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Safe to say no big changes will happen between now and opening day. How many wins do you think we will get and where in the AL East will we finish? Div champs? last place? 2nd?

87-86? 85-81?

The rotation was amazingly healthy last year - Would be shocked if they were close to as healthy this upcoming year.

Don't like our pitching depth at all if we have to go with guys like Hendriks, Francis for any extended period of time.

Bullpen has questions as well maybe a couple people step up or maybe as a whole they pitch like Detroit's RP did a year ago.

Offense can only carry the team for so long.

So yeah, it's all about the pitching and i don't think we have enough unless the rotation stays miraculously healthy all year long and our bullpen is at least respectable.

The rotation and batting order is going to be good enough. I think the bullpen blows it for us. 86 wins.

OK OK, BLUE JAYS BLUE JAYS, LETS PLAY BALL!

I'll reserve my vote until the season starts. I need to see what AA does with the bullpen and how 2B/CF look come April. As of right now I'd say 87-86.

I like this team quite a bit more than usual, so I'll say 88 wins. Donaldson and Martin are massive upgrades on what they had before (Martin's framing alone should add a few wins in comparison to Navarro), while the starting rotation has major upside in Stroman/Hutchison/Norris (the likes of which we arguably haven't seen since 2008 on the Jays). I have my doubts about Pompey as a starting CF at the MLB level so soon, but they can always move Saunders to CF during the season if that experiment fails.

2B and the bullpen are still obvious weaknesses as we enter ST, but I think the success of this season will ultimately be determined by the health of players like Bautista and the young pitchers anyway. If they can stay on the field, we'll have a good shot at the East.

Dunno. I'd say 80-90, likely; narrower band is so damned hard to go up with, in part because it depends on what happens with our division-mates. Boston should be good, and Tampa should be bad. But Baltimore might be the hardest team in all of baseball to pin down at the moment...their pitching staff beat their peripherals by miles, but perhaps that's sustainable because of their defense. Their most-commonly-used position players featured several black holes, and two of the best performers there are gone, but their bench and callups all mashed. And the Yankees aren't much easier...they can't hit, unless they can, and their rotation looks insanely fragile, unless it isn't.


So, 85, +/- 10 wins? Yeah. Sure.

Went with 87-86. Fangraphs has no AL team with 90 wins or more and wild card winners around 83 or 84 wins. Injuries, trades and the like can change all of these of course but we should be better than our 83 wins from 2014.

Have to pick the Red Sox to win the East , the rotation is a question mark though.

Red Sox, Jays, Yankees, Orioles, Rays

There are no super teams and no real terrible teams (on paper). The East and both Wild Cards could conceivably be won with fewer than 90 wins, so it's really anyone's guess at this point. Last season at this time I said the Jays were an 80-85 win team, and they finished right between that projection. I think they are an 82-90 win team based on the current roster and health permitting. The roster is incredibly top heavy on offense (the best players are elite at their positions), and a lot will depend on health (as usual) and how many starts they get out of the front four in the rotation (Stroman, Dickey, Buehrle, Hutchison). I think they are right in that general area with a whole bunch of other teams, which is why I was hoping they'd be able to pull off a Zobrist type of trade to kind of create some distance, but too late for that now.

Some team is going to do something to distance themselves eventually (like the O's did last year), but it could be any of the teams in the East, including the Rays. Kevin Cash was apparently the one who saw something in Yan Gomes and who turned Carlos Carrasco around in Cleveland so him being Rays manager might surprise a few people.

I know I shouldn't expect any different, but it's funny seeing this much bias. Objectively they project to barely above .500. Fangraphs projects them to win 84 games. Baseball Prospectus projects them to win 83. But only one single person out of 22 voters thinks they will win between 82-85 games.

Skin Blues wrote:I know I shouldn't expect any different, but it's funny seeing this much bias. Objectively they project to barely above .500. Fangraphs projects them to win 84 games. Baseball Prospectus projects them to win 83. But only one single person out of 22 voters thinks they will win between 82-85 games.

The most popular vote is 87-86 wins. That's pretty close to the forecasts you mention. If this board were truly filled homers, the average vote would be 90+.

99.

Donaldson hits 55 homers, Bautista 45, and Edwin 40
Goins learns how to hit, bats .265, with an OBP of .330.
Pompey wins Rookie of the year
Michael Saunders, and Jose Reyes both stay healthy
Marcus Stroman wins the Cy Young
The Jays bullpen bounces back to 2013 form
Ricky Romero return to pre-Miss America form, and wins 8+
The Jays randomly install grss during the all-star break
I wake up from dream

84 wins, 2nd place in the division behind Boston.

Schadenfreude wrote:Dunno. I'd say 80-90, likely; narrower band is so damned hard to go up with, in part because it depends on what happens with our division-mates. Boston should be good, and Tampa should be bad. But Baltimore might be the hardest team in all of baseball to pin down at the moment...their pitching staff beat their peripherals by miles, but perhaps that's sustainable because of their defense. Their most-commonly-used position players featured several black holes, and two of the best performers there are gone, but their bench and callups all mashed. And the Yankees aren't much easier...they can't hit, unless they can, and their rotation looks insanely fragile, unless it isn't.


So, 85, +/- 10 wins? Yeah. Sure.

Also, of course, depth. Health issues undermined the Jays. One would have thought that they would have undermined the Orioles, losing a very good catcher for most of the season and their starting 3B and #2 hitter for a good part of it. But their organization depth was good enough to cope, whereas the Yankees pitching depth wasn't sufficient to keep them in the race once Tanaka in particular went down. They could have a rotation of Tanaka, CC, Nova, Pineda, and all had injury issues last year. Like us, they don't seem to have the organizational depth to cope with losses that are concentrated in one area like SPs, despite an overall level of good prospects. My guess is that for the Jays to overcome some of the adversity that all teams suffer, some prospect likely to start the season at NH or BUF is going to have to be a "pleasant surprise" who can help for a few weeks at the major league level. Whether that's Devon Travis, Dwight Smith, Roberto Osuna, Miguel Castro, etc, someone needs to be able to come in a plug a hole at least short term.

torontoaces04 wrote:99.

Donaldson hits 55 homers, Bautista 45, and Edwin 40
Goins learns how to hit, bats .265, with an OBP of .330.
Pompey wins Rookie of the year
Michael Saunders, and Jose Reyes both stay healthy
Marcus Stroman wins the Cy Young
The Jays bullpen bounces back to 2013 form
Ricky Romero return to pre-Miss America form, and wins 8+
The Jays randomly install grss during the all-star break
I wake up from dream

C'mon now, you ruined an otherwise reasonable post with this prediction.

89

85

My own pessimism has beaten me down so badly that's it left me with no choice but to be unrealistically optimistic. 92+ wins. Screw it. Everything will finally go right for a team in this city...

torontoaces04 wrote:99.

Donaldson hits 55 homers, Bautista 45, and Edwin 40
Goins learns how to hit, bats .265, with an OBP of .330.
Pompey wins Rookie of the year
Michael Saunders, and Jose Reyes both stay healthy
Marcus Stroman wins the Cy Young
The Jays bullpen bounces back to 2013 form
Ricky Romero return to pre-Miss America form, and wins 8+
The Jays randomly install grss during the all-star break
I wake up from dream

So much for Saunders lol. We should keep this as a checklist

77