A Winning April

The Toronto Blue Jays had a winning April. That hasn’t happened in awhile.

To be exact, the Blue Jays haven’t had a winning April since 2012, when they went 12-11. They haven’t had as good a record as they had in 2018 since 2009, when they went 15-9. (The 2018 Blue Jays went 15-10.) And the last time that the Blue Jays had at least 16 wins by the end of April was 2001.

To be clear, I don’t think this speaks to the quality of the current team (although they do seem to be much better than past years — at least in the early goings). If anything, it shows how bad past Blue Jays teams in April have been.

Since I can not, for the life of me, figure out how to put a chart into articles (I used to be able to, but I can’t find the feature after an update), here’s a poorly organized list of the performance of Blue Jays teams of the past.

• 2018: 15-10; .600
• 2017: 8-17; 0.320
• 2016: 11-14; .440
• 2015: 11-12; .478
• 2014: 12-14; .462
• 2013: 10-17; .370
• 2012: 12-11; .522
• 2011: 13-14; .481
• 2010: 12-12; .500
• 2009: 15-9; .625

If the Blue Jays follow the trend of the past few years (winning at least 17 games in May, which they’ve done in both of the past two years), they’ll be well on their way to success.

The Blue Jays placed Randal Grichuk on the 10-day disabled list with a right knee sprain Monday, recalling Gift Ngoepe. As with the Kendrys Morales injury, this injury will probably help Toronto.

Grichuk is batting .106 this season in 25 games. and 66 at-bats. He’s only had seven hits and seven walks while striking out 24 times.

By comparison, the Blue Jays now have an infielder to replace Devon Travis and still have Carlos Ramirez in the bullpen. Teoscar Hernandez should get continued, if not more, playing time, while Lourdes Gurriel (without Travis) will surely play in more games.

The Canadian Press put out a story yesterday on Jerry Howarth and his retirement. My favourite tidbit of information: Before the internet, Howarth would head to the local library and would ask for 30 newspapers for the last 30 days.

“They would give them to me, truck them out to the table,” Howarth said. “I’d go through 30 sports sections for the previous month, take notes, I’d say thank you, and that was my preparation for the team we were playing that night in any city because there was no Internet.”