When the Blue Jays won their first World Series in 1992, they did so with the strongest and deepest bullpen in all of baseball.
The deepest bullpen in Jays history.
They had Tom Henke closing and Duane Ward setting him up. They had starters such as Jimmy Key, David Wells and Todd Stottlemyre available if needed. And for depth, they had the rookie Mike Timlin and the submariner Mark Eichhorn.
You needed all that back then to beat an Atlanta Braves team with Tom Glavine, John Smoltz and Steve Avery, two of them in the Hall of Fame, the other with Hall of Fame-like talents in their starting rotation.
When the Blue Jays won their second World Series in 1993, they were powered by WAMCO – a batting order that had the top three hitters in the American League for the first and only time with the Jays and started most nights with Devon White, Roberto Alomar, Paul Molitor, Joe Carter and John Olerud as the first five batters in their lineup.
You needed that kind of diverse offence to deal with the power-hitting Philadelphia Phillies, who scored 36 runs in six World Series games against the Jays. Toronto scored 45 in the Series, including eight in the walk-off win in Game 6 at what was then called SkyDome.
Jays president Mark Shapiro often talks about building a World Series champion. That’s his goal. He says it with a straight face. He says it, words surrounded with just the right verbs and adjectives. He says that and the corporate fools believe his verbiage.
The Blue Jays have been alive for 48 seasons and have only been to the World Series twice. It’s a tough place to get to.
Maybe they should have gone in 1985 and maybe they should have gone 30 years later in 2015, but both times the Kansas City Royals knew better and played better.
Twice in 48 years the Jays have celebrated victory. Four times in 48 years they had a shot. The other 44 years, the last eight with Shapiro as team president — nine if you count the team he inherited in 2016 — the Blue Jays haven’t been good enough to be close.
And this was a dreadful baseball season in Southern Ontario, which followed a dreadful playoff against the Twins and a rather dreadful off-season of apparent re-tooling.
In the post-2016 Shapiro era, the Jays have been a post-season wild-card team three times.
This run by Shapiro makes Brendan Shanahan look like Sam Pollock by comparison. Shanahan’s Maple Leafs have won 24 games over his term of office and everyone screams about it. The Jays haven’t won a single playoff game since 2016 with Shapiro and general manager Ross Atkins in charge.
But they do have a nice stadium. So there is that.
Big picture, all you have to do is take stock of the only championship teams in Blue Jays history, different as they may have been, view the talent up and down those lineups, to realize just how far away the Jays are from being either contender or World Series champion right now.
They’re the fifth-best team in the American League East today and there are no signs of any of the teams ahead of them getting worse.
Who might have started for those Blue Jays teams in 1992 and 1993 among today’s Jays? Maybe Vladimir Guerrero Jr., but in every other starting position, other than a healthy, hitting Bo Bichette, there are no contenders for any spot.
That bullpen of Henke, Ward, Timlin, and starters pushed out of the rotation, threw 17-plus World Series innings in ‘92, giving up one earned run. That’s what championship teams do when needed. They pitch to an earned run average under 1. They dominate.
The current Shapiro-Atkins bullpen ranks 14th in the American League. If not for the historically pathetic Chicago White Sox, they’d be last.
Against Minnesota a year ago in that short wild-card series, the team that Shapiro and Atkins promised would hit, didn’t. The offensive team of ’93, got two World Series home runs from Joe Carter, including the famous one, two from series MVP Molitor, two doubles each from Alomar and Rickey Henderson and an incredible playoff for the second straight year from Devon White, who hit two triples and three doubles against Philadelphia.
There is nothing about this year’s Blue Jays team that looks World Series-like except for maybe Guerrero’s second half of the season. Otherwise it’s just pretend stuff and nonsense talk from a specialist like Shapiro, who talks a better game than his Blue Jays play.
By comparison, Daulton Varsho is a top-flight outfielder, just not in the class of White. Few in baseball history have been. White had a World Series OPS of 1.001 in ’93 and the legendary catch in ’92. Varsho’s career OPS is a convenience store. It’s .711.
He’s an eighth or ninth batter in today’s world. White, never fit to be a leadoff man, was near perfect in those World Series years.
You go up and down the Blue Jays lineup and search for hope, and maybe that’s all you find. They have some veteran starting pitching of quality. They have Guerrero. They have Bichette and whoever he may be. And then what?
No bullpen. No WAMCO. No Pat Gillick in charge. Nothing around here that resembles ’92 or ’93.
We can’t forget those great Blue Jays teams. They are a stark reminder of what used to be and what isn’t anymore.
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