Incorrectly ranking the 10 players the Jays can least afford to lose for significant time in 2023
Or, put another way, who are the Jays' most important players for the season ahead?
With Tuesday’s Grapefruit League finale against the Phillies in Clearwater likely to be the domain of the Blue Jays’ minor leaguers, spring training for the group of players that will be heading to St. Louis for opening day on Thursday is all but over. And fortunately, unlike their division rivals, they’ve made it through camp relatively unscathed.
In Boston, the bad news came early, as the Red Sox learned back in December that shortstop Trevor Story was experiencing pain while throwing, and then in January had to send him for potentially season-ending UCL surgery. They'll also likely begin the season without rehabbing starters Garrett Whitlock, James Paxton, and Brayan Bello.
The Rays, meanwhile, lost starter Tyler Glasnow in late February to an oblique strain that will likely keep him out until May. This means that, at least for the time being, he joins Shane Baz on the IL. Baz, a sparkling prospect who started game two of the 2021 ALDS despite having just three big league appearances to his name, underwent surgery to remove loose bodies from his right elbow last spring, then ended up making six starts in the majors before hitting the IL with elbow trouble again around the All-Star break. It wasn't until late September that it was determined that he'd need Tommy John surgery. He'll miss the entire season.
And, of course, it's the Yankees and their injuries that have been one of the major stories in the sport this past month. Reliever Scott Effross, an impressive trade deadline acquisition, had Tommy John surgery in October. Frankie Montas, another of the Bombers' deadline “haul,” never looked right last season due to shoulder trouble that was apparent even when he was in Oakland. He had surgery in late February with the expectation that he'd be shut down for three months. More recently, Carlos Rodón, who just signed a six-year, $162 million free agent deal with the club, has just returned from a two-week shutdown and in the best-case scenario won't be back until the end of April. Luis Severino just suffered a lat injury which will cause him to miss at least a few starts — though a lat strain he suffered last season cost him two months. And the club will also be missing relievers Tommy Kahnle and Lou Trivino, plus outfielder Harrison Bader to start the year.
(The Orioles also exist, though their issues are more of the self-inflicted variety. Failing to spend money in the offseason, choosing not to open the season with top pitching prospect Grayson Rodriguez for mealy-mouthed reasons that definitely *COUGH* don’t have anything to do with service time manipulation, etc.)
Now, the Blue Jays aren't completely injury free, but comparatively the picture is far less bleak than at least the Yankees' immediate one. Hyun Jin Ryu won't be available until July at the earliest as he continues to rehab from last season's Tommy John surgery, though the front office was at least able to build their rotation with the knowledge that he won't be a part of it. Reliever Chad Green is also rehabbing from TJ, but he was hurt before the Jays signed him to that funky two-year deal. And Mitch White, after spending much of the spring dealing with a shoulder impingement, now has elbow inflammation and appears set to start the year in his ideal roster spot, on the Injured List.
In other words, it’s a good time to be a member of the Blue Jays, health wise, and with a tough, ten-game road trip to start the season upcoming, that’s a very fortunate thing. But it could all change in a hurry.
For obvious reasons fans don’t like to think a whole lot about injuries — particularly long-term ones — until they happen. But we all know full well that they can change the outlook on a team’s entire season, especially when that team lacks depth in certain crucial areas.
So, with the Blue Jays health in good shape for now, and the team poised for a what ought to be successful season, I thought… why not go for it? Why not do something absolutely no one will like and force ourselves into contemplating the kinds of dark hypotheticals that Yankees fans have been reckoning with in reality!
I could have just as easily have framed this a list of the most important Blue Jays for 2023 — you can think about it that way if my framing really bugs you! — but where’s the fun in that? These are the 10 players the Jays can least afford to have miss significant time in the upcoming season…
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Vladimir Guerrero Jr.
When I began to mull over this list, I thought Vlad was going to be an easy choice for this spot. But the more I thought about it, the more I wobbled. Vlad wasn't the Jays' best position player last year by a long shot. His 2.8 fWAR put him a full win behind Alejandro Kirk, who himself put up just the fourth-best mark on the club. Vlad’s not projected to be the most valuable member of the team this season either, at least according to ZiPS and FanGraphs' Depth Charts (that honour, among position players, goes to Matt Chapman).
Vlad also plays the least important defensive position on the diamond. And he has what appears to be a pretty good backup in Brandon Belt — a guy who I think could be a real difference-maker for this team if he clicks and stays healthy, though I didn't wind up putting him on this list.
And yet, Vlad is such a special hitter, has such game-changing power, and has so much more in him than we saw in 2022 — as evidenced by 2021, when only a literally Ruthian performance from Shohei Ohtani kept him from winning an MVP award at age 22 — that I think this is where he belongs. You have a chance with Vlad in a down year. I’m not sure how much of one you have without him.
Plus, though Belt can certainly handle some first base — he logged over 500 innings there for the Giants in his injury-shortened 2022 — he's really been signed as a DH, might get hurt himself, and so I think we'd end up seeing a lot of Cavan Biggio at first in the event of an extended Vlad absence. That, to me, changes the look of this team quite a bit more than, say, having Santiago Espinal in for Bo Bichette short.
Bo Bichette
Bo certainly has a case for being at the top of the list, as he plays in the most important spot on the diamond and is a superstar offensive talent, or thereabouts, in his own right. The thing is, he doesn't play shortstop especially well — Espinal would at least be a defensive upgrade if forced into regular action — and we saw in 2022 that the Jays can manage to get by even when Bo is not at his best. The team had the third best record in the American League through August 20th, despite Bo sitting on a 103 wRC+ at that point in the season.
That's not to say that he’s not important — he's second on my list and I debated putting him first! they played to an 88-win pace to that point, and a 101-win pace thereafter! — but when it comes down to it I suppose I value Vlad's offensive consistency and upside just a little bit more. And fear what the lineup would look like without him just a little bit less.
Kevin Gausman
With respect to Alek Manoah — who I love and can’t wait to watch do his thing in a Jays uniform for a long, long time — there’s just something that scares me a little bit about guys who are deemed to be “winners” without doing it for an especially long time first, as well as guys as reliant as he is on generating soft contact.
Among the 140 pitchers with at least 100 innings last season, Manoah's .244 BABIP was the 10th lowest, Gausman's (.363) the second highest. We're no longer in the days where we'd expect them both to regress to the mean — Manoah genuintely does seem to have an outsize ability to induce poor contact — but I'm in the camp that prefers the filthy, bat-missing stuff that Gausman has. Especially when you consider that he is not going to be as unlucky with batted balls again in 2023, that he'll have significantly better outfield defenders behind him, and when Eno Sarris of the Athletic has him among the pitchers this spring to have gained the most in terms of the Stuff+ metric.
I’ll admit that a lot of this is probably just gut feeling stuff — it’s really a toss up between the two. But when push comes to shove I’m betting on Gausman in 2023, if only by a little.
Hey, I never said these were correct rankings.
Alek Manoah
Like I say, there’s not a lot of daylight between Gausman and Manoah. The Jays would be in tough if either was to miss any sort of extended period of time — especially given the state of the club’s pitching depth at Triple-A (and, honestly, in the fourth and fifth spots in the rotation). You think the prospect of a lot of Cavan Biggio starts at first base is scary, just wait until someone welcomes you to the Zach Thompson or Bowden Francis era. You know?
Anyway, as far as what I was saying above about Stuff+, let’s not mistake Manoah for any kind of slouch here. Eno’s recent Stuff+ powered pitching projections had Gausman ranked 14th in baseball, with Manoah coming in at a very respectable 30th. Let’s also remember that one person’s “just not quite enough strikeouts” is another’s “impressive focus on efficiency and pitching deep into games.”
Manoah has been a great one straight out of the box, and by all accounts should continue fairly comfortably down that path for a long time. He just does too many things too well to think otherwise, especially considering everything we hear about his make-up and demeanor on the mound.
Plus, I think there’s still a chance for him to get more out of his changeup, which would help him improve against left-handed hitters — an area where he struggled a little bit in 2022, producing just a 19% strikeout rate to go along with a 9% walk rate. And, frankly, that need for a little improvement one of the reasons I have him slightly behind the first three on the list.
Jordan Romano
WAR would obviously never tell you that a reliever should be ranked this high, but even as someone who doesn’t necessarily agree with the takemeisters who think the Jays’ bullpen unit isn’t good enough, I can acknowledge that Romano and his ability to close out games is incredibly important for this team.
There are some nice enough arms in behind him, Chad Green’s likely arrival sometime around the middle of the season will add to that group, as could any number of genuinely talented, young, high-velocity arms bubbling up from the minor leagues — something the organization hasn’t really had in years past. But until Green shows up, or something truly clicks with one of the young guys, it’s just not a very impressive group without its best member pacing around getting ready to take the ball in the ninth.
I think that’s fine, to be clear. I think the Jays were right not to completely overreact to one horrific, mind-numbing, torturous loss in the playoffs. Besides, you want the best bullpen at the end of the year, not necessarily the start of it. Hit on one of Zulueta, Danner, or Pearson, make a deadline acquisition, have Green get healthy, and you could easily look up and see one of the better bullpens in the game pitching for the Blue Jays in September. Maybe not the best, and those are still a lot of ifs to have to contend with — not to mention good health for the best of the guys who are currently here — but it could happen. No, really!
Especially early on, though? Romano being Romano feels pretty essential.
George Springer
George Springer is a fabulous player who would have led the Jays in WAR had Bo Bichette not set the world on fire over the season’s final two weeks, and he did it while playing a touch fewer than a half-season’s worth of innings in the outfield. I think it’s entirely within the realm of possibility that he could have a better season than Bo or Vlad by WAR in 2023. For one thing, moving primarily to right field should help keep him healthier, which could more than offset the positional adjustment he loses by no longer being in centre. For another, he's shown before that there's more in his bat than we saw in his one-armed 2022 — his ISO dropped to .205 from a combined .292 over the previous three seasons, though some of that can be attributed to Rob Manfred's de-juiced balls. Springer is also a guy that you’d hate to see the Jays lose, if only because their lack of true outfielders is pretty glaring, both in the majors and the minors.
And yet he finds himself down here — and, honestly, could maybe have been a spot lower — because it kind of feels like we’ve seen the Jays weather the storm without him before, and end up pretty alright for it. That’s not entirely accurate regarding 2022. Springer’s 133 games played last year is a number that feels like it must be wrong, though it isn’t. But the Jays played well in 2021 despite having him for less than half a year in total. He deserves to finally have the full, magnificent season the team is paying him for, but if there’s a long-term hiccup in there, it at least won’t feel quite as catastrophic as it would were it the guys ahead of him.
Matt Chapman
As I mentioned above, Chapman is the Blue Jays’ highest projected position player by both ZiPS and FanGraphs Depth Charts. Chapman was also second on the club last season in fWAR among position players, which I suppose makes it seem somewhat weird that he’s down this far on the list. But the thing is, other than my going off-board with Romano at number five, who would you replace him with? And I don’t know about you, but I’m a lot more comfortable with seeing Santiago Espinal or Addison Barger taking regular reps at third base than I am with watching a Merrifield-Kiermaier-Varsho outfield, or this bullpen try to protect leads in the ninth without Romano.
And I suspect a whole lot of Jays fans would probably agree.
ZiPS, on the other hand, might profoundly disagree. Chapman’s 5.2 WAR projection — which sees him hit on a near-perfect marriage of 2021’s defence and the last four months of 2022’s offence — ranks 18th among all MLB position players. Among 108 third basemen projected by ZiPS, he ranks sixth, but is just one-tenth of a win behind Austin Riley and Rafael Devers. He's ahead of the consensus top prospect in the sport, Baltimore's Gunnar Henderson, as well as freshly-minted $350 million man Manny Machado.
He's incredibly good, and incredibly valuable! Even the lowliest projection on his FanGraphs page has him at about 3.5 wins, "merely" 42nd in baseball and on par with Tim Anderson, Bobby Witt Jr., and Dansby Swanson. And yet here we are! Most of the systems agree Espinal would be worth a couple wins with the right amount of playing time, and that to me is a decent enough offset to be slightly less worried here than elsehwere.
Chris Bassitt
Now we’re getting weird! Bassitt didn't exactly have the greatest spring training known to man, but partly that's because he was so deliberate in ramping up, and partly I think he was simply unlucky. In Monday's start, for example, he surrendered four runs on eight hits, but gave up just four hard-hit balls, and only two that came off the bat above 92.1 mph. He should be alright, because he almost always is when he takes the mound.
Of course, that's something we would have said last year about José Berríos and... well... you're not going to see his name on this list. Berríos and Yusei Kikuchi may have — hopefully have! — figured some things out this spring, but we're still looking at some pretty extreme variance in how their seasons could go. Bassitt was brought in to help stabilize the middle part of this rotation, and given that and the less-than-thrilling rotation depth the Jays possess — at least until mid-season when guys like Ryu, Ricky Tiedemann, and possibly Zulueta become options — he's a scary guy to contemplate the team being without.
Daulton Varsho
One of the Jays’ clear priorities this winter was adding offence from the left side, and for a while it looked like Varsho was it. The addition of Brandon Belt later in the winter significantly reduced the pressure on the 26-year-old to be the lone big bat — smart, given the fact that he has fewer than two full seasons' worth of MLB games to his credit — but the thing about Belt is, of course, that he's hardly a beacon of health. He’s only gotten close to playing a full slate of games twice since playing 156 in 2016, and one of those was the pandemic-shortened 2020 campaign. Chances are that Varsho is going to have to fill that big-lefty-bat role at times anyway. And that's assuming Belt even hits enough to make an impact — something that we all obviously hope he can do now that his knee is healthy, difficult as that may be for a 35-year-old coming off a .213/.326/.350 season.
Now add in the fact that that the Jays' fourth outfielder appears to be... Whit Merrifield? Cavan Biggio? Santiago Espinal? Otto López? Nathan Lukes? In other words, no one you’d especially want to be pressing into full-time duty, particularly since one of the first three or four of those names will typically already find himself at second base.
And then there's the fact that Varsho can catch. The Jays, sadly, don't seem particularly interested in allowing him to do that, but at least in theory he could serve as the club's third backstop — a really useful part of what he brings to the roster.
Like, suppose that one of Alejandro Kirk or Danny Jansen — both also excellent players, obviously, though they won't appear on this list because there's two of them — need just a 10-day trip to the IL. Are the Jays going to risk burning their best Triple-A depth, Rob Brantly, for such a short stint? Are they going to decline to pinch run for Alejandro Kirk late in games if Danny Jansen's already playing because they're afraid to even potentially use Varsho as an emergency guy?
I hope not! Because that's another way that Varsho helps optimize the roster. And, of course, in 2022 he had a 121 wRC+ against right-handed pitching, and he showed the year before that he can have some success against lefties too. There may be more in that bat. And he's the club's best outfield defender not named Kiermaier, too. Pretty huge.
Erik Swanson
Aaaaand now we’re really getting weird. Thing is, for my money Swanson isn’t just likely the Jays’ second-best reliever, he’s also their most viable weapon to face left-handed batters.
“Now, now,” you’re saying. “Doesn’t Tim Mayza exist?”
Well, yes, he does. And if you really need to get one lefty out, and aren’t terribly concerned about what happens after that, then Mayza’s probably your guy. But Swanson has been nearly as good against left-handers as Mayza over the last two seasons — maybe even better, depending on how you feel about Mayza’s wacky BABIP and strand rate in the split.
And Swanson was pretty clearly better if we look only at 2022.
Relievers produce small samples in the first place, and we’re looking at even smaller ones in these splits — fewer than 50 innings worth of batters faced for each pitcher in the two-year sample — but there’s not much else we can go on, as Swanson didn’t throw his splitter until September 2020, and therefore was a different pitcher before then.
There is, of course, more to the story here. Swanson is a right-handed pitcher, MLB has the three-batter rule, and Mayza has been a dicey proposition against right-handed batters for a couple of years now — and might even be getting worse.
Now, the numbers above maybe don’t look so different, especially if we’re willing to give Mayza the benefit of the doubt on BABIP and LOB% the way we were with Swanson in the other split. But I worry about how reliant Mayza has become on his fastball (classified as a sinker) against right-handers, which he used 79% of the time in 2022. He did that for a reason though: the hard hit rate on his slider against right-handed batters was 71%. Things got especially rough for him in the second half of 2022, when he surrendered 11 hits, including four home runs and two doubles, to the final 48 right-handed batters he faced. Likely a meaninglessly tiny split, yes. But becoming more and more of a one-pitch pitcher because your slider keeps getting clobbered could potentially explain why things went sideways.
Mayza's had a really nice spring, allowing just one run on four hits over 6 1/3 innings, while striking out seven and walking none. You love to see it, and I certainly hope it means last year's troubles are behind him. But over his last four outings the only right-handers he's faced are Nick Gonzales, Malcolm Nuñez, and Gilberto Jimenez, so colour me less than convinced that everything is fine just yet. Swanson is going to be incredibly important, I think.
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I love this negative approach. It's always fun to envision the ways we might be f***d. But it does expose our lack of depth in certain areas...big time lack of depth! While the catchers weren't on the list for reasons explained, it's not as if Jansen has a great health track record and I always worry about Kirk's body shape. And every pitcher is just one pitch away from blowing out their elbow. So there's that. But I'm optimistic about this season. The fact that it was the most boring spring training in recent memory bodes well I think.