I guess we should talk about Judge and Manoah...

Monday’s opener of this week’s Jays-Yankees series wasn’t an especially fun one if you’re a Jays fan, but — hoo boy! — it generated some talking points. Fragile Yankees fans, fragile Jays fans, Boss Baby vibes. This one had it all!

Funnily enough, the game took place on the seventh anniversary of Rougned Odor’s infamous punch of José Bautista — the “mighty” wallop that phased Joey Bats for about 1/8th of a second, and that is still celebrated by the Rangers and Rangers fans alike, who both always seem to omit the fact that the whole thing started because their chickenshit team waited until José’s last at-bat of the last scheduled game between the two teams that season to retaliate for the events of the previous October (in which Bautista had taken advantage of the Rangers utterly humiliating themselves out of the playoffs, and apparently enjoyed the moment too much for their liking), by intentionally hitting him with a pitch.

Beware the ides of Meltdown May, I suppose.

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Judging Aaron

Let’s start this one with the conclusion: Aaron Judge wasn’t cheating but Dan Shulman and Buck Martinez were absutely right to point out whatever it is he was doing — and did so as professionally as could have been done given how bad it looked that Judge just so happened to demolish a hanging Jay Jackson meatball mid-discussion.

I, for one, am very glad we had Dan and Buck getting out ahead of this thing, and Ben Nicholson-Smith getting Judge to go on record with his explanation. The insult-trading and conspiratorial nonsense would be even more unbearable otherwise.

Personally, I find it much more entertaining to insinuate that of course the Yankees cheat (or have the commissioner’s office do it for them) — it’s not like they haven’t been caught before, and by now we all know about the “Goldilocks balls” — but that they surely aren’t stupid enough to give a visual cue that it’s happening while on the field, in the batter’s box, with camera’s trained directly on them. Or, if they were, they would have been caugh eons ago, you fools!

For those who missed it, or only saw a short clip, a quick rundown…

The first time Judge is spotted doing it is ahead of Jackson’s 0-1 pitch, during a split screen closeup of each of their faces.

Judge would later say that he was looking over to the dugout to see who on the bench was chirping the home plate umpire. Truly clownish behaviour in a game that was 6-0 at the time, which was indeed taking place, as we’d soon see.

The first eye-dart pitch was a ball — a result that was somewhat conspicuously not commented on at the time by Dan and Buck, who were presumably off mic discussing what they seen in the closeup.

Dan resumed speaking as Jackson began his motion to the plate with a simple, “The 1-1…”

Though a few inches low, that one gets called a strike just as Dan begins, “Alright Buck, so, Judge kind of...”

Boone gets even louder, more animated, and more clownish, and is tossed from the game, forcing the booth to change tack.

After order is restored and Jackson misses with his fourth pitch, Dan begins again.

DAN: Alright Buck, so you and I looked at each other at the same moment, right when we saw this, three pitches ago.

BUCK: Watch what he's looking at.

DAN: Yeah. What is that?

BUCK: Where's he looking?

DAN: Where's he looking? And he did it more than once.

BUCK: Yeah. It was really unusual. You and I both looked at each other when we saw that.

DAN: Yeah.

BUCK: Like, did you see what I saw?

DAN: You don't want to go, you know, throwing allegations around without knowing, but —

BUCK: Nah. And you know, I have had guys look back when I was catching, and you obviously could see it, and he couldn't see the catcher with the way he was looking right there.

DAN: Just did it again. And he pummelled it.

Now, I’m not sure I buy Judge’s explanation for all this, but he did quite visibly suggest to his dugout that they should cool it with the chirping. And very plausibly explained afterwards that, even with Boone tossed, he was looking over because guys were still doing it.

“I feel like after the manager does his thing it’s like, ‘Fellas, our pitcher has still got to go out there and make some pitches. We’ve got the lead, let’s just go to work here,’” he explained to reporters after the game.

But whether it was that, or whether he was trying to peek in on the catcher’s setup as he looked past him down the field, or if he had picked up that one of the Jays’ infielders using PitchCom was giving away something about the pitch type or location by setting up early (or being signalled as much by the first base coach), it all makes a hell of a lot more sense than the idea that he alone among Yankees has been getting electronically stolen signals relayed to him from elsewhere, which he has to look over for pre-pitch, and which no one has noticed until now.

Fun as it is to dunk on the stupid Yankees and rile up their weird front-running fans, most of us would get all this real quick if the shoe was on the other foot — and absolutely did get it back when the “Man in White” scandal broke.

As for John Schneider, fair point to him for not taking the heat off a rival team by being too open about this. He’s not wrong that “it’s kind of odd that a hitter would be looking in that direction,” and it’s fine to leave it at that. At least publicly. Behind closed doors, however, he’d better be making sure his players are tightening up anything they may have been giving away that Judge or Travis Chapman could have spotted. That’s on them. There’s a reason catchers shield their signals, or now use PitchCom, and make sure not to set up too early. If there’s even a hint that there’s an issue there, it needs to be addressed — and it sounds like it will be.

It’s the little things, eh John?

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Well, OK, and maybe one big thing…

Alek is (not) on Fire

Alek Manoah has struggled so far this season, as has been very apparent.

Manoah struggled again on Monday night, but in a way I think we need to be careful not to suggest looked like the rest of his games so far. For example, it’s really only been in his three starts in May that the strikeouts have disappeared on him. And Monday’s seven walks were a season high. Obviously he’s mostly been bad here in 2023, but that one was certainly uglier than average.

Nothing in this sport is ever quite as good or quite as bad as it seems — which is why it seems beyond silly to me that people are out there acting like this is a problem that needs immediate and drastic action, rather than one that more simply needs to be worked through over the course of the next few weeks and months.

Sure, on Twitter you can find a living breathing straw man saying literally anything you could ever dream of arguing against — hell, I keep seeing this one freak out there who keeps suggesting that Whit Merrifield isn’t a very good hitter anymore! — but apparently this stuff is real…

And it’s what’s giving me those aforementioned Boss Baby vibes…

Like, literally last year the Jays had two starters who struggled this badly or worse, for this long or longer. The team lacked for depth, yes, but it’s not like anybody’s exactly banging down the door at the moment right now, is it?

The Jays gave Yusei Kikuchi 20 starts in 2022. Manoah is not even halfway there yet. He’s also a guy the Jays obviously have a huge amount of faith in, given his opening day start and his getting the ball in game one of the playoffs a little more than seven months ago. They are not the same.

Granted, one of the things that allowed Jays fans — and perhaps the Jays themselves — to continue to have hope for Berríos and Kikuchi was the fact that neither seemed to have lost anything in terms of stuff. That isn’t quite the case for Manoah, whose velocity and slider break have both moved in the wrong direction.

In the excellent FanGraphs piece by Leo Morgenstern that I linked in Monday’s post, we learned a lot about what’s gone wrong and how — it’s very much worth a read — but not a lot about the why or what to do about it. I can’t say I have a clue here myself either. But I do feel very confident about what’s not going happen. Unless there’s something physical going on that we don’t know about, we’re probably still a long, long way from the Jays deciding it’s best for him to be elsewhere.

He’s not going to rebuild himself like Halladay — good lord! — and wasting innings against Triple-A cannon fodder won’t do him any good. He needs to find his best stuff or find a better way to battle without it. That’s work that will have to be done against big leaguers, and that will probably require a few more duds before he gets right.

And that’s fine. The good innings he gives them in the meantime — and there will be plenty of those too — will be more than enough to make avoiding a Zach Thompson call-up, or giving a rotation spot to Mitch White, worthwhile. As will the ultimate payoff, which is that he gets right sooner.

It’s bad, but it’s also May and he was a Cy Young finalist last year. He may not ultimately be fine, but he deserves a hell of a lot more of a chance to prove that out than this! A hell of a lot more.

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