The Blue Jays won just 73 games last season, finishing fourth in a division where the top three teams all reached 90 victories. It's been 13 years since any team claimed an AL East flag with fewer than 95 wins. Thus, Toronto's front office entered the offseason knowing that it wouldn't be enough to make only small changes at the margins.

With this fact in mind, general manager Alex Anthopoulos has spent the past three months overhauling and upgrading the Jays' roster, completing a transformation that would be difficult to execute in, say, a 10-team dynasty league. Toronto completed a 12-player deal with the Marlins in November — adding Jose Reyes, Josh Johnson, Mark Buehrle and Emilio Bonifacio — then pulled off a seven-player trade with the Mets in December, picking up Cy Young winner RA Dickey. They acquired John Buck in one deal, then flipped him in another. Along the way, the Jays also signed PED offender Melky Cabrera to a relatively modest make-good contract (two years, $16 million). This team traded its manager, too, which isn't the most common occurrence.

Toronto has added tens of millions of dollars in salary in a short period of time, substantially improving the big league roster at the expense of the farm system. (Prospects Travis d'Arnaud and Noah Snydergaard were shipped to New York, Jake Marisnick, Adeiny Hechavarria and Justin Nicolino to Miami). Without question, the Jays are going to be a whole lot better in 2013. It's no stretch to imagine this team in the postseason — which, again, will require something like a 20-win improvement. Toronto has depth and talent in the rotation, plus plenty of speed and power in the lineup.

In most fantasy drafts, the early rounds will be full of Jays. Let's review...

Q: How 'bout we begin with the new additions to the starting rotation? The transition from the NL East to the AL East can't be easy, right?

A: Nope, we don't generally expect such moves to be kind to pitchers, fantasy-wise. But we also need to be careful not to overstate the impact of these switches. Last season, the league-average ERA in the NL was 3.95, WHIP was 1.31 and BAA was .254. In the AL, the numbers were 4.08, 1.31 and .255. So the degree of difficulty goes up for Dickey, Johnson and Buehrle, but not by orders of magnitude.

Rogers Centre has been a hitter-friendly park over the past three years, we should note, and it's generally a nice power environment (better for right-handers). Marlins Park, by comparison, was a tough place to clear the fences last season, ranking 26th in HR park factor. There's little question that Johnson and Buehrle will find themselves in a more challenging home environment. Still, for me, the principal concern with Johnson is health, not home. He has a history of elbow and shoulder issues, his velocity is in multi-year decline, and his strikeout-rate is trending the wrong way. He's also coming off a perfectly ordinary season in Miami (3.81 ERA, 7.8 K/9). There's no obvious reason to jump on him in mixed league drafts until the mid-to-late rounds.

View photos

Buehrle is ... well, he's Buehrle. He spent a dozen years in the AL (in a hitter-friendly park), so he knows what's coming. Buehrle will pile up innings — he's thrown 200-plus in 12 straight seasons — but he won't pile up Ks. In mixed leagues, you're not drafting him. He's a spot-starter for fantasy purposes, a guy that streamers will add and drop all season long. He's low-risk, low-reward.

Dickey is clearly the most interesting new name in Toronto's rotation, and perhaps the trickiest to project. You'll go broke betting on players to repeat career years, particularly at age 38. But Dickey was so good last season — 20 W, 230 Ks, 2.73 ERA, 1.05 WHIP — that he can take a backward step (or two), yet still be a solid fantasy asset. We also shouldn't fret so much about mileage and age with knuckleball specialists. It's tough to find comps for a guy like Dickey, because not only does he have a non-traditional arsenal, but he's actually something of an oddball within the community of knuckleballers. The guy varies speed significantly on his signature pitch, hitting every number on the radar between 67 and 83. He's different from Tim Wakefield, who threw the knuckler with consistently lower velocity (mid-60s) while mixing in the occasional low-70s fastball.

Story continues