The M’s head to Toronto to take on the surprisingly decent Blue Jays, who used a solid off-season to retool and are hanging around at 19-16. The Jays offense has some pop, but not much else; they’re hitting .237/.315/.427, which works out to dead-on league average. Unfortunately for Toronto, they’ve paired that with poor defense, and thus their position players rank 21st by Fangraphs’ WAR.
If you think it’s a bit early for defensive stats like UZR, well, right. But just using defensive efficiency, they’ve been among the league’s worst teams at turning batted balls into outs. One of the noticeable trends in baseball the past few years has been an increase in league-wide BABIP, a finding that’s hard to square with the fact that more and more teams are using data to shift their defense into better/newfangled arrangements.