Three Panicked MLB Teams

It is officially May, and that means that the baseball season is now a month old. With a 162-game schedule, it can be challenging to decipher a bad stretch from a bad team, but I am going to try. After, roughly, a 25-game sample size, here are three teams that have been massive disappointments in 2017.

Toronto Blue Jays ... The Blue Jays currently sit in the cellar of the AL East with a record of 8-17. Yes, the calendar just turned to May, but they are 8 full games out of first place. That is a hell of a hole in which Toronto finds themselves. What may be even more troublesome for Canada's team are the struggles that Jose Bautista is enduring. He is currently batting just .178 with 30 strikeouts and just 16 walks. Looking at his baseball reference page, Bautista's strikeout-to-walk ratio for his career is roughly 1.25, this season it is nearly 2. That is not an encouraging trend for the 36-year-old slugger or the Blue Jays. A team that was picked by many to make the playoffs have a steep hill to climb.

New York Mets .... The news for the Mets just keeps getting worse. Today, it was announced that Noah Syndergaard tore his right lat muscle. This comes after Syndergaard forcefully denied an MRI last week. He joins Yoenis Cespedes, Lucas Duda, Stephen Matz, Wilmer Flores, and David Wright as Mets currently on the DL. Terry Collins needs to keep this team afloat. If he can't manage to do so, he might be run out of town. This team should be competing for a World Series with all of the talent they have at their disposal, in particular of their pitching staff. Instead, they find themselves as the bottom-feeders in one of the least competitive divisions in baseball.

San Francisco Giants ....... How much clemency does a World Series buy a team? How about 3 World Series? We will find out the answer to this question this season. Bruce Bochy and company have lived off of their past success (3 World Series titles in 5 seasons), but are struggling yet again. They are 9-17 and 7 games out of first in the NL West. Most alarming is that their ace, Madison Bumgarner, will be out for an extended period of time after he was involved in an accident while riding his dirt bike. This season has been a disaster for the Giants thus far, and it appears as though it will only get worse.