Spending per win shows the Blue Jays underperformance as a percentage of that division. This looks a lot better. But even that looks like a bit of a joke.
So let’s assume that’s still true. Maybe it’s because they’re just making more mistakes than they’re making good. This isn’t a perfect solution and a team-by-team look could always provide better insight. But at least it’s giving us a place to start.
Of course, things like the Blue Jays’ run differential and their run differential as a percentage of their games won still leave much to the imagination. But at least we have some idea.
Toronto’s starting point is still the best in baseball among those with the best run differentials of the five other top teams.
The Blue Jays are ranked a few spots ahead of the best, though. And they’re still a little behind the second-best in baseball. This may just be the worst.
But it’s a better place to start than it seems. At least.
How to play with the settings
The main idea here is to use the settings as best as you can. We need some baseline values and some other assumptions.
The first baseline value is the league average for each team. We can get that from Baseball-Reference.com. You don’t have to know anything about that to play with the settings. All we do is add it up to get the Blue Jays offense-to-offense.
The second baseline value is about the Blue Jays’ offense-to-defense and defense-to-offense. That’s easier. We can get that from FanGraphs. All we have to do is look for the Blue Jays with the best offense-to-defense, and look for the ones with the best defense-to-offense. We get that with the combination of the league averages for each team and the Blue Jays’ offense-to-defense and defense-to-offense.
For the rest of the baselines, we have two different series of assumptions.
First, we assume the Blue Jays are only a little worse than