Anatomy of an eighth inning rally, plus: Springer is hurt (as we all knew), and Ross Atkins spoke about it
The Blue Jays needed that, didn’t they? A comeback win and some genuine fun after a couple of real dogs out in Oakland and a day of less-than-ideal news. Let’s go talk about it.
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Jays games sure are better when they rally to win, huh? Here’s some three up, three down…
▲ That eighth inning
Let’s go over this whole beautiful mess of a half inning closely, shall we?
• Reese McGuire walks (Jonathan Davis in to pinch run)
Back on Monday, the Jays were reminded why it’s never a good idea to issue a lead-off walk to the number nine hitter, after Steven Matz’s free pass to Tony Kemp came back to bite him thanks to a two-run Ramón Laureano home run that put his team up 5-3. On Wednesday, the A’s returned the favour when, up 3-2 to start the eighth, Lou “obviously you’re not a golfer” Trevino walked light-hitting catcher Reese McGuire.
An auspicious start.
• Marcus Semien singles to left (Davis to second)
Semien’s start to his Blue Jays career isn’t exactly going to be confused for his MVP-calibre 2019 just yet, but when the Jays arrived in Boston two weeks ago he was sporting a ..182/.247/.364 line, which since then has steadily risen to .232/.310/.411. He's played just 29 games for the Jays so far, and went hitless in nine of his first 17, but has been held hitless just once in his last 12. You feel like he's starting to get locked in, and though he's not quite there just yet, it definitely feels like the best is yet to come.
• Bo Bichette grounds to second: fielder's choice (Davis to third, Bichette to first, Semien out at second)
Bichette's sprint speed may "only" be in the 86th percentile in MLB so far this season, but he used every ounce of his ability to beat this one out and avoid the double play. He did the same thing an inning later, and may have been going even faster there.
• Wild pitch (Davis scores, Bichette to second)(TOR 3 - OAK 3)
Foul territory in Oakland’s former football stadium is excessively large, and all three of the Blue Jays on the field understood this well when Trivino threw one through Austin Allen’s legs and all the way to the backstop.
• Vladimir Guerrero Jr. intentionally walks
A tie game, one out, a runner suddenly in scoring position, and one of the game’s best hitters at the plate already up 2-1 in the count? Yeah, that’s a free pass. What a world!
• Bichette steals third
A superb bit of heads-up base running from a young player who has been looking more and more comfortable lately, and who in this one showed off not just his head, not just his feet, but his bat and his arm, too.
Easy to forget that this was only his 104th game in the majors.
• Teoscarnandez singles to left (Bichette scores, Guerrero Jr. to second)(TOR 4 - OAK 3)
I have no idea how Teoscar Hernández came back from 10 days on the COVID list and ended up not only looking like he hadn’t missed a beat, but looking significantly better than he’d been before. But I’ll certainly take it.
Lineup protection isn’t nearly as important a thing as we were told growing up, I don’t think. But it still can be important, and never more so than when you have a hitter as able to put the fear into pitchers as Vladdy is right now. Teoscar seeing the ball well is great news.
• Randal Grichuk singles to left (Guerrero scores, Hernández to third)(TOR 5 - OAK 3)
My new podcast cohost, Nick Ashbourne, just wrote about Grichuk in a great piece for Sportsnet, where he ooks at what actually might, finally, be sustainable changes for the the Jays’ oft-maligned outfielder.
“It appears that Grichuk has cut down on his swing a bit in order to make more contact, and sacrificed some power to do it,” he writes, after presenting a bounty of evidence to make his case. “However, the gain looks to be more profound than the loss, and the 29-year-old looks better at the plate than he has since his scorching finish to 2018.”
A single in this situation was all the Jays needed, and he pulled it off.
• Pitching change: Adam Kolarek replaces Lou Trivino
A tough lefty who has been struggling so far this season comes in to face a struggling lefty on the offensive side.
• Cavan Biggio sac bunt: fielder’s choice (Hernández scores, Grichuk to second, Biggio to first)(TOR 6 - OAK 3)
Safety squeeze! A great call by Charlie Montoyo, great execution from Biggio, and a much-needed extra run comes home as Kolarek, after making a nice barehanded stab of the ball, muffed his throw home.
Biggio is a good bunter, as Montoyo noted after the game. And, uh, perhaps it needs to be imparted on him that that’s something he needs to do more often — particularly against the shift.
Biggio is a smart player with good fundamentals and an elite eye at the plate. That plus the ability to knock the ball over the fence every once in a while is enough to make him useful. To be more than that he’ll need to be creative. I don’t want to get into the whole “Biggio thing” again here, but I think it’s clear that to be successful long-term he’ll need to adjust to what teams are doing to exploit his weaknesses.
One way to do that would be to take advantage of his ability to bunt. Though in general I think it’s understandable why good hitters don’t bunt very often against the shift, even when a free base is there for the taking, Biggio just isn’t enough of a threat right now to pass those opportunities up. And if starting to do so changes the way teams think about shifting him, even better.
Anyway, this play was good!
• Wild pitch (Grichuk to third, Biggio to second)
You love to see it.
• Lourdes Gurriel Jr. grounds out to shortstop (Grichuk scores, Biggio to third)(TOR 7 - OAK 3)
Sure, it may have been a ground out, but the Jays were having a whole lot of fun by this point — and boy did they need it.
• Santiago Espinal lines out to centre.
Well, they all have to end somewhere.
▲ Robbie Ray
The bats weren’t the only story in this one, as Robbie Ray, the man with the tight pants, was once again spectacular. And he once again did it by being very un-Robbie Ray like.
▲ Insurance runs/banana guns
Those extra runs that Bo Bichette and Vladimir Guerrero Jr. (and Jonathan Davis and Marcus Semien) managed to help put on the board in the ninth? The ones that prompted Lourdes Gurriel Jr. to fire off — as you see in the image at the top of this post — some imaginary shots from a dugout banana? Yeah, those were good.
▼ The Springer situation (again)
Announced prior to Wednesday’s game was the fact that George Springer has landed back on the injured list. According to GM Ross Atkins, who spoke to reporters on Thursday (more from him later on), it doesn’t sound as though he’ll be ready to go again when his 10 days are up, either.
I wrote about this yesterday, and nothing has really changed except that the Jays, and their ever-busy MRI machine, have confirmed what we all understood from the beginning. I don’t want to repeat myself, but it sure doesn’t seem any less dumb today for them to have not just been truthful about it all. Some real Streisand effect stuff, Jays. Good job.
▼ More injuries!
Reliever David Phelps, who has been excellent for the Jays this season, and who has pitched less than 60 innings since returning from Tommy John surgery that cost him all of 2018, exited on Wednesday night with what Charlie Montoyo said was discomfort in his right shoulder. Here on Thursday he’s been placed on the injured list with a lat strain.
Also needing to exit early was Joe Panik, who “felt something in his calf muscle,” according to Montoyo’s post-game comments. He has evidently avoided the IL.
The good news in this? The Jays are at least getting their ace, Hyun Jin Ryu, back. He gets the start here on Thursday.
▼ Aaaaaand a minor league injury
Not related to the game in Oakland, but worthy of our attention nonetheless: in his start for Dunedin on Wednesday, Cuban right-hander Yosver Zulueta faced one batter before there was an injury delay (per MiLB’s live Gameday feature) and he exited the game. For those who don’t remember, the flame-throwing Zulueta was a bright spot back in spring training, becoming a prospect of note on the strength of a few very impressive outings. He had Tommy John surgery back in 2019.
Atkins Speaks!
As I’m writing this, game time on Thursday is fast approaching, so I’m not going to transcribe every single thing that Jays GM Ross Atkins said in his Zoom session with reporters today. Some of that I’ll save for later. The key stuff — the stuff about George Springer and his injury — will be the focus. To wit:
On Springer
He's actually feeling better, in talking to him last night and this morning he's more encouraged by the day. But obviously very frustrated. I think what's been consistent with George is just his desire to play. So the MRI results we have read. We obviously will continue to get a more thorough assessment, but as I think you guys are all aware, there was a reaggravation of the injury and we'll determine timelines as we move forward.
We’ve know there was a reaggravation of the injury since Saturday, when he grabbed his quad running down the first base line in that game against Atlanta, yes. For me the bigger question is why the team — even though we all saw that, then all saw him lifted early on Sunday, and not playing either Monday or Tuesday — is just now admitting to it.
I don’t even think the issue here is that the injury was reaggravated. That happens. I think it’s understandable that the Jays chose to have him DH in the majors rather than continue doing so at the alt-site. What’s the difference, really? And who’s to say that he wouldn’t have aggravated it behind closed doors just like he did in full view of everyone?
My issue is being so weirdly guarded about that.
If we’re to believe Atkins on this, however, it’s just not that simple.
All the testing that we could do we were comfortable with. So I think from an objective standpoint the isometric strength test, the speed test using GPS monitoring to ensure it wasn't just our eye, it was giving us all the confidence to take the next step. And the next step was playing centre field, which he already had done at the alt-site, and we were encouraged by that play. We wanted there to be a progression, and as a part of that progression we knew there would be DH at-bats. And, unfortunately, in the second game, he felt something which was the re-aggravation, in that first at-bat.
And at the time we felt it was just mild cramping, or a stretching sensation, and he felt that. We leaned heavily on his reporting. Leaned heavily on the ability to assess that injury during the game, and felt as though it was a mild stretching or cramping sensation that could be occurring from some level of fatigue after playing back to back games. But we feel very good about the process of preparing him to come back in to play, and I can't say enough about the work of Andrew Pipkin and Jose Ministral to be exceptionally thorough and thoughtful and collaborative about the process. All the information that we had at the time suggested it was safe to take the next step, and unfortunately we had a setback.
That’s all totally fair, in my view. Which is why saying “it’s a scheduled off-day” seemed unnecessary.
Asked whether he had regrets, Atkins said no. Albeit not in so few words.
I think there's the obvious one where you can just say, should we have taken more time, and what I would tell you is that, as we are trying to compete and trying to win, if we have objective reasons to take the next step and put him in a position to make our team better, then we're always going to do that. Having said that, we're going to continue to revisit that process with George, with our medical staff, with our coaching staff, and learn how we can improve upon it. And if there's a way to be better we want to be that.
And more on what happened…
We were comfortable with him playing in the field, so there was going to be a progression, and then everything is based on feedback that he's giving us. So, we had originally planned for him to play some centre field that weekend, and we were just going day by day. And based on his recovery, the length of games — how long that game was Friday night — we decided to DH him again on Saturday.
There will be a progression again when he returns. I think the things that we'll revisit: Are there other ways that we can improve upon this process to maximize his return and strength? Are there other medical opinions that we can get? Are there other resources that we can use? But the process will probably be relatively similar, and there will probably be a progression as he returns.
Asked whether Springer will be shut down, or what the next step in the process is, Atkins said… um… kind of?
I think with the reaggravation there will be a minimal workload, and as we get other medical opinions, dependent upon where the resources are used, this will be a time of rest.
He doesn’t want to put a timeline on anything just yet.
I don't want to overreact to what we've learned in a very short period of time, but I would expect it would take more than just the IL stint. There's a chance I'm wrong. But based on the information that I have right now, I expect that it would take longer than that IL stint. How much longer, I would rather comment more specifically on in the coming days, or Charlie may be able to provide more insight into that in the coming days.
Like I say, there was more to the conversation than just this.
He addressed the spike in injuries that we’ve seen league-wide (certainly not just a Blue Jays thing, though people do love to invent reasons to point fingers, don’t they?). He commented on some of the young pitchers who could certainly help the rotation right now (and made it sound like Nate Pearson may not be leaving Triple-A as soon as Sunday, emphasizing that they’d maybe like to see him have some consistent success at that level first — though that could just be about not looking like they’re going to hand him a rotation job straight away, even though they probably should).
The Springer stuff was, obviously, the most pertinent. And with Thursday’s game now most definitely underway, it’s also where I’m going to end this post!
GIFs and screengrab via MLB.com/Sportsnet
Something I wonder about -- given that you can bunt for a single, or even a double -- something that Cavan Biggio did 2 years ago versus the Rays -- why is the bunt Biggio laid down this game called a 'fielder's choice'? Nobody was out. Why wasn't it called a single? If this is a judgement call, who makes it, and what are they using to make their judgement?