Welcome to Rates and barrels presented by Tops Checkout Tops Project Project 70, celebrating 70 years of Topps baseball cards.

Derek Van Riper, Enoceris here with you on this Friday. On this episode, we'll discuss the recently surging Blue Jays.

They are right back into the thick of the wild card race. 8-0 so far in September. We'll dig into them and discuss which potential wildcard team is the one we'd least want to face if we were a team already in an LDS sort of position.

We're going to take a look at what's on Eno's dashboard, something that carried over from the last episode.

So we get a sense for how Eno's mind works and what kind of lens he's looking at.

It doesn't work.

Well, the successes and the failures.

Both are important.

You can learn more from those failures, so it's important to dig into those.

I had a few follow-up questions about Hall of Famers, and it kind of slides into this team grades versus Hall of Fame thing and a few extended thoughts there. So we'll get to that a bit later in the show as well. But really the Blue Jays are where I wanted to start today. I even found my hats, which is great news. If you were listening last week and wondering why I've been wearing the Padres hat so much, well, I've found all my hats. So that's a huge victory for me personally. But a lot of victories for the Jays lately, including a four game sweep over the Yankees this week. So then I was sitting at a 51.9% chance of making the playoffs. They were down at 8%. I want to say two weeks ago. So definitely kind of where the A's and Mariners have been living in the AL for most of that time.

This is a good team, though, because the J is their first in the league in home runs,

217 home runs this year.

They're second in WRC plus, and not surprisingly, they're second in K percentage too.

So they have the look of an Astros sort of offense.

And they could have a healthier George Springer back in the fold come playoff time as well,

which has been the case for only about 60 games so far this season.

So I think the questions people have about the Js will continue to point back to the pitching.

Is the pitching good enough?

And I'm leaning, yeah.

I mean, you talked about this when we were looking at just stuff in command numbers for staffs,

I think a couple weeks ago with bullpens in particular.

They're good there, but they're also good in the rotation.

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