Blue Jays’ Player of the Week – Someone beat out Josh Donaldson

In contrast to last week, there’s a fairly clear player of the week this week (April 13-19). Before we get to him, let’s roll out the other candidates because otherwise this would be a pretty short article.

The bullpen, other than Todd Redmond and Brett Cecil, did pretty well overall. Roberto Osuna has continued his scoreless streak, Marco Estrada had two great outings and Liam Hendriks came throwing heat out of nowhere. Osuna tossed 5 scoreless innings with two walks and 2 hits against, Estrada struck out 5 in 4.1 scoreless and Hendriks K’d 5 batters in the 3 innings (two in a very high leverage situation) As good as they were, it’s hard for a reliever to have enough impact on games to be considered the team’s best—even for a week. A reliever would have to do something like what Chad Jenkins did in that 19 inning game last year.

Unfortunately not a single starter this week earned an honourable mention. It was an ugly 7 games for the rotation. Together they sported a 5.94 ERA and only got through 33.1 innings. I would really love for there to be a starting pitcher in the running for PoW next week.

The defensive standout again was obvious. One Kevin Andrew Pillar. His bat once again prevented him ranking higher here. He may not be the player of the week but he’s got play of the week honours down and a secure hold on play of the year so far.

"#THIS. Your friendly neighborhood @KPILLAR4. https://t.co/IxFmovHcdU— MLB (@MLB) April 16, 2015"

Danny Valencia appeared in three games this week and was fantastic in an itsy bitsy sample. 4/5, 2 doubles and a steal. Although, one 4/4 game isn’t enough to be the PoW—unless it was 4 home runs.

Russell Martin had a big week. Well, a big half week at least. He finally broke out with 2 home runs, a double, 3 walks and a .927 OPS. 

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Josh Donaldson had a great seven days at the plate posting a .379/.419/.724 with 3 homers and 7 RBIs.

Devon Travis takes the cake and PoW honours this week with a 1.143 OPS, 2 home runs, and 2 doubles—all of which he did while being pretty slick with the glove. He was very nearly the player of the week last week as well. Here’s hoping Devon Travis can continue to defy expectations in the weeks to come.

This week’s razzie was a bit of a tight race between Drew Hutchison’s ugly 4.2 innings with 10 walks/hits and four earned, Todd Redmond’s relief outing that got him DFA’d, Brett Cecil’s ugly 2 HR inning on the 17th or Edwin Encarnacion’s 3/26 week. We’ll give the dishonour by a hair to Cecil since those runs cost the Jays that game.

Next: Daniel Norris' Dead Arm