Blue Jays Benefit From 60-Game Season With Improved Playoff Odds

If Blue Jays fans were being honest with themselves this winter, their expectations for the 2020 team would be some sort of modest improvement.

Toronto finished 67-95 last year — 26th in the majors — leaving plenty of room to get better. In a February interview with the Toronto Star, president Mark Shapiro said he hoped the team would “win more,” but he didn’t attach any playoff aspiration.

That’s a reasonable mindset for a group led mostly by players in their mid-20s and younger. In a tough division, with a fairly inexperienced core, the playoffs seemed at least one more season away.

Of course, that was back in the winter. Everything has changed since then.

As MLB prepares to begin a pandemic-shortened season, teams are set to face the wild and wonderful randomness that can play out in 60 games. For the Blue Jays, that could be a very good thing.


Here’s the TLDR version of how the truncated season helps Toronto: Fewer games = greater variance.

Despite adding a front-of-the-rotation starter in Hyun-Jin Ryu, the Blue Jays were very clearly on the outside looking in entering 2020. They still are, but now teams have fewer games to separate themselves — and an unexpected hot or cold streak can change everything.

Let’s break this down using Fangraphs’ season probabilities (for which we are eternally grateful):

  • On March 17, Fangraphs’ Dan Szymborski published a 162-game ZiPS projection for all MLB teams. The Blue Jays were given a 0.9 percent chance to make the playoffs and a 0 percent chance to win the World Series.
  • In the same article, he ran projections for season lengths of 140, 110 and 81 games. The Blue Jays’ playoff chances were 1.3 percent, 8.9 percent and 16.7 percent, respectively.
  • Last week, Szymborski crunched the numbers on a 60-game season and gave the Blue Jays a 15.1 percent chance to make the playoffs.

If a mix of words and numbers isn’t your thing, perhaps I can interest you in this table:

You might be wondering why the Blue Jays’ playoff chances went down from the 81-game season to the 60-game season. Here’s my hypothesis:

  • The altered schedule. Literally half of Toronto’s season will come against the Yankees, Rays and Red Sox, which helps give them the third-hardest schedule in the American League, according to ZiPS.
  • Injuries/recoveries since the pandemic began. The Yankees, for example, will have players like Giancarlo Stanton and James Paxton back from injury.

Still, when comparing a full season projection with the 60-game season, the Blue Jays’ playoff chances shot up 14.2 percent. Any Toronto fan should happily take that.

Because again, if we’re being honest, a trip to the playoffs in 2020 would be a bonus for the Blue Jays.

It’ll likely take 33-plus wins (based on Fangraphs’ projections) to get into the playoffs. Toronto’s best 60-game stretch last year was 28-32.

So the odds remain against them. But we’ve never had a season like this, and once the games begin, who knows what will happen?

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