The Blue Jays return to the post-season after a 21 year drought (20 if you don’t count 1994). They hold home team advantage over a Texas team that won back-to-back AL Pennants in 2010 and 2011.

The Blue Jays offense is the best in the American League. They are 0.78 runs per game ahead of the second place team, the Yankees. That gap is bigger than the Yankees lead over the 14th place Rays, .74 runs per game. The Blue Jay get there with a multifaceted offense. They hit for average, get on base with walks, hit for power, and are even high percentage base stealers. Unlike the classic high percentage Moneyball stealing teams, the Jays actually run fairly often, attempting 111 stolen bases.

This type of offense is difficult to shut down. In a pitching duel, they can beat you with a couple of home runs. A pitcher who keeps the ball in the park might give up too many walks. A control artist has his strikes turned into hits. There are simply no weaknesses to exploit.

The Rangers offense is a bit more interesting, in that it seems to be greater than the sum of it’s parts. Texas ranks third in the league in runs per game, but none of the components of offense ranks that high. It might just be that the other components are so spread out over the league and being competent at all of them causes the run ranking to be high. It could also be situational. Base situations don’t show much, except that the team OBP goes way up with men on base, so they do tend to keep rallies going. The Rangers were very good with a man on third and less than two out. In that situation they produced a .336/.362/.488 slash line, with 54 sacrifice flies. (Toronto hit .371/.386/.621 in that situation. Show offs.)

The Rangers offense may also be a bit underrated by these numbers. Adrian Beltra and Shin-Soo Choo played much better in the second half of the season compared to the first half.

The Blue Jays are almost half a run better than the Rangers on the pitching and defense side of the equation as well. That is almost entirely due to two factors, walks and defense. The Jays walk the fewest batters in the league, the Rangers the most. Neither team strikes out that many batters, but the Blue Jays cover the weakness by being the best at converting balls in play into outs.

The pitching numbers also somewhat underestimate the Blue Jays staff. David Price was only there for 1/3 of a season, and Marcus Stroman made just four starts. If the Blue Jays were to go the full 19 games in the post-season, those two would likely start 11 of those contests. The Rangers added Cole Hamels, which should make them a little less likely to walk batters in the post-season.

Toronto took four of six games from the Rangers in the regular season, outscoring them by the Fibonacci sequence 34-21. I estimate that Toronto should have about a 65% chance to win the ALDS.