Are the Blue Jays really this good?

Baseball would be better if the Blue Jays were really this good.

Fans of four teams in the AL East just flipped off their computer, but that sentence was for fans like me, the baseball communists, who want playoff appearances and good tidings to be distributed equally among the masses. The Blue Jays used to be the Cardinals of their day; no matter what they did, it usually worked. They were a masterclass in development, acquisitions, and creativity.

Then they fell down a mineshaft of boring and couldn’t yell loud enough to draw anyone’s attention. The Jays became the Official Third-Place Team of Major League Baseball, a total cheese sandwich. Then they became the Official Fourth-Place Team of Major League Baseball. Last year, after the busiest offseason in decades, they fell to fifth. They were still a couple years away from official Fifth-Place Team status, but the trend was discouraging.

Enough. We had the Pirates last year, and even though the Blue Jays are still miles behind that kind of misery and shame, I have no problem with them being the new, fresh faces of the 2014 playoffs. Rougned Odor would finally get to see the first Blue Jays team in the playoffs in his lifetime.

Now we get to play our favorite game with surprise teams: Which of the surprising performances should we keep expecting?

First, allow me to present my qualifications when it comes to Blue Jays analysis.

Qualification #1: I told everyone not to bury the Blue Jays just yet back in April.

It still might work. A year later, everything looks like ash and feathers, but it still might work. The disappointment from last year, combined with the inactivity of the offseason, makes it seem like the Blue Jays are hopelessly adrift. Give it one more year, though, before burying them in a shoebox in your backyard. Wait for Syndergaard’s first major league pitch before assuming he was more likely to be a part of the next good Blue Jays team than Dickey is right now.

toooot toooooooot. I get so much wrong, give me that one. Syndergaard is resting his elbow and Dickey is a part of the next good Blue Jays team. toooooot.

Qualification #2: I made this:

You can tell I’m proud of it because I include it in every other article on the Blue Jays, but danged if that isn’t one of the top 10 things I’ve ever been a part of.

Now to the thought exercise. Which Blue Jays should keep this up, and which ones are going to disappoint, eventually? Mostly, are the Blue Jays really this good?

Edwin Encarnacion probably isn’t going to hit 10 homers in every 13 games. Just a hunch. But his OPS+ was 153 in 2012, 144 in 2013, and 148 this year. He’s always this good. His dingers have just come in strange permutations.

Jose Bautista is still one of the best hitters in baseball. I don’t see why we should assume differently. Even if he’s a little older, he’s a little healthier.

Jose Reyes is probably good for above-averagish offense and average defense as long as he’s healthy, which is what the Jays are getting now.

Melky Cabrera wasn’t really the .346/.390/.516 hitter he was with the Giants before he got busted. He also wasn’t the .279/.322/.360 hitter he was last year when he had leg weakness that was likely due to a tumor in his spinal cord. The correct answer was probably the .305/.339/.470 hitter he was with the Royals in his final year there, which is really what his Giants numbers translated to BABIP was accounted for. That’s what he’s doing this year, give or take.

Colby Rasmus will continue to be a hairier Dave Kingman.

Dustin McGowan is one of the weirdest stories in baseball, now and forever. Look at his freaky, gap-filled career. I have no idea if he’ll keep up his slightly below-average pitching; I just wanted to point that out.

If Juan Francisco is really this good, the Blue Jays really have a weaponized Plodding Third Base Slugger Ray, which they use to turn middling third basemen into All-Stars. This would violate all sorts of treaties, and I’m not sure economic sanctions would be enough. Amass at the border, all true patriots. Meet me at a Tim Horton’s because I’ve always wanted to see what the big deal is.

We have 2,900 innings suggesting Mark Buehrle is good-not-great. We have 73 innings suggesting he’s great. Put the smart money on good-not-great.

Wait a sec, where did all the wait-a-secs go? I was looking forward to a long list of comments like “look at this unsustainable BABIP” and “well, this jerk’s ERA is going to shoot up.” Instead, there’s probably a category missing: Could do better. That’s where Brett Lawrie and R.A. Dickey might be. You could probably dump the whole second-base swamp in there, too, as that would seem to be an obvious and easy fix before July is over.

It turns out that when the Blue Jays aren’t all hurt, ticking off the old, vengeful gods, and playing J.P. Arencibia, they’re pretty danged okay. The caveat is that they still have a host of players who might be considered injury risks, whether because of age or recent history. It’s not like I have to tell a fanbase with 20-plus years of post-championship sadness not to print the playoff tickets yet, so that part goes for the rest of us, the general baseball fan. It’s too early to suggest the Blue Jays are the best team in the American League, even if the recent winning streak has us all excited.

Just using a quick is-this-legit? sniff test, though, the Blue Jays pass. Their productive players are supposed to be productive, more or less. Their rough spots are easily fixed. It turns out the horribly inactive offseason wasn’t so horrible after all. They just needed their talented players to be talented again.