Checking in on the top Jays spring storylines

On Chapman, Manoah, "position battles," and more.

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“Top storylines heading into camp” is a classic of the pointless winter busywork genre if you’re a writer—or a reader—of MLB team coverage. I’m sure I’ve cranked out a few of those kinds of pieces myself over the years. But you know what? It’s really not until camp gets going—until we get past all the “best shape of his life” nonsense, start noticing changes to swing mechanics and pitching repertoires, and actually see some games—that storylines really begin to come into focus. Or, realistically, become even worth focusing on. These are, after all, things that develop. And that takes time.

Well, with José Berríos taking the hill on Thursday, we’ve now seen four of the five projected Blue Jays starters pitch. Old veterans like George Springer and Kevin Kiermaier have finally debuted. Six of 32—thirty-two!—Grapefruit League games are in the books. March is coming at us incredibly fast. Spring is on.

And so now, before we reach the point where we collectively realize what a slog this all is about to become—just please everyone stay healthy!—it finally seems like a good point at which to take a look at those top storylines that are still swirling around in Dunedin.

So, uh, let’s do that…

Are they really not going to sign Matt Chapman?

Scott Boras and Cody Bellinger swallowed their pride last weekend and came to an agreement with the Cubs on a three-year, $80 million deal with opt-outs after each of the first two seasons. That move put a big spotlight on Bellinger’s Boras Corp. stablemate, Matt Chapman. The former Jays’ third baseman remains without a team, and may not even have particularly enthusiastic suitors at this stage—a point well made by Darragh McDonald of MLB Trade Rumors in a piece this week.

Could the Jays be one of those suitors? Maybe. Should they be? I still say absolutely yes.

Admittedly, Chapman was an incredibly frustrating hitter to watch last season. He was abysmal with runners in scoring position, posting just a 77 wRC+ in the split. He was also terrible after he injured a finger in an August weight room mishap, due largely to his attempts to play through it. Despite having noticeably cooled since his electric April, when he was first scratched because of the injury on August 13th, he was actually in the midst of a pretty good offensive season: his 121 wRC+ put him just outside of the top 40 among 140 qualified hitters, tied with a group that included Paul Goldschmidt, Marcus Semien, and Jorge Soler. By the end of the year his wRC+ had dropped to 110, and his ranking among qualified hitters had sunk to 70th.

The punchless version of Chapman that we all saw at the end of the year, and so often when the Jays needed him to cash a run in 2023, has lived long in the memory of many fans, but isn’t really representative of who he is. For his career his wRC+ now sits at 118. His wRC+ with RISP? Also 118.

Even with a “crowded” Blue Jays infield picture at the moment, I think he’s still very much a fit here. More than that, I think he’s a clear improvement—and that’s because the Jays don’t actually have a real third baseman on the roster.

Isiah Kiner-Falefa is being paid a bizarrely large amount of money, meaning he won’t be sitting on the bench, but he is just not an everyday player. I mean, the next time he posts a wRC+ above 91 will be the first. His 83 wRC+ over the last three seasons combined ranks in the bottom 20 among 226 batters with at least 1,000 plate appearances over that span. Yes, he was an everyday shortstop for the Rangers and Yankees in 2021 and 2022, but he was really only a placeholder until some real options (Corey Seager, Anthony Volpe) came around.

You can hide a hitter that weak at the bottom of your lineup as long as he’s giving you elite defence at a premium position, but the metrics really disagreed on Kiner-Falefa’s work at short in those two years: he was +20 by Defensive Runs Saved, but -7 by Outs Above Average. In just over 1,200 career innings at third base his DRS is +19 and his OAA is +22, so there’s maybe some hope there for the Jays. But the equation changes once you start moving down the defensive spectrum. And also when you’re doing the same exact thing in centre field, potentially in left field, and when you’re handing over second base to an untested and not especially exciting committee.

Versatility is IKF’s true calling card. He spent more time in centre field last season than anywhere else on the diamond. He can play everywhere. Or, more precisely, he can be a backup everywhere. Seeing a ton of him almost exclusively at third is not the answer. (I still do not understand that contract!)

OK, so how about the other guys?

Well, Justin Turner is much more a DH at this stage of his career. Though he only managed to play 57 innings at third base last season, he's compiled more than 600 there over the last two combined, and over that span he's been -6 by OAA and -2 by DRS. That's not necessarily catastrophic if your opinion happens to tilt toward DRS, but it's not good. And at 39-years-old, it's not likely to suddenly get better. Statcast’s calculations put him in just the 12th percentile for arm strength in 2023, and he’s sure not making up for that with his range. The Jays can mix him in sometimes I guess, but this is also a bad idea.

Moving down the roster we have Davis Schneider, who has an even worse arm—10th percentile—than Turner. He didn't necessarily look awful when he was asked to man the hot corner in the majors last year, but the fact that the Jays have so deliberately kept him away from third both in the majors and in the minors—he's played fewer than 300 innings total there since the start of 2019—means he really shouldn't be in this conversation.

Cavan Biggio's arm is closer to average—38th percentile—and he made some nice plays at third base down the stretch in 2023 when Chapman was out, but I think 2021 proved pretty definitively that he's not an everyday third baseman.

Santiago Espinal has always been more about his range than his arm, so third is maybe not an ideal fit to begin with. It’s also worth noting that his arm ranked worse than Biggio’s (29th percentile) in 2023 and—like many other aspects of his game last year—the range component of his OAA cratered, dropping from the 95th percentile to the 15th. And… I mean… Espinal is the player made most redundant by the IKF signing, so there’s really no reason to believe he’d be viable as an everyday 3B either.

Youngsters Orelvis Martinez and Addison Barger have defensive questions as well, but more importantly are simply not ready yet as hitters. Martinez could probably be a lefty-mashing platoon bat right now, but needs more seasoning against same sided pitching. Barger was below average among International League hitters in 2023, though the excellent top 15 Jays prospects list at Just Baseball notes that his “underlying batted ball data” was at least “encouraging.” Still though.

Ernie Clement? A really interesting out-of-options guy who might have figured something out in Buffalo last year. But what are we doing here? A hearty “what are we doing here?” to the desiccated corpse of Eduardo Escobar, too! And that’s sort of the whole thing. Honestly, any number of these guys would probably deserve a long look if this wasn't a team with championship aspirations, but the Blue Jays are! And Matt Chapman is right there, albeit at a price that would surely put them over the second luxury tax threshold—a line they did not cross last season—even if they managed to “subtract” some additional salary elsewhere. (According to RosterResource, if the Jays found a team to take on all of the money owed Espinal and Trevor Richards—about $5 million combined—it would only take them to about $14 million below the threshold.)

I don’t want to give the guy who jumped at the chance to hand $15 million to IKF credit for being some kind of market genius who is perfectly playing the Chapman situation—especially if the reason he may not be is in part because of that deal!—but I sure hope that’s what Ross Atkins is at least trying to do. The team is in a position where adding two or three more wins to their projections would be genuinely meaningful, and the answer is there for all to see. Until Chapman goes elsewhere, a reunion here will continue to make all of the sense, and will continue to be—rightly—a major topic of discussion.

Will there be a fifth starter competition?

On March 12th of last spring, José Berríos took the ball for the first game of Puerto Rico's World Baseball Classic campaign—a crucial start as they tried to get out of a tough group that also featured both the Dominican Republic and Venezuela. Starting against Team Venezuela, Berríos made it to the second inning but didn't record an out in it, exiting having allowed six runs (five earned) on five hits, with two walks and just one strikeout. His first inning? Error, ground out, walk, single, homer, single, strikeout, walk, ground out. In the second he gave up a double (to José Altuve), and a single (to Luis Arreáz), before getting yanked for Reds reliever Fernando Cruz. An Anthony Santander homer off of Cruz closed out the ugly line for Berríos, and considering the way the former Twins ace had struggled in 2022, the entire experience felt incredibly ominous about what was to come the Jays’ $131-million man in '23.

Berríos, it turns out, would bounce back to have a very typical Berríos-like season. As you may have heard, he even earned a playoff start.

Just a few days earlier, Chris Bassitt had been defiant in the face of some increasingly loud questions about the velocity his was flashing in his first camp after signing a sizeable free agent deal with the Jays. In his second start of the spring, Bassitt’s sinker had averaged just 89.9 mph, down from 92.8 the previous year. Asked about it by reporters after the outing, he admitted that he wished his velo had been higher, but insisted that he knew “the process of what it takes to get ready for a season.”

“It’s just a matter of trusting the process and constantly keep working and knowing that in four weeks, when the season actually rolls around, that I’ll be there,” he added.

Bassitt would, of course, go on to have another excellent season—particularly in the second half, where his 2.89 ERA ranked 11th in MLB—even if his average sinker velo did drop to 91.9 mph.

Obviously I bring these up because Alek Manoah did not look good in his spring debut on Tuesday—or, as the game wasn’t televised, I suppose I should say he didn’t sound good. Manoah's physical transformation and candid comments about his struggles last season were among the biggest stories to come out of camp after pitchers and catchers reported, but after allowing four runs over 1 1/3 innings on three hits, a walk, and three HBPs against the Tigers in Lakeland, he suddenly found himself a topic of conversation for very different reasons.

The cases of Bassitt and Berríos last spring are worth remembering at times like this. Manoah’s promising velocity—the 93.7 mph average on his fastball was exactly in line with 2021 and 2022, and 0.9 mph up on where he was at last year—is very possibly the better indicator of what’s to come, rather than the iffy command. This was, after all, his first time in something resembling a real game since his he was demoted for a second time back in early August.

Nonetheless, the outing provided an ugly reminder of what Manoah went through last season, and of the fact that he could be in a real battle for his job—not just this spring, but all season long.

When I was asked last week on Tall Can Audio what a successful season for Manoah would look like, my answer was “making 30 starts in the big leagues.” There is going to be scrutiny on him until he pitches his way out of that situation. But, of course, he could also pitch his way out of the job altogether—it’s not like we haven’t seen it before.

Could it happen as soon as next month? Well, I suppose anything is possible, but thinking back to how many starts Manoah was given to figure it out last season—and Yusei Kikuchi the year before that—plus how quickly they brought him back from the minors after his first demotion, and how dedicated they were to focusing on the positives from his performances, I don’t think the Jays are going to be in a rush to pull the plug on this.

Granted, last year’s situation was partly about the club’s lack of depth behind Manoah, at least until Hyun Jin Ryu was ready to return. But while I think Bowden Francis, Mitch White, Yariel Rodríguez, and Ricky Tiedemann are a pretty interesting group at the moment, are we really ready to believe the Jays are about to thrust any of those guys into a regular rotation spot? Certainly not the latter two. And the former pair didn’t exactly have the best time in their spring debuts either—two runs on four hits over two innings for Francis, two runs on a walk and a double for White—save for their velocities looking looking pretty good. Which… maybe is fine enough for now for everybody?

Can any of the youngsters win a job?

Though I slandered them above, I thought Arden Zwelling's pre-camp piece on storylines to watch did a great job of injecting some realism into what is usually a genre that gets overly optimistic about how meaningful spring really is. The idea of there being jobs to be won during spring training is “generally a misnomer,” he says.

“Sit down any general manager in the middle of February and they can tell you with near certainty how their 26-man roster will be composed come late March. They've already worked through the minor league options, playing time considerations, long-term controllability, and 40-man roster machinations. Preserving roster flexibility and depth has far more say in any decisions there are to make than whoever parked a few balls beyond some Florida or Arizona fences.”

To illustrate his point he brings up the Jays' dalliance with Greg Bird in 2022. The former Yankee had a great spring in Dunedin, seemed like a nice roster fit, but—according to Arden—the Jays didn't want to add him to their 40-man, so Bird opted out of his deal and jumped back to New York. Despite some gnashing of teeth over it among Jays fans, he ended up getting released mid-year anyway. In 2023 he was with the Québec Capitales, and this winter was playing in Australia. No big loss—the spring meant nothing.

Another example from that 2022 spring remains on the Jays' roster today: Orelvis Martinez.

I remember fans being certain that Martinez was “ready,” based on 16 strong plate appearances, in which he smashed a pair of home runs, a pair of doubles, and produced a 1.323 OPS. However, he ended up slashing .203/.208/.446 that season in Double-A.

Be careful getting worked up about any of this stuff, in other words. Or, more importantly, be careful wasting too much energy on it. During the offseason RosterResource projects what each club's opening day roster will look like, and right now it's pretty hard to argue with for the Jays.

Position players: Springer, Bichette, Guerrero, Turner, Biggio, Kirk, Varsho, IKF, Kiermaier, Jansen, Espinal, Schneider, and Vogelbach.

Pitchers: Gausman, Berríos, Bassitt, Kikuchi, Manoah, Romano, Swanson, García, Mayza, Green, Richards, Cabrera, and White.

Where, exactly, is change going to come? I see a a pretty limited number of spots. White could be supplanted by Francis or Yariel Rodríguez in theory, though I have a hard time believing the Jays will give him up to the waiver wire—he is, of course, out of options—given the velocities he's already showing, and the strong end of his 2023 campaign. And Richards had a brutal end to the year and always seems in danger of pitching his way out of the job, but it just never seems to happen.

That leaves the three places where I think a change could be possible: Vogelbach's spot, Espnal’s, and maybe Cabrera's.

Obviously Vogelbach has a pretty limited role, but he's also been a very strong hitter from the left side. His career 125 wRC+ against right-handed pitchers makes him a real bench option to bring in for any number of the Jays' right-handed hitters in a big spot with a right-hander on the mound. He's averaged over 300 plate appearances versus RHP in each of the last four full seasons (i.e. excluding 2020), so he's a real big league hitter of a type that the Jays don't really have. He's also a better guy to have sitting a lot of the time than the younger Spencer Horwitz—Vogelbach's only real competition for the job.

Could Horwitz displace him? Maybe. Though I suspect that if that happens it would more of a Greg Bird situation than one where Vogelbach was so bad and Horwitz so good all spring that the Jays were left with no other choice. The 40-man is pretty cramped at the moment, and that might be Vogelbach’s biggest obstacle. Though a trade could certainly clear some of that up.

Of course, Ernie Clement is out of options, and maybe his spot on the 40-man ends up going to Vogelbach. Thing is, he’s a pretty interesting guy who had a great breakout season in Buffalo last year, showing levels of power and patience at the plate that he’s never reached before. Is there a chance he could take Espinal’s spot? That feels unlikely to me—paying Espinal $2.75 million to be in Buffalo would be odd—but Espinal can be optioned, and maybe that gives Clement more daylight than it seems. The switch-hitting Eduardo Escobar could also be in the mix there, I suppose. But I do tend to think it’s simply Espinal’s spot unless Chapman arrives to take it.

Then we have Genesis Cabrera, who was excellent down the stretch as a second bullpen lefty after coming over from St. Louis. But the weird thing about that transaction was that the Cardinals designated him for assignment despite the fact that he still could be optioned. He comes into 2024 with one option year remaining, and while I have a tough time seeing him starting the year in Buffalo, the Jays added another lefty power reliever, Brendon Little, back in November, and immediately added him to the 40-man.

Little has stayed there all winter, and as Arden points out in a piece on him earlier this week, it's clearly because the Jays like him quite a bit. After all, they swung a deal with the Cubs to acquire him just an hour before he was set to be a minor league free agent—meaning they could have just waited, signed him, and kept him off the 40, though they'd have had to compete for his signature in that case, and may have lost out.

He remains a work in progress who has struggled to keep his walk rate down, so Arden posits that the Jays “can leverage Little's three remaining option years to allow him to continue working on things at triple-A while providing a layer of bullpen depth,” but maybe if something pops he can steal a spot. Or if Cabrera returns to having command issues of his own. This, too, seems unlikely though.

Other storylines of note…

Will we see an extension—or two?

If the second luxury tax threshold really is the biggest impediment to bringing Matt Chapman back, a theoretical way to save some money to that end would be to extend Vlad and/or Bo to a long-term deal that cuts their 2024 salary for enough to get Chapman in. But even if we remove that fantasy from the equation, with all the “Bo is a leader now” stuff we’ve been hearing out of camp, the calls for the Jays to get a deal done with their franchise shortstop aren’t going to go away—and they’re always going to be louder in spring.

Hey, and now Vlad is talking about the Jays not making him a long-term offer yet, which I’m sure will be reacted to normally. (Though, as I said on Twitter when I saw this, what number would they even start with here? This was a 1.0 fWAR player last year! You can’t responsibly offer him a contract that he’d actually be willing to take, so why bother until he demonstrates that he can be the 2021 version of himself again?)

New pitch, who dis?

The Jays don’t necessarily need their starters to be better than they were last year, but that doesn’t mean that competitive guys aren’t going to be out there looking for a new edge. We saw that once this week with Yusei Kikuchi, who has changed up his changeup, throwing it about four mph slower than last year in Monday's game. That puts it closer to where it was when he first made the leap to North America back in 2019 (84.5), but according to MLB.com’s Keegan Matheson it’s not the same pitch: he’s switch from a split-change grip to a circle-change.

We a second change on Thursday, when José Berrîos debuted a new cutter. He only threw a couple of them, but for a guy who could use another weapon against left-handed hitters—they posted a .774 OPS against him in 2023 compared to .616 for RHB—it’s a very intriguing development.

New Rule: Stop making Chris Bassitt mad

We haven’t had any major issues yet with the new new pitch clock, but that doesn’t mean MLB’s tinkering—pitchers will now only get 18 seconds between pitches when runners are on base, down from 20—hasn’t caught the attention of the guys who will most be affected by it. Specifically, it’s caught the attention of Chris Bassitt.

“Obviously I've been in the league a long time and I feel like the last seven or eight years, it's been like a different league every single year we walk in. I look forward to the year where it's like, ‘Hey, we did nothing from a year ago.’ That shouldn't be too hard to do,” he told reporters when camp opened last week. “It's just when is the game going to stop changing?”

It probably won’t be until guys start going deeper into games, and start caring more about their results rather than just getting work in, that we’ll see whether this tweak has much of an effect—if any.

Quickly…

• It will probably be impossible to tell what difference the Jays’ coaching shakeup had on the club by the end of the year, so it’s a fool’s errand to try to read too much into it in February. But I’ve heard less chatter about the importance of an all-fields approach—even from Buck! Plus, it’s been good to hear all the praise coming the way of new assistant hitting coach Matt Hague—Spencer Horwitz on Thursday’s broadcast being the latest iteration—and I really enjoyed Keegan Matheson on Don Mattingly’s new role, and Mark Feinsand talking to DeMarlo Hale about what an associate manager does.

• Former radio play-by-play man Ben Wagner was done absolutely dirty by Rogers, but thankfully has landed on his feet with the Orioles—they’re even going to send him on the road some! Ben Shulman will always have fans who raise their eyebrows about his name and how such a young guy managed to get the opportunity to be Wagner’s replacement, but has already shown that he’s a big talent with a real feel for calling the game. Rob Longley of the Toronto Sun has a great piece up about the radio booth’s two Bens, one outgoing and one incoming.

• Lastly, though this obviously wasn’t a storyline coming into camp, I’m sure that every Jays fan will have Erik Swanson and his family in their thoughts after their four-year-old son Toby was airlifted to hospital this week after being hit by an SUV. According to an Instagram story from his mom on Thursday, Toby is thankfully out of intensive care and on the road to recovery.

As usual, Drew gets it¹:

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1. Look at this stupid thing.