The Blue Jays are great hitters individually, as indicated by player stats like OPS+. However, they aren’t scoring enough runs, and lots of pressure is being put on the pitching staff to give up as few runs as possible – or else the Jays don’t have a chance to win games.

I’ve heard people say the Jays’ offence this year is feast or famine, but personally I can’t recall too many feasts. So, I dug into the numbers with a pretty simple analysis.

Looking at all MLB games played this season prior to today, teams have a 35% win probability when they score 3 runs, 47% when they score 4 runs, and 67% when they score 5 runs.

So far this season, the Jays have scored 5 or more runs in 42% of their games, putting them 18th in the MLB. (LAD is 1st with 65%; ATL 2nd with 59%; then comes ARI, TEX, HOU; …; BAL, TBR, and BOS are 8th to 10th with ~51%.) By average runs scored per game, the Jays are 16th with 4.45.

I arbitrarily defined a feast as 7 or more runs in a game and a famine as 2 or fewer runs in a game. The Blue Jays are 10th best in ‘famines,’ having scored 2 or fewer runs in only 26% of their games. The more eyebrow-raising number is their ‘feast ranking.’ The Jays are 28th in at times they’ve score 7 runs or more, ahead of only KCR and MIA. Counting both famines and feasts as an ‘extreme runs scores’, the Blue Jays have the 3rd fewest extreme run scores in the MLB.

TL;DR/ Summary: The Blue Jays’ runs per game don’t suggest a feast or famine pattern as much as they do just a low average number of runs per game – compared to the expectations for this year and our hitters’ individual numbers. That said, my analysis was simple, and changes to the cutpoints chosen might lead to different results. All data from baseball-reference.com, obtained via the baseballr package.