Dan Shulman

It's kind of hard to say...

you know, talk about playoff standings with 130 whatever games there are left.

But I think one of the best things the Blue Jays have going for them is 13 of the other, 13 of the 15 teams in the American League are in the exact same situation.

The only difference is for the Blue Jays, Orioles, and Red Sox, winning a division looks much, much tougher now than it did a month ago.

But I'm, you know, get in any way how you can get in, right?

And I think...

I don't think we should poopoo the fact that a lot of these teams are in the same boat whereas some years it might have taken 88 89 maybe it only takes 84 85 this year I don't know but you know one thing I think we could all agree on is a month from now it's not going to look like this right some of these teams are going to figure it out and the Blue Jays uh you know hope they're one of them Dan are you a little surprised the way the Jays have played defense this year yes absolutely um

I'm not really surprised with the offense because of the injuries.

And the crazy thing is they've scored more runs through 37 games this year than they did last year.

We forget how bad they were offensively at the beginning of last year.

pitching is about where I thought it would be but yes the defense has surprised me now some of it is you're missing some of your you know you miss Alejandro Kirk and you're missing one of the best defensive catchers in baseball but some of their great defensive players have not been quite great this year

You know, Varshow's range appears to be a little bit down, just looking at stat cast and stuff like that.

Ernie Clement has made a couple of errors that are very uncharacteristic of Ernie Clement.

Andres Jimenez, the advanced numbers don't like Jimenez this year at short.

I think he's been good.

I think he's been fine, good.

You know, maybe not electrifying like he is at second base.

The other thing, too, and I looked it up this morning as I dove back in on some stuff, so they've committed 25 errors.

nine of them are from their pitchers that's a lot yeah like that's that's 36 of your errors pitchers are not involved in 30 36 of the plays on the field um another five of them is from the catchers so um but yes big picture to your point they've got to clean that up because if you're scoring seven runs a game nobody even notices but when you're scoring three that becomes a very big thing

Yes, so I did a hit earlier on MLB Network, and one of the questions they asked me was specifically, how do you think Jeff Hoffman has handled the change in the role?