Early season ups and downs!
The Jays are in Kansas City and set to begin the third week of the 2021 season. Seems like it’s about time to take stock of what we’ve seen from them so far.
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It’s been quite an up and down few days for the Toronto Blue Jays — OK, OK, several days, but who’s counting? — and on Wednesday the team had a fittingly up and down game to finish out their homestand and a tough series with the New York Yankees.
Or, actually, perhaps it’s more fitting to call it a down-and-up finale, seeing as the Jays went down early to an Aaron Judge home run off of emergency starter T.J. Zeuch, but ended up walking it off dramatically on Bo Bichette’s second home run of the afternoon.
However we choose to phrase it, these up and down Blue Jays, in this up and down season, after this up and down game, deserve some up and down assessment. So let’s catch up on just where the team is at as they head off on a road trip to Kansas City, Boston, and the Trop, with expanded game of three up, three down. Many up, many down!
▲ Bo Bichette
We have to start here, and not even just because of Bichette’s two-home run, walk-off performance on Wednesday, spectacular though that was. Bichette had a bit of a rough patch after he missed a month with a knee injury in late 2020. He didn’t exactly have an eye-popping start to spring (on March 23rd his spring numbers were a Biggio-esque .229/.357/.286), or start to his season, either. Yet in relatively short order he now finds himself among the league leaders in OPS (27th, 1.012) and home runs (t-7th, 4). He’s seeing the ball especially well now, having struck out just once in his last four games, after piling up 12 Ks over his previous eight. Best of all, though, he’s jolted us a little bit into remembering again just what a special bat he has. We’re even starting to see him hit the kinds of absurd statistical benchmarks we were starting to get used to back before last year’s injury struck.
OK, so maybe “most multi-extra-base hit games through the first 87 games of an MLB career” requires parsing the numbers to death a little bit, but still! Joe DiMaggio! And, perhaps more importantly, 87 games.
Bichette’s career is incredibly young, and the future is incredibly bright. There were moments, be it because of the defence or the injury, over the last six months where it was maybe a little too easy to forget about both of those things. /After his performance against the Yankees, I’m sure every Blue Jays fan remembers it all quite well.
▼ The injury bug
I’ll get more specific with some players later on in this list, but the first big down arrow here has to go just generally to the way that so many Blue Jays players have been struck down by various ailments already. The team came into the season with a sizeable injured list — George Springer (oblique), Nate Pearson (adductor strain), Kirby Yates (Tommy John surgery), Thomas Hatch (elbow impingement), Patrick Murphy (AC joint), Robbie Ray (bruised elbow) — and have only added to it in the meantime. Ray has since returned, and looked good in doing so, but the rest of that group remains hurt. Added to it now are Tyler Chatwood (triceps inflammation), Teoscar Hernández (COVID-19), and Julian Merryweather (oblique). That’s eight guys on the 40-man currently unable to play, plus David Phelps, who is day-to-day with a contusion after taking a liner off the back on Tuesday night, and Ross Stripling, who was scratched from Wednesday’s start because of tightness in his forearm. Included among the Jays’ walking wounded are the team’s best player and record-breaking off-season signing, their top prospect, two ostensible closers, and last year’s best offensive player for the club.
We knew that injuries were likely to be an even bigger fact of life for MLB in 2021, coming off of the weirdness of last season, but this is a lot to be dealing with so soon.
▲ Hyun Jin Ryu
We’ll get to Vlad in a second, but before we do I think it’s important that we acknowledge the work of Ryu so far. Because for a guy who is such a delight to watch throw the baseball, his greatness sometimes feels a little easy to take for granted. Maybe that's just because he's not overpowering in the traditional sense — because he doesn't throw in the upper 90s, so instead has to rely on location and deception. But the results are indisputably ace-like.
After another brilliant performance on Tuesday, Ryu has a 1.89 ERA in three starts this season, two of which have been against a New York Yankees lineup that scored the most runs in the American League last season, and is projected to score the most runs this year according to FanGraphs' Depth Chart projections. His ERA as a member of the Blue Jays now stands at 2.51.
You can debate a lot about what the Jays should have done this winter, and will need to do on the pitching front before they can truly become a championship calibre team, and where a lot of guys who are currently here might eventually fit, but Ryu has been absolutely rock solid at the top of their rotation so far, and that’s massive.
▲ Vladimir Guerrero Jr.
The Jays best players are playing like it right now. The ones that aren’t on the injured list, at least. Vlad has looked like a star so far in 2021, and I really want to believe there’s some permanence to that. The improved physical conditioning? The improvements to the launch angle and ground ball rate? It feels like it’s all there.
In his latest at Sportnset, Nick Ashbourne gives us a bunch of reasons to maybe not get too ahead of ourselves on all that. He’s had stretches like this before, just maybe not so early in a season as to result in a wRC+ above 200 staring back at us from his FanGraphs page.
Still, while I know that it can’t in a meaningful statistical way, I have to believe the incredible spring he had has to count for something. It hasn’t just been two weeks of “finally, here’s the real Vlad!” performance. It’s been, like, almost two months. That’s what I’m going to tell myself anyway. Let the good times keep rolling!
▼ Julian Merryweather
This is no knock on Merryweather. The down arrow here is entirely about this situation. Because it’s a situation that sucks! Merryweather has barely played for the Jays, yet his immense talent already seems obvious. The number and quality of pitches that he can throw puts him in a class apart from the vast majority of pitchers. If healthy, he’s a weapon. If healthy, he’s basically their closer — their best reliever. He just can’t stay healthy.
With each time that this happens — and at this point you can’t not believe that it will happen again — I think it’s going to take longer and longer before fans will be able to stop being uneasy with every pitch he throws. That’s not a lot of fun, but because he’s so talented there’s really not another way to go about this. Merryweather needs to be in the Blue Jays’ bullpen whenever he can be, and hopefully over time they find a way to help his body hold up better to the rigors of throwing baseballs nearly 100 mph.
▼ Nate Pearson
At the risk of lumping Nate Pearson in with the oft-injured Merryweather, I’m going to lump Nate Pearson in with the oft-injured Merryweather. The Jays are clearly proceeding with extreme caution as their top prospect returns from yet another injury, and part of me thinks that’s good and completely normal. After all, Pearson was going to face workload limitations this year anyway, so it makes total sense just to ease him into the season.
The other part of me, however, is concerned. Especially when it — I? — sees things like the third point in this tweet.
Obviously there’s nothing wrong with making small tweaks to help a pitcher’s delivery be a little less violent, but this seems to me like an acknowledgement that the Jays are definitely concerned. For a while, at least among hopeful fans, the narrative about Pearson and injuries was coloured pretty heavily by the fact that he suffered a broken ulna (forearm) on a fluke comebacker in early 2018, causing him to miss that entire season. Now the “bad luck” injury seems more like the aberration. (Less often remembered in the story of Pearson’s 2018 is the fact that the broken ulna was suffered in his first game back from an oblique injury.)
I’m probably being overly worried about this, because pitchers tweak things all the time. But “if it ain’t broke, don’t fix it” is a pretty good general rule for the way pitchers are handled, so if they’re fixing it, that tells us they think it’s “broke.” And when the “it” in this case is the delivery that has made Pearson successful so far, that doesn’t sound great to me!
▲ The schedule
Thank goodness for off days. The Jays’ rotation was thrown a curveball on Wednesday (see what I did there?) with the late scratch of Ross Stripling, which forced T.J. Zeuch into action. This means that, for moment, as I write this, the Jays don’t have anybody named to start here on Thursday in Kansas City. They also have a rotation that features some big question marks behind their front three of Hyun Jin Ryu, Robbie Ray, and Steven Matz.
That sounds like a problem, which is where the schedule comes in. The Jays haven't had a scheduled off day since April 2, but will get two next week, and two more the week after that. As Sportsnet’s Shi Davidi explained in a series of tweets on Wednesday, this helps them in a big way.
▼ The cold bats
It's obviously still much too early in the season to be drawing too many conclusions about anyone just yet, but it is absolutely jarring to go to FanGraphs and see that the Jays have already handed out 129 plate appearances to a group of five players whose highest wRC+ right now is 17. Seventeen!
Alejandro Kirk (17), Lourdes Gurriel Jr. (6), Rowdy Tellez (5), Danny Jansen (1), and Jonathan Davis (-41 somehow) have all been putrid at the dish so far. Teoscar Hernández (38) and Joe Panik (67) have been nearly as atrocious. And Marcus Semien has been pedestrian (99), while Cavan Biggio (94) has felt a lot worse than his wRC+ suggests, posting a .179/.304/.385 line and a strikeout rate of 32%.
Given all that, plus all the injuries to the pitching staff, and it's a wonder that this team is even 6-6.
Gurriel, in particular, has looked awful and turned in some atrocious, non-competitive at-bats. Tellez, who picked up his first home run of the season against the Yankees, and managed four hits in three games, is hopefully pulling out of it, though that's far from clear. And really it’s those two that need to start pulling their weight. The catchers you don’t expect much of. Panik will either start hitting or lose his job to Santiago Espinal. Davis already has fallen behind Josh Palacios. But with Springer and Hernández out, and everyone else going the way they are, an incredible amount of the offensive burden is being placed on the shoulders of Bichette an Guerrero. Fortunately they’ve been up to the task so far, but the rest of the team needs to snap out of their collective funk, and soon.
▼ COVID-19
This should go without saying, but I’ll say it anyway because the Jays are clearly missing, and are going to continue to miss Teoscar Hernández, who is currently on the COVID IL. Fortunately his case doesn’t seem to have led to any sort of outbreak among Blue Jays players or staff, but there were certainly some worrying moments on Wednesday when Ross Stripling’s late scratch led to a very noticeable delay in getting the lineup posted.
As should also go without saying: hopefully Teoscar gets healthy and back on the field as soon as possible.
▲ MLB’s COVID-19 Injured List!
Because of the way the COVID IL works, the Jays have been able to replace Teoscar on the roster with Anthony Castro, who gives them a much needed extra arm in the bullpen. Under normal circumstances, because Castro isn’t currently on the club’s 40-man roster, the Jays would have had to remove someone from the 40 in order to make this move. Because the COVID list is involved, that is apparently not the case.
▼ Thinking about service time manipulation
I don’t want to think about service time nonsense — I doubt anybody ever does — but sometimes I just can’t help myself.
Yeah, yeah, I know. Alek Manoah is incredibly green and his success in spring training shouldn’t really mean anything. It’s probably too soon to even think about this. And I’m honestly not even sure how serious I am when I bring it up.
On the other hand, Alejandro Kirk is here. Josh Palacios, who only had 82 games of Double-A experience coming into this season, is also here. Guys like that were seemingly able to make some pretty significant strides last year while working at the Jays’ alternate site in Rochester, facing significantly better competition than their minor league track record indicates. Before all of that happened, it definitely would have been a hell of a lot to ask Manoah to step into a sizeable big league role right now. It probably still is. But teams seem to be looking differently at certain guys now — these alt-site success stories in particular. (I think you can count Jonathan Davis among that group too, because while he may have had Triple-A experience coming into this season, it was his performance and the improvements he made at the alt-site last year that really turned heads in the organization.)
Would I bet on Manoah getting the call any time soon? No. And I definitely wouldn’t bet on him getting the call on or before the 16th day of the season. But I wouldn’t bet against it either. We’ll just have to see how much T.J. Zeuch, Anthony Kay, and Tanner Roark the Jays are willing to take, I guess.
▲ Remembering that it’s early
It’s early. Remember that.
Obligatory:
▼ The Boston Red Sox
I was really ready to take a year off despising the Boston Red Sox, and yet here we are! Nine straight wins my ass.
▲ Jackie Robinson Day
As the Jays begin a series in Kansas City here on Thursday, the calendar falls on Jackie Robinson Day. The city is, of course, home of the inimitable Negro Leagues Baseball Museum, and making today’s celebrations even more poignant is the fact that Major League Baseball is still somehow in the crosshairs of the dummies of the Republican Party. This is all happening, as you may know, after the league’s recent decision to pull this year’s All-Star Game from the city of Atlanta in response to a series of provisions in the state of Georgia’s new voting law that will make it much more difficult for people to vote — particularly those in Democrat-leaning constituencies already faced with inordinately long lines, inadequate numbers of polling places, and various other tactics of disenfranchisement — and will strip power from local and state elections officials, putting crucial decisions into the hands of their fellow Republicans pushing Trump’s blatant “election fraud” lie who clearly see fair elections as an obstacle to overcome in their pursuit of absolute power, not the bedrock of democracy that normal, non-fascists do.
Anyway! This dumb fight with some of the worst people in the world is still going on, and MLB, for all its many, many faults is somehow on the right side of it — their decision being laughably painted as “woke capitalism” by the incoherent Citizens-United-loving chuds of the right. It’s quite a backdrop for what is always a meaningful day on MLB’s schedule anyway, and it will be cool to see the Blue Jays in Kansas City’s Kauffman Stadium — the place that would have been the ideal replacement site for the All-Star Game, given the presence of the NLBM, the city’s importance in the history of the Negro Leagues, and the ongoing centennial celebrations. (MLB instead chose Denver, a move that sparked claims of hypocrisy from the right, suggesting that voting laws in Colorado are similar to the new ones in Georgia. Such claims are categorically untrue.)
Andrea Williams of the New York Times has an outstanding piece on the complex legacy of Robinson’s breaking of MLB’s colour barrier that is very much worth a read. Randy Wilkins’ short film on Robinson’s life as an activist, which premiered a year ago today, is also definitely worth revisiting as well.
Never stop despising the Red Sox, Andrew. And while I'm here: fuck the Yankees, contract or move the Rays, and may the Trash Birds stay in the dumpster forever.