Stray Thoughts... - Bass-o-matic
On the Hound, Gausman's splitter, a dominant 'pen, Vlad's baserunning "error," prospect updates, Jackie Robinson Day, and much, much more!
Your paid support makes independent, thoughtful, grass-fed, naturally raised, free range coverage of Toronto Blue Jays baseball possible. Thank you.
On Wednesday afternoon, the Toronto Blue Jays beat the Atlanta Braves to take this week’s three-game series and head into their first scheduled off-day of the season holding a share of first place in the AL East (the Yankees would later swim ahead by a half game thanks to a win over the Royals). Currently the Jays sit at three games above .500 for the first time since last April 22nd.
That date is, of course, a very solid reminder that things can still go very, very badly from here. It is, after all, even earlier still this season. But, to be about as unscientific about it as possible, the vibes around the Jays at this moment feel different.
There are some obvious reasons for that, I think. For one, we’re all still living in the afterglow of the abyss-averting Vladimir Guerrero Jr. contract extension. No longer having to engage with the thought of a potential rebuild on the immediate horizon is, of course, massively uplifting.
Meanwhile, thanks almost entirely to Jeff Hoffman and Yimi García looking as good as anybody possibly could, the bullpen feels in much better hands than it did a year ago. The starters have looked good enough to win most nights, even if the odd blow-up—including five earned runs unfairly hung on Bowden Francis in Baltimore back on Saturday—means the numbers aren't quite showing it. Anthony Santander has more to give and is clearly a much better fit in the lineup than Justin Turner. Bo Bichette, Alejandro Kirk, and George Springer don’t look lost the way they did last April. The team hasn’t even had an at-bat yet from Daulton Varsho, and instead of having all-but-guaranteed playing time for guys like Kevin Kiermaier, IKF, and Daniel Vogelbach, they've been able to ride hot hands like Alan Roden or even Myles Straw and a weirdly impressive Tyler Heineman.
I’ll admit that the offence still feels light, and that the potential for a strings of ugly starts from this rotation isn’t nonexistent (especially with Max Scherzer on the shelf), but it simply feels like a roster that ought to be able to function just a little better—that has a filthier bullpen, a rotation in good enough shape to probably weather the storms that will inevitably arise, a lineup with meaningfully more pop, and a defence that’s gained as much at second base as it has lost by tilting more toward offence in the corner outfield spots.
Maybe I’ll look back in a couple months and find this optimism hilariously naive. And undoubtedly optimism is a very easy thing to tap into after watching Chris Bassitt somehow strike out 10 Barves over five innings to take his MLB-best ERA down to 0.77, with a best-in-baseball 1.01 FIP and 1.3 fWAR to go along with it. But I think there's more to this still, actually.
Last year’s 13-10 Jays were already falling behind the Orioles and Yankees, who were 2.5 and 2.0 games ahead respectively at that point. Cleveland had a better record than the Jays did. Boston, Detroit, and Kansas City were all even with them at 13-10. And with a -11 run differential, the Jays were just ninth in the American League by that metric. Right now they're only at +4, but that ranks fourth. By winning percentage they’re third.
Objectively, none of that necessarily makes this a better team or situation. For one thing, when they were 13-10 last year their likelihood of making the playoffs, according to FanGraphs, was 57.9%. Right now that number sits at just 49.2%. But, for another thing, so what?
I don’t want to be the kind of hack who’d write something like “perception is reality,” but… I currently perceive things with this team to be better than they were last year, and so that’s the reality I’m choosing to live in. At least until a louder reality comes along to tell me otherwise. They’ve staved off the bad vibes thus far, and have even built a tiny cushion for themselves under difficult circumstances. They’re both doing the bare minimum of what was required, yet somehow also exceeding expectations. That’s the sweet spot, baby.
Time for some stray thoughts…
“Kick his ass, C-Bass!”
I don’t even know what to say about the performances we’ve seen from Chris Bassitt so far this season beyond the mind-bending statistics I quoted in the section above.
Not only is Bassitt a difficult guy to dissect at the best of times, because of all the different pitches he throws, he doesn’t appear to be doing a ton differently than we’re used to. The velocity is a touch down, the batted ball numbers are where you'd expect, there’s nothing crazy different to see in his pitch mix (though his splitter usage to LHB has more than doubled up to 16%), and yet he’s pitching as well as anybody in baseball right now, and currently sitting on a career high for swinging strike rate, and career lows for contact rate and contact rate within the zone.
What gives?
Well, the biggest difference that I can see is this:
As the chart says, that’s Bassitt’s horizontal release point over the years, and suddenly it seems he’s made a significant move toward the third base side of the rubber. We can see it as well in the images below, though it’s a little subtle and the angles aren’t quite the same.
On the left we see Bassitt at the point of release during the first inning of his 2024 home debut against the Mariners, and on the right we have him in the first inning on Wednesday. Note, specifically, how much of the rubber remains to the third base side of his foot in the earlier image compared to the newer one.
Could a change as innocuous-looking as this have really unlocked something here? Right-handed batters have slashed just .190/.227/.190 against him so far (.194 wOBA), which could indeed be because they're having more trouble than usual at picking up the ball out of his hand. But… I mean, no… it’s probably not true that he was always this one tweak away from gaining more than ten percentage points on his strikeout rate, or being able to suddenly strand 92% of baserunners despite having a career rate of 76%.
But that’s fine!
His feel for the zone has seemed better than usual, all his pitches seem to be working, and for the time being it’s on the league to catch up. What he’s doing doesn’t have to be some kind of a long-lasting new normal to be good. And, folks, you don’t need me to tell you that Bassitt’s been good.
Has Gausman’s best pitch split for good?
Kevin Gausman put together a nice little line on Tuesday, racking up six strikeouts to zero walks, and allowing just two runs on six hits over six innings of work. But the 2.49 ERA he’s sporting through four starts is doing a nice job of masking the fact that he simply doesn't look like himself. Or, at least, the version of himself that we became accustomed to in his first two years in Toronto—and that we all hoped we’d see again.
To wit:
As the chart above shows, the dip in the quality of his splitter isn’t exactly new. The pitch wasn’t the same last year either, and his strikeout rate—21%, down from 31% in 2023—and overall production suffered for it.
We can also see in Gausman’s Statcast data that the pitch has lost a couple inches of vertical break from 2022 and ‘23, and that it is moving even more toward the third base side than ever this year. So far that’s led to him struggling to locate the splitter where it can be most effective as a swing-and-miss offering—something he did masterfully two years ago. Assuming that’s even what he’s trying to do.
Gausman appears to at least understand that the pitch isn’t what it once was, as he’s no longer using it nearly as much in the spots where you’d expect. In 2023, right-handed batters with two strikes against them saw the splitter 57% of the time, whereas this season that rate is down to just 40%. It’s not even his most-used two-strike pitched against RHB right now, something it has been in every season for him since 2019.
There are other outlier numbers of interest here, too. He’s pounding the zone more—his splitter, in particular, is catching the zone 50% of the time, despite having rates below 30% in each of the past two years. He’s generating far more first-pitch strikes, batters are swinging much more often at what he’s offering overall, and yet a ton more of those are turning into flyballs, largely of the harmless variety—which surely is at least part of the reason for the low BABIP.
That last bit stands out most to me, as it’s a deepening of a trend we saw last year. Throughout his career he has always tilted toward getting balls on the ground versus in the air (41.8% to 36.7%), but in 2024 those numbers basically reversed. Now, so far this year, his fly ball rate is at an astronomical 54.4%—third highest among qualified starters.
It’s not just one pitch that is inducing this trend, either. Especially against right-handers, as we see below.
And if we look at his overall pitch map to right-handers from this year and compare it to 2023, we start to see why guys are getting under the ball so much more often than they used to.
The question, of course, is whether this adjustment is sustainable—or if it’s meant to be a permanent adjustment at all. It certainly looks to me like he’s leaning into it. His HR/FB rate of 10.8% means that he hasn’t been getting torched by the long ball, which is obviously good. The results have been there, more or less. But given how hard opponents have been hitting the ball, it's difficult not to worry a little bit going forward.
Credit to him for battling as effectively as he has, but it sure would be nice to see that money pitch again, wouldn’t it?
Jackie L’s
Tuesday was MLB’s annual Jackie Robinson Day celebration, marking the anniversary of when one of the greatest players in the history of baseball began his MLB career by breaking the “colour barrier”—the league’s decades-long self-imposed racist ban on non-white players—in April 1947. Robinson was a hero, an icon, a legendary ballplayer thrown into impossible circumstances who—by the grace of his own humility, restraint, and incredible on-field talent—transcended the sport and forged a towering figure in the global fight for social justice and against white supremacy. He was also a Black man in a deeply racist country.
There is no way to disentangle that last fact from his story, nor should anyone ever want to. But don’t tell that to the Quislings at MLB, who not only failed to meet the moment this week, with respect to Robinson Day, they didn’t even try.
As pointed out by Tom Moore, executive sports editor of the Southern California News Group (which includes the Orange County Register, the Los Angeles Daily News, and the San Diego Union Tribune), MLB removed in their 2025 Robinson Day press release references to race, racism, diversity, and Robinson’s Blackness that existed in the 2024 version. The league also stood by as teams like Jackie’s own Dodgers—who a week before trying to boost their brand off the back of his legacy had spent an afternoon visiting the Trump White House in recognition of their World Series title last fall—toned down any messaging about the celebration that might catch the ire of the very loud and very pathetic “anti-woke,” “anti-DEI,” “too chickenshit to just call themselves the bigots that they are so they have to dress their views up as opposition to scary overreach by people with not even a fraction of the power they have,” “dickless meat-head crybaby” crowd.
Of course, just last month, a Trump executive order saw the accomplishments of women and minorities scrubbed from government websites, including a Department of Defense one on Robinson and his military service—since restored, thanks largely to the efforts of ESPN reporter Jeff Passan, while the league sat conspicuously silent. Also last month, Craig Calcaterra reported that, in an act of shameless cowardice, MLB had quietly “altered what was once its ‘Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion’ webpage, removing that title, and scrubbing the word ‘diversity’ from it,” among other related scrubbings.
When promoting his must-read article on the subject this week, Yahoo’s Jake Mintz wrote that “MLB’s unwillingness to connect the larger lessons of Jackie’s life to the current moment is a disappointing missed opportunity.” I think that’s probably too kind.
Quickly…
• Let’s go back to Bassitt for a second, as MLB Network’s Yonder Alonso has some high praise for the early-season ace of the Jays’ staff, and breaks down what it’s like to face him as a right-handed hitter. (Clip via MLB Network)
• I can’t say I’m the biggest Jomboy fan in the world, but credit to him for diving deep on Vlad’s supposed baserunning error from back in the Orioles series, and showing that he was indeed erroneously called out for leaving first base too early when tagging up on a fly out. The Jays didn’t have the angles to prove it, so they’re absolved for not challenging the play. Not absolved? The home plate ump who made the call from a mile away! (Clip via Jomboy)
• Speaking of the Baltimore series, is there hypocrisy in complaining about a blatantly brutal night of umpiring back in Boston last week, but on the other hand rushing to defend Alejandro Kirk’s ability to steal strikes any time opposing fans do the same? Probably, yeah. But it’s the good kind of hypocrisy, so I’ll allow it.
• And still with the Orioles for a second, because I desperately need to shake the hand of whoever it was on their medical staff that recommended they back out of Jeff Hoffman’s deal. I promise I won’t laugh. I might blow a kiss in their direction, though.
• Great Hoffman-related stuff over at Sportsnet from my Blue Jays Happy Hour cohost, Nick Ashbourne, as he looks at the changes Hoffman has made since coming over to the Jays that have somehow made him even better than before. (Would you believe it involves a splitter?)
• Elsewhere at Sportsnet, Shi Davidi catches up with prospect Arjun Nimmala, who is having a great start to his season (.326/.383/.558 through 10 games) despite being more than three years younger than his average Northwest League opponent. Meanwhile, David Singh talks to Myles Straw—a guy a whole lot of us owe an apology to, myself very much included—about his hot start and being able to find the game fun again after the grind that was his final year in the Guardians organization.
• More intriguing prospect stuff!
• Reminders that the Jays’ bullpen success so far has not entirely been about Hoffman and García:
• In terms of fWAR, the Jays’ bullpen as a unit has already been 3.3 wins better than the club’s 2024 ‘pen (0.8 WAR vs. -2.5 WAR).
• Home runs: They’re fun and important!
• Another Apple TV+ game on Friday? Woof.
• Tired: Asking why all the Ross Atkins haters have gotten so quiet lately. Wired: Asking why all the Matt Hague lovers have gotten so quiet lately.
• I’m not about to scold anyone for being unprofessional, though it obviously was, but I don’t think asking a woman for her number on live TV because what you really crave is the attention and approval of men is the flex you think it is, bro.
• This kinda feels like a threat to the worst kinds of Jays fans imaginable, and I am extremely here for it.
• Lastly, if you’re looking for something to do in Toronto tonight, the boys from the Walkoff have you covered. (Ticket link here.)
• OK, that’s it for this one! Let the good times roll!…
Bluesky ⚾ Podcast ⚾ YouTube ⚾ Twitter ⚾ Facebook
⚾ Want to support without going through Substack? You could always send cash to stoeten@gmail.com on Paypal or via Interac e-Transfer. I assure you I won’t say no. ⚾
I think what I like the most about baseball is its unpredictability. Yeah yeah short sample sizes, but I love the fact that Straw and Heineman are doing so well and find it fascinating that our top 3 hitters have only a few home runs combined. I love the fact that Bassit is nails and Roden exudes confidence. Regardless, I can't help feeling that if there's ever a time to take advantage of an unstable AL East, this is the year. Let's hope for good health from our starters and bullpen.
Senility may be hitting early, but I was sure that the issue with Hoffman’s medicals was more to do with the Braves and O’s wanting to sign him as a starter. Didn’t the O’s then try to sign him anyway but as a reliever on a similar deal to what the Jays got him for?