace to hit a lot of home runs in 2012. Over 50, in fact.

8. He is 29 years old.

9. He is a free agent after 2012.

10. His impeccable timing is about to make him very, very rich.

MLB Season Preview: Toronto Blue Jays

The Blue Jays, one of baseball's up-and-coming teams, could benefit most from the addition of an extra wild card to the playoff system.

Jose Bautista takes pleasure in destroying baseballs.

Offense: The lineup is essentially one superstar (Jose Bautista) and a bunch of question marks. Yet there's a ton of upside for an offense that already finished sixth in runs scored last season. Adam Lind is looking to rediscover the form that led to his .305/.370/.563 line three years ago. Former top Cardinals prospect Colby Rasmus is coming off a down season, but he's still a 25-year-old five-tool center fielder who could break out at any time. Yunel Escobar and Kelly Johnson compose an intriguing double-play combo. Edwin Encarnacion, Eric Thames, Travis Snider, and J.P. Arencibia are all young players with impressive power. And the most tantalizingly talented player of them all is 22-year-old Canadian third baseman Brett Lawrie, acquired from Milwaukee for Shaun Marcum, who is poised to become a superstar for years to come. There aren't many sure things besides Bautista, but there's youth, upside, and power at nearly every position.

Ricky Romero is no longer known as
"that guy drafted before Troy Tulowitzki."

Pitching: Like the offense, the Jays have one proven workhorse (Ricky Romero) and few other established starters. Brandon Morrow is the Colby Rasmus of the rotation--he's got ace stuff, but hasn't translated it into consistent success yet. He's struck out over 10 batters per nine innings the past two years, while his ERAs have stubbornly hovered in the mid-4.00s. The Jays need him to put it all together in 2012, because the pitching gets thin fast: Brett Cecil and Henderson Alvarez are promising but unproven, and Dustin McGowan just made his return to the majors last season after a series of major surgeries cost him several years. In the minors, Kyle Drabek still has a bright future despite struggling mightily with his command last year. The bullpen was a weakness last season and the problem was well-addressed with new closer Sergio Santos (13.1 K/9 in 2011), former Reds closer Francisco Cordero, and veterans Darren Oliver and Jason Frasor.

Brett Lawrie: Future Stud.

Breakout Candidates: They're all over the place on this roster. The most obvious candidate is Brett Lawrie, who has Ryan Braun-caliber upside but at third base. In two months and 150 at-bats last season, he hit .293/.373/.580 with nine homers and seven steals. The sky's the limit. On the mound, Brandon Morrow is the pick. His peripherals suggest that his ERA should be much lower than it has been and he's gotten terribly unlucky in his young career. The Jays signed him to an extension this offseason, so maybe they think a breakout is coming, too. You don't have to look far to spot other potential breakout players like Colby Rasmus, Eric Thames, Henderson Alvarez, Sergio Santos, and so on.

3 Key Questions: Will Rasmus and Lind become stars or disappointments? How will the young rotation settle in? And just how good will Lawrie be?

Best Case Scenario: Bautista and Lawrie go nuts, Brandon Morrow turns into Justin Verlander Lite, some young arms step up, and the Jays grab a wild card and return to the postseason.

Worst Case Scenario: The young arms are too young, the bullpen gets overtaxed, Lawrie can't live up to the hype, we don't see anything special from Rasmus or Lind, and the Jays finish fourth (though the future remains bright in Toronto).

Predicted Finish: There's a lot to like here, but Toronto doesn't have the established players to compete with New York, Tampa Bay, and Boston. They finish fourth and their promising young core takes a step forward.