Eight premature conclusions to draw from the Jays' first 14 games (including Friday's!)
On Berríos and Bassit bounce backs, speed and defence, Daulton Varsho, Zach Pop, Tim Mayza, Anthony Bass, Ricky Tiedemann, renovations, and more!
I recommend getting your heart trampled on to anyone.
Every year, over and over and over, it’s the same exact exhausting thing: Blue Jays fans forget how a baseball season works.
No! I don’t mean by reaching over the wall to grab balls-in-play that cost their team runs — *COUGH* — I mean by completely overreacting to a few games of bad, unlucky, listless-seeming baseball. This, folks, is simply not how the game works.
As anyone who has actually watched the sport for their entire lives can tell you, the very well established time to start drawing conclusions from early season trends isn’t after your team’s first few losses, it’s after precisely 14 games.
Look it up! I am definitely not joking! No more, no less. Lucky number fourteen!
The Blue Jays, at 9-5, are now on pace for 104 wins. The Rays’ record may be better at the moment, but only one of those teams is currently on a winning streak. All is just about right with the world — at least until Yusei Kikuchi takes the ball on Saturday afternoon. A lot of these Blue Jays are who we thought they were. Brandon Belt can actually make contact with a baseball. Alek Manoah might be due a little regression, but Kevin Gausman is great when not getting absurdly unlucky. Kevin Kiermaier really does do all the little things right. And Bo Bichette looks much more like the guy we saw last September than the one that took until mid-August to really start to heat up. We’ve lived, we’ve learned.
But some things — like Bo’s offensive impressiveness, which he put on display in a two-double, 5-for-5 night on Friday, reaching 500 hits for his career faster by more than two dozen games than the next Blue Jays player on the list — we already know all about. Vladimir Guerrero Jr., who on Friday struck out for just the fourth time in 66 plate appearances (6.1%) so far this season, is an incredible player. We know that Matt Chapman, here at the outset of a potentially life-changing free agent walk year, is playing as well as he maybe ever has.
We know that Jordan Romano is a great closer and a joy to watch. (You know, usually.)
What, though, are some things that we’ve learned — or “learned” — in this season so far that are a little less obvious? Now that the time is officially appropriate, let’s take a look. Here are eight premature conclusions to draw from the Jays’ season so far…
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Bassitt and Berríos starts aren’t guaranteed losses
I mean, OK, so we knew this already, but oh man was it good to see it in practice. Chris Bassitt found his command and a bit more velocity in his third start of the season on Thursday, and José Berríos actually looked something like the guy the Jays gave all that money to 17 months ago on Friday night.
First Bassitt, who worried Jays fans a little bit in his first couple of starts — not just because he was awful in one and merely bad in the next, but because his velocity looked off compared to where his average was at in 2022.
Neither of Bassitt's first two starts saw his average fastball velocity top 92 mph — a continuation of a trend we saw in the spring, which he explained away as a deliberate sort of build-up. Scary stuff when we're talking about a 34-year-old arm with more than 1,300 innings on it between the majors and minors over the course of his career. And while velocity isn't exactly his game anyway, pitching at that part of the velo spectrum gives you a much thinner margin for error. It could be a problem.
Fortunately, Bassitt broke the 92 mark in his third start, and seems to be trending in much the same way that he did last season — when he ended up pitching to a 3.42 ERA, 2.7 fWAR, and earning himself a three-year, $63 million contract from the Jays.
Berríos, of course, is a different animal. We all know the story, and we’ve all been through the “maybe he’s turned the corner” stuff before. It’s going to take more than one impressive start in a big-for-April series against a division rival and the hottest team on the planet to change what anyone thinks here, but… well… it was a pretty impressive start.
Berríos went five innings on Friday before leaving with a knee contusion, and in that time allowed just one run on four hits with no walks and six strikeouts. Yes, there was hard contact — eight balls in play came of Rays' bats at more than 95 mph — but he and backstop Danny Jansen worked well together, and Berríos was especially good at locating his changeup away to left-handed batters. He threw the change to lefties 41% of the time, up from 19% on the season, and cut his sinker and slurve usage to them by about half.
Against right-handers it was a surprisingly heavy dose of four-seam fastballs, topping the 40% mark despite only doing so twice with the pitch since the start of last season (having used the sinker as his primary fastball to righties).
He wasn't hitting his spot low and away with the slurve quite the way he'd done in his previous start, which might explain why the usage there to right-handers was down. And those fastballs to hitters on both sides were still catching a lot of the plate. But seeing as lefties were slashing .320/.346/.640 against him coming into this one and the ones on the Rays only managed two hits, that’s progress.
Or at least enough to make us not quite dread the next time he takes the ball so much.
They’re doing it more with instincts than speed
We’ve heard a lot of talk about the improvements the Blue Jays have made defensively this season and, statistically, a lot of that has come through the prism of Defensive Runs Saved. That’s for good reason, as the Jays are the top team in the American League by DRS so far this year (+13 heading into Friday) and rank second in baseball. Less discussed has been where they stand in terms of OAA — Statcast’s Outs Above Average — and that’s probably for good reason too. According to that metric they rank only 19th, at -2.
That, I think, is pretty interesting, though it’s obviously early to be looking at this stuff. Bo Bichette, Whit Merrifield, George Springer, Daulton Varsho, and Matt Chapman are all in the negative by OAA so far, and you have to believe that’s going to change over time for a least some of those guys.
What I think is more telling — a bit more tangible at this point in the year, at least — is looking at the difference in terms of Blue Jays players’ speed between this year and last. And that, too, is pretty interesting.
Here’s where Jays players were at in 2022 in terms of sprint speed.
Looking at it from left to right, top to bottom, that's Alejandro Kirk (24.1 ft/s), Gabriel Moreno (27.4), Danny Jansen (27.5), Vladimir Guerrero Jr. (26.6), Santiago Espinal (27.0), Cavan Biggio (28.5), Whit Merrifield (28.7), Matt Chapman (28.4), Bo Bichette (27.5), Lourdes Gurriel Jr. (27.3), Raimel Tapia (28.1), George Springer (28.3), Bradley Zimmer (29.2), Jackie Bradley Jr. (27.1), and Teoscar Hernández (28.6).
A funny thing happens when you look at this year’s version of the same chart.
On this one we have Kirk (22.9), Jansen (26.2), Vlad (26.7), Espinal (26.8), Biggio (27.0), Chapman (27.7), Bo (26.8), Daulton Varsho (27.0), Merrifield (28.7), Kevin Kiermaier (28.8), Springer (27.8), and Brandon Belt (24.8)
It’s early, obviously — the sample is tiny, so there aren’t a whole lot of “competitive” balls to judge by — but that doesn’t look like the obviously faster team, does it?
Yes, it’s got Kiermaier and Merrifield, who are in the 92nd and 91st percentile respectively, and there’s certainly room for improvement from the likes of Kirk, Jansen, Bichette, Biggio, etc., but I think it’s some pretty compelling evidence that the Jays are running smarter, not necessarily faster.
Not that it matters, as long as it’s working — and it is. Heading into Friday's game the team's BsR (baserunning runs) of 1.5 ranked 6th in baseball. Last season they ranked 25th at -10.5.
Anthony Bass is a bit worrying
Anthony Bass had an outstanding 2022 season, posting a 1.54 ERA over 70 1/3 innings with better than a strikeout per frame while keeping his walk rate well below where it had been in the previous three seasons. His walk and home run numbers went a bit sideways after his move from spacious Miami to Toronto and the AL East, but in general he was just a very solid reliever.
So far in 2023 he has, uh, not looked like that.
The problem very clearly has been the fact that right-handed batters have been teeing off on him. He's faced 16 right-handers so far, and to them he's surrendered six hits, four of which have gone for extra bases (three doubles, one home run). Add in one walk (and three strikeouts) and his line in the split is a putrid .400/.438/.800.
In 2022, right-handers slashed .159/.228/.242 off of him.
Right now, Bass is throwing his sinker 43% of the time to right-handed hitters, and his slider at 52%. That's not so different from last season, but the outcomes on the sinker certainly have been. None of Bass’s sinkers to right-handers have generated a swing-and-miss, down from 16.4% last year. And 100% of the sinkers that have been put in play off of him by right-handers have been hard hit (i.e. greater than 95 mph off the bat), down from 29%.
So, what gives?
Well, the sinker has lost a little bit of velocity, going from 95.3 mph on average to 94.6. But that doesn't seem like a whole lot, and probably isn't enough to make such a drastic difference. Nor is anything that’s going on with the way the pitch is breaking, which has been almost exactly the same year over year both vertically and horizontally.
Something is off, though, because at 7.9 runs above average according to Pitch Info, Bass’s sinker was one of the best in baseball last year — top 10 among relievers. This year so far, at -1.1 runs, it’s been one of the worst.
To me, there are two things that don’t look the same: one is where he’s standing on the rubber/releasing the pitch.
And the other is where he’s been locating the it.
It’s not like he’s leaving everything out over the plate, but it doesn’t exactly look like he’s putting the ball where he wants to, either.
Hopefully that’s something that’s fairly easily corrected, because it’s been ugly so far — though the offseason addition of Erik Swanson (who Yahoo’s Ethan Diamandas notes was up to a 55.6% swing-and-miss rate on his splitter versus right-handers heading into Friday night) has certainly helped pick up the slack at the back of the bullpen so far.
Zach’s Poppin’
Zach Pop only faced one batter on Friday night, but it was a pretty big one. A crazy, four-run bottom-of-the-fifth had given the Jays a 6-1 lead, which afforded manager John Schneider the comfort to use Trevor Richards in the top of the sixth instead of Erik Swanson — who he appeared to be planning to use when it was still a one-run game. Richards gave up a pair of singles sandwiched between a pair of outs, and so, with Isaac Paredes coming up, Schneider went to Pop.
It was just one batter that the Canadian was asked to face — a decision that seemed questionable when Yimi Garcia gave up back-to-back solo shots to Josh Lowe and Christian Bethancourt to cut the Jays' lead to 6-3 in the top of the seventh — and as he's done all season so far, Pop did was he needed to.
An eight-pitch K to Paredes took his strikeout total for the season to seven in seven innings — an important step forward given that last year he struck out just 5.77 batters per nine. He's now faced 22, and allowed just one run on two hits and one walk. He maybe hasn't quite moved up a spot in the bullpen pecking order just yet, but combine his success with the Clay Holmes comp Pete Walker put on him back in spring training — which Dan Shulman noted on Friday's telecast — and you feel like he's a guy who, if he keeps this up, has the potential for an expanded role.
Daulton Varsho is handling LHP just fine
Daulton Varsho's offensive production here at the start of his Blue Jays career has been a very pleasant surprise. Sure, the various projection systems all appeared bullish on him despite his producing just a 106 wRC+ in Arizona last season — a career high — but it was hard not to look at a number like that, or his production against left-handed pitching in 2022 (52 wRC+), and not get a little bit concerned about his potential for settling into his big league career as a mere platoon guy.
The Jays obviously felt differently, given not just the high price they paid to acquire him, but how often he's been allowed to face left-handers. Of course, partly that may also be happening because his play against lefties has warranted it. So far Varsho has ridden a .462 BABIP to a .375 average and .421 on-base against them.
There are caveats here, however. It's all been singles as yet, including a pair of gorgeous bunts for hits, and he simply doesn't seem to strike the ball very well versus lefties — with the bunts excluded his average exit velocity against them has been just 83.7 mph, ranking 46th of 58 left-handed batters who've had at least five plate appearances against left-handed pitchers so far. But he doesn't really need to be doing anything more than what he's already been doing.
We’ll see how it goes from here, but the early results have certainly been encouraging. The 54.5% line drive rate will, uh, likely regress. But if the 21.7% strikeout rate — down from 29.2% against them last year — holds, that would bode really well.
Tim Mayza is an odd one!
Things are basically working right now for the Jays' only left-handed reliever, Tim Mayza. Or, at least, the results you want to see continue to come. Since failing to get an out and allowing a go-ahead run in St. Louis on opening day, Mayza hasn't allowed a run over 4 2/3 innings. He’s struck out four (though all came in the same game in Kansas City), given up four hits, and he’s walked nobody. It's much too early to even look at a thing like this, let alone believe it’s in any way meaningful, but so far he's actually been the Jays' most valuable reliever by fWAR — even including Jordan Romano, who picked up his fifth save of the season on Friday but is only at 0.2 WAR to Mayza’s 0.3.
And yet it hasn't exactly felt easy, has it? Particularly when Mayza has been tasked with facing a right-handed batter. He has so far has faced 10 right-handers, and given up four hits, including a double, while managing just one strikeout.
Weirder than even that, he continues to grow closer and closer to becoming essentially a one-pitch pitcher.
Right now Mayza is throwing his sinker 90% of the time: 85% against right-handers and a whopping 94.4% against lefties. A slider exists just to keep guys honest, but I'm not sure how useful it is for that — particularly against righties, who have produced a .562 wOBA against the sinker so far in 2023. Obviously the sample is tiny, but that’s incredibly high for a pitch being used that much. And yet he’s managed to get the job done.
According to Statcast, going back to 2008, there have only been a handful of guys to have been so reliant on one fastball over the course of a full season. Mariano Rivera (cutter) was basically a one-pitch pitcher, of course. Kenley Jansen (cutter), Zack Britton (sinker), James Pazos (sinker), Jake McGee (four-seamer), and Tony Cingrani (four-seamer) have also each had seasons with more than 90% use of their fastballs (min. 500 pitches) over that span. And... that's it! Not even Sean Doolittle, who was also famous for basically only ever throwing his four-seamer, reached that 90% threshold.
It can be done, in other words. But only by a handful of guys out of hundreds and hundreds. Can Mayza also be one of them? Should he be trying to be? I’m not entirely sure, myself, and tend to believe the indicators that aren’t saves, ERA, etc. I think John Schneider, Pete Walker, et al., have done a decent job keeping him away from right-handers, but that's not always easy to do — as we saw on Thursday, when the Tigers used right-handed pinch hitter Matt Vierling with Mayza on the hill (and not yet having faced three batters) in the seventh inning of a 2-1 game.
It's a concern! It will bite them again soon, no doubt. Fortunately, perhaps, there is another left-handed pitcher on the horizon…
Ricky Tiedemann might be ready
There is no Statcast data available for top prospect Ricky Tiedemann's season debut on Thursday. Fortunately, traditional numbers work just as well for conveying his dominance. In just three innings of work — ostensibly due in part to the mild shoulder issue that set him back during spring training, and perhaps partly to the Jays' desire for him to save some bullets to potentially help the big club later on in the summer — he managed to strike out the side in each frame.
Nine Ks, 13 whiffs (more than the 11 produced by Portland Sea Dogs starter Brian Van Belle, who pitched twice as many innings), and just two hits allowed — one of which was an infield single that Tiedemann deflected to shortstop. Of his 49 pitches, 35 were strikes (72%).
Obviously we’re still very early in the season here, and no one should necessarily be a expecting a Manoah-like rise through the system — no matter how badly we might end up wanting to see a Kikuchi or Berríos out of the rotation before the first of May. But Tiedemann clearly appears to be on the right track after that shoulder-related mini-wobble in the spring. And, maybe more importantly, his future manager seems to be very impressed.
“I don't know what else he needs to do at Double-A,” John Schneider said to reporters, including SI’s Mitch Bannon, on Friday afternoon. “I think the biggest thing was feeling good afterwards, was the big key. We know Rick can pitch, didn’t really expect that first time out, but happy for him.”
Yowza. That’s a very high level opinion offering some incredible praise for a 20-year-old. You just don’t hear stuff like that — and, more than maybe anything we’ve heard about Tiedemann so far, it kinda makes me start to really believe he’ll be here sometime this year.
The Jays’ renovations appear to be winners
Yes, yes, there have been many terrified words said and written about the new positioning of the visiting bullpen at Rogers Centre, but those have presumably come from those who have already forgotten how easy it was to chirp opposing relievers from the seats behind the old bullpens. Or forgotten how seriously MLB takes player safety, how quickly fans will get kicked out if a player or team staff wants them gone, and how common it is for stadiums to have places where fans end up in very close proximity to players.
I obviously can’t say definitively that this setup will be incident-free, but unless you think Jays fans are considerably more menacing than, say, Red Sox, Yankees, Phillies, or Giants fans, I don’t really get the pearl-clutching here. Back in 2015, former journeyman reliever Burke Badenhop wrote a piece about bullpen life for Grantland, and the biggest safety concerns he mentioned had nothing to do with fans — they were about various steps and cobblestones relievers need to traverse to get to and from the field.
“What’s a day at work without being told you stink, anyway?” he wrote.
Otherwise? People seem to be enjoying the new social spaces at Rogers Centre — at least based on the many, many, many camera shots of them we’ve been treated to during broadcasts. I’ve yet to check out the new digs myself, and I’m sure that at some point the novelty will wear off, but it’s hard not to notice how much better a use of what were some of the most grim spaces in the building the new layout provides.
Bonus points for some of the stuff that isn’t public-facing, too — like the new kids room.
The Jays have been very clear about wanting to be a family-first organization, and have made that an important plank in their recruiting process when it comes to free agents. It’s no surprise, then, that they emphasized that as part of their renovation. Cool to see it getting the seal of approval.
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The Kooch is going to win 20 games.
Cats go to hell, dogs go to heaven, only 2 jays starters have ERAs below 7