Jo-Jo Is Winless No More

Image courtesy of Daylife via Reuters Pictures

Was there anything better than seeing Jo-Jo Reyes’ happy face after finally getting his long sought after win? Nothing like a shaving cream pie to the face and a Gatorade shower to celebrate picking up the victory.

Reyes had been waiting over 2 years to finally shake his winless streak, and he did it very handily against the Cleveland Indians.

It was only fitting that it was a complete game victory, something that had eluded Jo-Jo Reyes his entire career until last night. Reyes picked up the first complete game victory by a Blue Jays pitcher this season, and the first since Shaun Marcum did it back on August 16th of last year against the Oakland A’s.

Joe Posnanski had a great article last week on how Reyes’ streak of 28 consecutive starts without a win was blown a little out of proportion. Jo-Jo didn’t lose his previous 28 starts, he just didn’t win them.

It has a lot more to do with the weight of the pitcher’s win statistic more than anything else. If Jo-Jo Reyes was pitching as poorly as his record would have you believe, the Blue Jays would have cast him aside long ago.

Reyes actually has the second lowest ERA and has the third most quality starts of the Blue Jays starters. So take away that piddly win-loss record, and Jo-Jo Reyes isn’t a spectacular starting pitcher, but he’s not that bad either.

He isn’t someone I’d hand the ball to in an ALDS game, however there’s nothing wrong with letting him go to work every fifth day and eat up some innings and hopefully build some interest from teams looking for starting pitching help.

I believe Alex Anthopoulos was hoping Jo-Jo Reyes peripheral statistics might be more impressive out of the gate to help build trade value, but hopefully the wise General Managers out there can see the value of Reyes as a back-end starter.

As meaningless as the “W” really is for a pitcher, I’m actually very happy Jo-Jo Reyes picked up the win. Because nobody wants to go down in the record books as the guy who was winless in 29 consecutive starts.

And just for old time’s sake, here are the highlights from Bruce Drennan’s infamous rant from last May when the Indians coughed up a game to the Blue Jays.