FanGraphs projects Blue Jays on playoff bubble, fourth in AL East

If you were hoping that 2024 would be a season where the Toronto Blue Jays cruise to an American League East crown this year, it doesn’t seem like that will be the case.

With the franchise having made the playoffs in three of the last four seasons, expectations are sky-high once again for the team to be among the World Series contenders. But if the team is looking to bring home its first AL East title since 2015, well, they’ve got their work cut out for them.

According to popular baseball stats website FanGraphs, the Blue Jays are projected to finish fourth in an ultra-competitive AL East, finishing with 85 wins. FanGraphs’ projection puts Toronto just three wins behind the New York Yankees, projected to finish with 88 wins, one win behind the 86 projected wins of the Tampa Bay Rays, and tied on wins with the Baltimore Orioles, though having a differential of five fewer runs over the course of the season.

Here’s how the full FanGraphs projections for the American League look, with the AL East teams in bold.

FanGraphs.com

Fourth in the strong AL East is somewhere the Blue Jays know all too well in their recent memory, having most recently occupied that spot in 2021, when they missed out on a postseason berth by just one game after a 91-win season.

Under this current projection, the Jays would finish fifth in the American League by record. But, they’d still miss out on the playoffs due to the final postseason spots to projected AL Central champions in the Minnesota Twins, the team that swept them in the 2023 Wild Card round.

Playing their last spring training game of 2024 on Monday afternoon against the Pittsburgh Pirates, the Blue Jays are just two days away from their 2024 regular season opener on Thursday against the Tampa Bay Rays.

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