I used to think the trading deadline was overrated. Then the 2015 Toronto Blue Jays came along.
Whatever we thought of the Blue Jays before July 29, the day Troy Tulowitzki cleared customs, it's apparently as irrelevant now as whatever we used to think of Duke before Coach K pulled into beautiful downtown Durham, North Carolina.
Just contemplate for a moment what's transpired in Toronto since the moment the Blue Jays first wrote Tulowitzki's name on their lineup card, back on July 29:? In the 32 games since Tulo's debut, they've gone 26-6. Yup, 26 wins and six losses. And how many times before that, in the history of their franchise, had they ever gone 26-6 over any 32-game stretch of any season? That would be never. Of course.
? They've scored a ridiculous 200 runs in those 32 games. That's the most in baseball. They allowed just 97 runs. That's the fewest in baseball. OK, that'll work.
? So if you're subtracting along at home, you know that translates to a plus-103 run differential. Plus-103. In basically a little over a month. By a team that has only had a plus-103 run differential for a whole season once since Joe Carter's fabled 1993 home run fell to earth. (That was in 2008, when the Jays went plus-104.) Crazy.
"It just seemed like once Tulo showed up," says general manager Alex Anthopoulos, "a switch got flipped. And it energized everybody."
But of course, Tulo was just the beginning of Anthopoulos' entertaining pre-deadline wheel-and-deal-athon. David Price, Mark Lowe and Ben Revere were coming right up. LaTroy Hawkins was part of the Tulowitzki package. And whatever it was they each brought to the dance floor, the beat hasn't been the same since.
"You look at our team before, we had some marquee guys," says manager John Gibbons. "I'm talking about [Josh] Donaldson, [Jose] Bautista, [Edwin] Encarnacion. We had some of the better players in baseball, but we just kind of sputtered along. But then you add two guys like Price and Tulo, and guys say: `Wow. Boom.' We weren't an easy team to face to begin with. But now you add Tulo to the everyday lineup, and you put Price on the mound, and son of a b----. That's a lot of All-Star players."
And as you may have detected, having a lot of All-Star players hanging around is always helpful. I'm pretty sure Miller Huggins first caught onto that. But are we certain that's all that the Blue Jays' trade-deadline bonanza taught us? I'm not.
This team seems to be living proof that what goes on at the deadline can sometimes turn out to be more powerful than the names added to the lineup card or the holes that get filled.
There's also a certain psychology involved. There's emotion involved. There are energizing forces involved -- that can sweep up players, fans and an entire franchise. And this feels like one of those cases where the combination of all of those elements has elevated the play of a team that already had the names, the stars, the talent level and the run differential to make a run at greatness.
But you don't even have to take our word for it. Listen to how one of this team's most important players (and personalities), Jose Bautista, describes the transformation of the Blue Jays since the deadline, and see what you think.
