Fishing with Ross

On consumer confidence, a weird weekend, and hopefully the last of the Bass fallout. Plus some quick news and notes as the Jays get set for a big series with the Orioles.

Sunday's win to avoid being swept at home by the Minnesota Twins was about as satisfying a victory as the Blue Jays have had all season. For me, at least. Not only did the Jays overcome a rare tough outing from Kevin Gausman — though it was not the first time since joining the club that the Twins seemed to know what was coming from him — they overcame a particularly pissy turn from a fan base that had watched the team win its previous four series in a row.

I can't deny it, an epic comeback victory tastes so much sweeter for me when it comes on one of those days when everybody seems to forget just how little anything in this game is written in stone. Jays can't score runs? Can't come back? Can't hit with RISP? Biggio stinks? OK, here's a three-run, eighth-inning home run from Biggio to blast the Jays to a one-run lead after at one point being down 6-1. Baseball!

This doesn't suddenly make Biggio good — though his last 40 PA have been a whole lot better than we're used to — any more than a win makes any of the team's problems go away, but both things offer a good chance to take a deep breath, gather some perspective, and think about what’s real here and what isn’t…

---

---

I’ll be honest here, friends. This site keeps the lights on for me, but it isn’t a cash cow. And I could live a lot more comfortably than I do right now if I was willing to put some of my work behind a paywall and push a bunch readers who are on the fence into becoming paid subscribers. But, the thing is, I know that times are tough for a lot of people and I really don’t want to become inaccessible to anyone. So, if you can afford it, and you value what I do and aren’t already a paid subscriber, I’d ask that you consider upgrading your free membership to a paid one. Thanks. — Stoeten

---

---

I saw a tweet on Tuesday that said “the Jays are 37=30, but it feels like they’re 30-37,” and I feel like that’s a sentiment that would probably resonate with a whole lot of fans. Not because — as you might be expecting me to say — they’re wrong and overly frustrated, but because there’s actually quite a bit of sense to it.

The Jays' record would have them leading the AL Central by 3.5 games, leading the NL central by 1.5 games, second in the NL East (3.5 games back and in the second NL wild card spot), barely third in the NL West (4.5 games back, just a half game behind the Dodgers, and holding a wild card spot), and third in the AL West (5.0 games back). Only in the AL East does 37-30 leave a team in fourth place and 10 games back. Every other team with a winning percentage above .550 currently has their hands on a playoff spot.

A 30-37 record in the AL Central, meanwhile, would put them much closer to the division lead (4.5 games back) than 37-30 does in the AL East.

I mean, that sucks! It’s a tough spot.

And though they’re just a half game back of a wild card spot right now, with 95 games still left to play, passing one of the Astros, Yankees, or Orioles while simultaneously holding off the likes of the Angels, Mariners, and Red Sox is not going to be an easy task. And, so far, the club’s run differential of +25 suggests they’re exactly where they should be: the seventh-best team in the American League.

A series loss this week in Baltimore could deepen the hole they’re in — not to mention the misery of the fans and the poisonous nature of the discourse around the club — yet still leave them on an 88-win pace.

That is, of course, not good enough to meet the high expectations rightly placed on this team. But it’s still, you know, pretty good. Especially with so many games left to push it much higher.

Yet, as with digging themselves out from the hole they found themselves in back on Sunday, fans right now seem to be having a tough time mustering the belief that they can turn their season around.

Some of that lack of belief — be it with the bench, the bullpen, John Schneider, Vlad, or whatever else — is mostly just silliness, in my view. For one thing, bench guys are going to play like bench guys — I’m sorry, but nobody has a bunch of guys good enough to produce every day just sitting on their bench or in Triple-A! For another, the consternation about Bowden Francis not pitching in the eighth inning with a one-run lead on Saturday was a little overblown given the difficulty he's had at keeping the ball in the ballpark — he's allowed 42 HR in 187 Triple-A innings (2.0 HR/9) since joining the Jays in 2021 — plus the fact that his fastball velocity was already starting to wane, and that the bullpen (though, I will grant, not necessarily Adam Cimber) has by and large been pretty effective this year. And you only need to look as far as Bo Bichette, and what he’s been doing this season, to see how foolish it can be to start jumping off the bandwagon when it comes to electrifying young talent.

I know, the “Vlad hasn’t hit a home run at home yet” stuff isn’t actually about some kind of a magic force or personal failing that’s causing his troubles there. It’s more about viewing that stat as a microcosm of the Jays’ anemic offence. But it's also maybe more instructive than most people realize.

Because the Jays spent so much time on the road to start the season, Vlad played just 15 of his first 38 games at home. He was going well then, and it's a bit of a weird luck-distribution thing that he didn't homer at Rogers Centre in any of those games. He then played 16 of his next 26 games at home.

That’s a much higher proportion of home games, and that run coincide with the slump he entered after tweaking his knee fielding a popped-up bunt against the Yankees on May 16th. Vlad had a 156 wRC+ coming out of the Jays' home sweep of the Braves in the series preceding that one. Since the start of the Yankees that mark is just 73. His walk rate is down, his strikeout rate is up, his exit velocities, barrel rate, and hard hit rates are down. The differences haven't been massive, but there's enough there, I think, to make it plausible that his latest wobble has been more about the knee than about the last four weeks finally revealing his true self as a hitter or confirming that 2021 must have been a mirage — a lesson that the Bichette experience last season really ought to have taught.

Less silly, I’d say, is the stuff I’ve started to see lately about the Jays’ reluctance to hit the ball to the pull side. So far in 2023, the club’s pull rate has dipped by the third-biggest margin in baseball. They’ve gone from being in a tie as the 7th-most pull-happy team in 2021 (38.2%), to 17th last year (37.8%), to 28th of 30 this year (35.9%). Perhaps unsurprisingly, their team slugging percentage has somewhat followed suit. Here in 2023 it’s still decent at .421 (10th), but it's gone from .466 (1st) in 2021 then to .431 (3rd) last year to get there. And after leading the league in hard hit rate last year (44.3%) they’ve now dropped into a tie for 12th (41.2%), and have had the majors’ biggest drop according to that metric.

A lot of this comes down to personnel changes, but certainly not all of it. Ross Atkins talked about the club’s overall hitting philosophy when he joined Dan Shulman and Buck Martinez in Sportsnet’s booth back on opening day.

BUCK: You've got eight hits already and we're in the third inning. And some of them have been kinda flare hits, but how do you evaluate the approach? We've seen Bo double down the right field line. It seems like everybody's bought into that approach.

ATKINS: I could not be more pleased to watch that. To see guys pulling their hands inside, staying within themselves, and thinking about the whole field. It works. And the fact that the ball is not drive quite as hard as maybe a double in the gap is just because where it hit the barrel. I mean, you know that better than I do, that that's a really good swing, and that's a really good sign for our offence.

I’ve joked before about living by a roster constructed solely to please Buck Martinez and dying by it, but this kind of stuff — which was a bit surprising to me at the time, especially with a guy like Matt Chapman, who had seemed to turn his 2022 season around last June by getting far more pull-happy — may be living proof. And… well… perhaps it’s not good enough to have just a “pretty effective” bullpen if you’re going to pivot so hard into winning games by the thinnest of margins on pitching and defence, and away from, you know, the one thing you were elite at.

And that brings us around to what was the bigger theme of the weekend, which was: do these guys actually know what they’re doing?

On one hand I sometimes find myself wondering if, a few years from now, a whole lot of people are going to look up and realize that the best run of Blue Jays baseball since the 90s ended and they missed a lot of the joy of it by being utterly miserable the whole time.

On the other hand, the graphic below is an awfully ugly one for a front office that will head into next season potentially with just two years of Vlad and Bo left, and simply may not have the horses to change their placement on it before then — if they’re even able to get into this year’s playoffs in the first place…

Yes, this is the fourth year of the Jays having genuine championship aspirations, and actually being able to market those, but a lot of times in sports perception is reality. And right now the perception of the front office is at the lowest ebb we’ve seen in a long time.

I don’t think anybody could actually say how much of an effect the Anthony Bass debacle may have had on how Jays fans processed very nearly being swept at home by the Twins over the weekend, but it’s hard not to think about. If you can’t lead, if you can’t listen to reason, if you can’t be sufficiently decisive in one aspect of your job, why should anybody believe you’re able to do so in any other?

Atkins explained to reporters on Friday, not long after designating Bass for assignment, that the move was primarily "a baseball decision” — though he acknowledged that "the distraction component was a part of it." He also said that it was "not a realistic outcome" for Bass to stay in the organization were he to clear waivers, yet also insisted that he hadn't changed his mind about the authenticity of Bass's apology — the reason, he assured us while the matter festered for 10 days, that Bass wasn't disciplined in the first place.

I'll give him that Bass, with eight years of MLB service and the right to refuse an outright assignment and still collect his cheque, was absolutely not going to elect to remain in the organization after being DFA’d.

Hell, I could even give him that maybe he technically hasn't changed his mind about the apology. It’s not just plausible, but I think likely that he never thought it was an authentic apology, but just said so in the hopes that the whole thing might just blow over.

But how on earth could he expect anyone to believe that a "baseball decision" needed ten days to be made when the guy was barely even pitching and — *gestures wildly* — all this was going on??? It just so happened to become a baseball decision after the player made a fool of his GM??

This doesn’t just strain credulity, it utterly disfigures it.

I can't imagine that Atkins could have expected anyone to believe the things he was saying on Friday. But, more importantly, I also can't imagine that there wasn't anyone who felt they could tell him that this was obviously going to go down as another humiliation.

I mean, Jesus, at least when J.P. Ricciardi said “it’s not a lie if we know the truth,” you could almost respect him for being such a prick. Atkins would have done better by hiding under a pile of coats and hoping that somehow everything would work out.

And he practically did at times, too! For example, the Sun’s Rob Longley reported on Monday that the Jays actually didn't want Bass catching the ceremonial first pitch of their Pride Weekend, as was the galaxy-brained plan at some point back on Thursday. Apparently they gave him the chance to back out, but found the scheme difficult to nix because Bass and Pride Toronto executive director Shrewin Modeste had come up with the idea, and "Bass somewhat defiantly wanted to go through with the ceremony."

This seems, to put it mildly, insane. You’re the team! It’s your game, your product, your ceremony, and a player in your employ! How could this have been difficult to stop? I hope the coats at least smelled nice!

Longley adds that “the news that Bass was scheduled to be a prominent part of the on-field celebration was not well-received in the Jays clubhouse” — something that was made clear about all of this nonsense in his piece on Saturday, in which Rob reports being told by one clubhouse individual, “All we want to do is focus on baseball and the ability to do that has been compromised. It’s a major distraction.”

This, of course, was not the first time ol’ “Popcorn Boy” proved himself to be a distraction this season either, which is another thing that speaks to how bungled this has been from the get-go. Bass’s social media antics should have been stopped when he was trying to get that flight attendant fired, or at the very least been on somebody’s radar!

I really don’t want to bother any longer with the subject of this clown, but the incompetence displayed throughout the whole situation really is quite alarming. And while I have no doubt that, had none of this stuff happened, Jays fans may have become just as agitated about the club’s subpar performance until those last couple of innings against the Twins, there’s no question that the Bass thing has eroded what was already some pretty shaky faith that fans had in this whole operation — even if I’m only speaking for myself here.

Woof.

---

---

---

---

Quick notes…

• The stupid Orioles are winners of four straight and have managed to claw their way to within 5.0 games of the Rays. The Jays will see Dean Kremer, Kyle Bradish, and Taylor Wells of the next three games, so it seems at least plausible that they could put a nice dent in stupid Baltimore's stupid aspirations, but they'll have to it without one of the hottest hitters in baseball. Brandon Belt was moved to the IL with hamstring inflammation prior to Tuesday's game as part of a series of roster moves made by the club.

• Belt's IL stint comes mostly out of an abundance of caution, per John Schneider's pre-game chat with reporters. Less cautious is the path the club is taking with Danny Jansen, who has been activated from the IL and will have no restrictions placed on him. He's good to go.

• With Jano back, the Jays won't need third catcher Tyler Heineman, so he's been optioned back down to Buffalo. The fact that Heineman can be optioned was certainly a large part of the appeal for the Jays when they acquired him in April, as their previous number three — Rob Brantly — would have needed to clear waivers before going back down.

• Adam Cimber is also no longer with the club, but before anyone gets too excited, he's simply been temporarily moved to the paternity list.

• Coming up to take the place of Belt and Cimber are infielder Ernie Clement and right-hander Bowden Francis. Gee, weird, the Jays managed to get Francis back up in time to potentially make another start in Alek Manoah's spot. Who'dve thunk it? (Literally everyone should have!)

• Buffalo has a couple of guys making noise with the bat of late, notably Davis Schneider (.957 OPS and recently named International League player of the week) and Rafael Lantigua (.913 OPS). Both are right-handed hitters, as is Clement (.936 OPS in Buffalo, FWIW). 1B/DH/LF Spencer Horwitz (.830 OPS) is a more natural fit in Belt's place, though his lack of power will pose problems at the big league level.

• In other news via Schneider, Sportsnet's Ben Nicholson-Smith tweets that Alek Manoah "threw a five-up, 72-pitch sim game in Dunedin" on Saturday, "some of it in the pitching lab." Manoah and Hyun Jin Ryu, who has been reunited with his former protegé while rehabbing at the Jays' PDC, FaceTimed wit Schneider on Sunday. Ryu, Ben adds, is "slated to face hitters in live BP this week."

• Benny Fresh also lays this on us: “Asked John Schneider whether Blue Jays have given thought to whether they’ll go bullpen game then Gausman vs. Rangers this weekend, or Gausman then bullpen game. ‘Yes, we have.’ Care to share those thoughts? ‘Not yet.’”

• Lastly, do as all a favour and beat the stupid Orioles, would ya Jays? Please???

---

---

⚾ Be sure to follow me on Twitter // Follow the Batflip on 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. ⚾