Over at The Hardball Times, David Gassko has a new article up summarizing (and crunching) some of the zone rating fielding data from Baseball Info Solutions for the first ten weeks of the season.  David mentions only the leaders and trailers in his article, and there's only one Blue Jay who gets a look in, Alex Rios who is the #1 overall rightfielder in the majors.  I thought it would be worthwhile to grab the data and see how the rest of the Blue Jays have fared... many thanks to David and THT for obtaining the data and boiling down the numbers into runs above/below average.

The St. Louis Cardinals moved into a shiny new ballpark last spring, Busch Stadium Version 3.0, and promptly went and won the World Series.

Which had to be posted separately because I actually broke the Box software with this one!

I am so proud.

At about this time last year, I devoted a fair amount of attention to the striking discrepancy between Toronto's won-lost record and what their actual runs scored and allowed should have led us to expect. This year, of course, things returned to normal.

The Blue Jays have played 40 games this season.  The good news is that at their current .575 winning percentage they are on pace for 93 wins.  The bad news is that 93 wins right now is 3rd in the AL East and 3rd in the wildcard.

What do the players look like spread over 162 games?

A short while ago, I decided to release the secret recipes of Leverage Index, which you can read about here: Crucial Situations . I also generated the Leverage Index Chart . Then, just a few days ago, I licenced (for free) Fangraphs to use my WE and LI data, and here's how the Blue Jays look so far. Here is a recent see-saw Blue Jays game, which you can tell by the Leverage Index indicator. An LI of 1.0 means average, so you can see that this game was pretty stressful throughout, especially near the end. I think this is an exciting development, and we're fortunate that David has spent so much of his time in producing such quality work.

For those who have been asking, here they are.

David Pinto has begun to release his defensive ratings for 2005. These ratings are based on a probabilistic model of range, comparing the number of outs recorded based on zone information with the number that would be expected from league averages and visiting player performance. The Blue Jay middle infielder statistics were very interesting. Thanks to Wildrose for the tip.

Where do the AL East contenders sit right now compared to each other? Let’s compare them by looking at how their current depth charts stack up. At each position (including starters one through five and three bullpen slots for closer, lefty/righty setup men and the rest) the three teams will be ranked according to the likely productivity of their current situation. We’ll assign points on a 3-2-1 scale for each team and total them up at the end.

I've mentioned a few times that the Jays need to consolidate their roster. The Overbay move was a good example of this.

I'm in Vegas this week - the wifely person is on a business trip and I'm just tagging along as a tourist.

I just saw something you might find interesting.

It's too soon for another look at the current payroll projection ($78.7M, if you're dying to know), so let's instead turn our attention to how the current Toronto squad would line up against righties and lefties.

Over 300 posts in the Overbay trade thread and I don't even think anyone even brought up Overbay's splits once. How are we supposed to be 'stat geeks' if we don't go any further than OPS? I'll get the ball rolling.

Consider this a tack-on to Magpie’s excellent work from last week regarding the how the Blue Jays were historical in terms of their actual record vs. their Pythagorean record. It’s been postulated that part of the reason for this was that they scored a lot of meaningless runs, running up the score in games that were already out of reach. Another popular theory is that Toronto’s long-sequence-low-power offence was more prone to producing very small or very large run totals in any given game. This idea may be fueled (wrongly, in my opinion) by J.P. Ricciardi’s remarks near the end of the season about needing more hitters who could put the ball in the seats.

The Blue Jays signed BJ Ryan to a contract worth $9.4/year. Which isn't a huge surprise.

The Blue Jays signed BJ Ryan to a contract for 5 years. Which is a huge surprise.

Or is it?