Is Manfredball melting our brains?

Ruminating on the disconnect between what success is in 2022 and what we think it should look like.

Screengrab via Sportsnet

"Doom and gloom for six, then they score in the seventh, and now everybody's happy here in the eighth." — Buck Martinez

Judging by the picture above of Rays pitcher Colin Poche, Buck’s statement that “everybody” was happy at the outcome of Tuesday night’s ballgame isn’t exactly accurate, but certainly those in the Blue Jays’ dugout were. As were the much-commented-upon low-ish number of fans in attendance.

Alek Manoah pitched his ass off in the hours after having a stomach bug severe enough to have had him considering an ER trip in the middle of the night, and his teammates eventually did him the courtesy of scoring a few goddamn runs. Whit Merrifield came up with a huge hit. George Springer allowed us all to exhale by finally hitting a home run. The vibe was successfully shifted. And, I’m sure, will remain shifted — at least until the next time the Blue Jays fall behind in a game or fail too often to cash runners in.

Unfortunately for those of us who prefer a cheerier mood to go along with their entertainment product, those things tend to happen a lot for this team. It’s now been nine straight home games in which they’ve failed to be the first team on the scoreboard.

And yet the Jays are winning. As I write this they sit atop the wild card standings in the American League. They are a successful team by the standards of Major League Baseball in 2022. But something has continually felt off about it all — and I don’t just mean the attendance thing, which is certainly a noticeable blip, but likely not a long-term story.

James G @james_in_to

Remaining tickets for Saturday and Sunday, looks like it will be close to a sold out weekend.

So, rather than go through a game that I think we probably all know plenty about by now anyway (Manoah is badass as hell, Merrifield is maybe not entirely useless), let’s talk a little bit about how this season has been perceived so far and why.

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Personally, I blame Rob Manfred.

There have been two changes to the way that we watch, and feel, and follow the game of baseball that are brand new this year, more fundamentally altering to the sport than I think a lot of people realize, and have a direct line straight back to the commissioner’s office. One is that the owners achieved their goal — albeit not by as much as they’d have liked to — of expanding the playoff field when negotiating their new collective bargaining agreement with the Players Association during the lockout they imposed over the winter. The second is that the league has continually mucked about with the construction of the ball, which has been a major reason for the continually shifting offensive environment.

Obviously these are far from the only reasons anyone has found this Blue Jays team to be incredibly frustrating, they’re simply the ones that I feel we’ve struggled the most to wrap our heads around. It’s not difficult to understand that the team hasn’t lived up to pre-season expectations or that core players haven’t had the seasons expected of them. The roster is a bit inflexible, too. José Berríos signed the richest contract for a pitcher in the history of the team and has been barely above abysmal. Yusei Kikuchi’s three-year deal, as annoyingly hubristic as “last year was this trailer, this year you can see the movie,” quickly descended into farce. The Yankees surged out of the gate and in the middle of the year the Jays felt the need to fire their manager. Objectively these are bad outcomes and nobody can be faulted for being a bit soured by all of it.

But those types of stories happen to every team in every season, as do good ones to help balance them out. For the 2022 Blue Jays we’ve had Alek Manoah’s star turn, Kevin Gausman’s consistent brilliance, Alejandro Kirk’s incredible first half, Jordan Romano’s dominance, Matt Chapman’s defence, and the pleasure of simply getting to watch George Springer every night. Yes, there are some big names absent from the list of things that have gone particularly well, but I don’t think what’s been such a drag is the fact that Vlad hasn’t had the season we expected of him. Or that Aaron Judge has had that season. Or even that some of Vlad’s more 2020-ish tendencies have been rather alarming.

I actually think the issue is one of aesthetics. And that’s where Manfred comes in. It’s due to his actions that success in baseball has been redefined this year, both at a team and an individual level.

I’ve been thinking about this stuff for a while now, but the impetus for this piece came here on Wednesday morning, when I saw FanGraphs tweet out what their playoff odds for AL wild card contenders have looked like this year.

Data via FanGraphs

The Jays’ chances of making the postseason, by this measure, have never dipped below 75%. The playoff predictions at FiveThirtyEight, which tend to be a bit more volatile and thus hew a little closer to the mood of the fan base, are updated weekly and had the Jays down as far as 61% on August 17th — still quite good, and, as I learned when tweeting about this stuff, certainly not in line with the way much of the conversation about this team has gone.

Andrew Stoeten @AndrewStoeten

By FG’s calculations the 2022 Jays have never dipped below having a 75% chance of making the playoffs, which I suspect would be a massive shock to anyone who had only seen the conversations about them On Here.

FanGraphs Baseball @fangraphs

Happy Wednesday, folks, here are your playoff/division odds as of this morning in the races still too close to call (NL East, AL Central, AL WC): https://t.co/tmbp3xLuD7 https://t.co/dkEpMECg4D

Acting the Fulemin @ATFulemin

@AndrewStoeten i can actually fit the bill of someone who only knows the Jays from the conversations about them On Here, and i figured they were in the 35-45% range. lots of tweets about hope being snuffed out

Looking back at August 17th, it’s not difficult to spot where the disconnect was happening. The night before the Jays had lost at home to the Orioles, their ninth loss in 12 games and dropping their record to 61-54 on the season. That's a .530 winning percentage, and just a shade under an 86-win pace. The last time an AL East team made the playoffs with 86 wins (or at an 86-win pace; i.e. including the 2020 Jays, who just scraped in) was never.

We may not think about it in exactly these terms, but our fan-brains know that’s not good enough. Coupled with the sinking feeling based on their slump at the time and you’re obviously going to get a ton of frustration. And yet, 61% by FiveThirtyEight’s count, and 81% by FanGraphs’ measure — just a touch ahead of where FanGraphs had their season low of 79.2% back on July 11th, just before Charlie Montoyo was fired.

Anyone who has followed actor Nick Turturro and his delightfully deranged Yankees commentary on Twitter knows that this isn’t a phenomenon unique to either Jays fans, or fans of teams in danger of falling out of contention, but what expanding the playoff field has done is take a sport where failure is massively prevalent even within success and ratcheted up the cognitive dissonance. I don’t think we’ve fully wrapped our heads around what a pretty good baseball team looks like in 2022, because it’s awfully close to what a fairly mediocre team would have looked like until very recently.

Compounding that effect is what has been going on with Rob Manfred’s balls. Or his humidors. Or whatever has been suppressing offensive production so dramatically this season.

Thanks to his recent hot streak, Bo Bichette now has a 128 wRC+ on the season, meaning that he's been 28% better than the league average hitter. Last year he was only 22% better than average.

This year, Bichette has slashed .282/.325/.478. Last year he slashed .298/.343/.484. By the traditional numbers, Bo has been clearly worse this year than last. By the advanced numbers, because they are relative to the rest of the hitters in the game, he has been better.

This is a weird thing!

The league average OPS (on-base plus slugging) this season is .709, which is the second lowest mark since 2001, with only 2014's .700 mark being worse. BABIP (batting average on balls in play) has settled over the last three years into the low-.290s range (this year it's at .291) despite it long being axiomatic that it hovered "around .300". The increasing prevalence of defensive shifts plays a role in this, but slugging percentage and isolated power are both at their lowest levels since 2015, despite average exit velocity, launch angle, and barrel rate holding stead over the last few years. And despite the fact that at 38.3%, the league's hard hit rate is just a shade below last season's all-time high (keeping in mind this data only goes back to 2015).

In other words, Manfred's balls seem to have lost their juice. Or, at least, some of them have.

Early in the season this was very apparent. Since about the middle of May we've seen the ball appear to become a bit livelier, though all the effects of changes in production runs, and materials, are for now unclear.

The foremost expert on this subject, astrophysicist Dr. Meredith Wills, joined YouTube show PressBox Sports back in July for a lengthy and fascinating talk on this very subject — and how it relates to her background in knitting! — which I recommend giving a watch if you're in any way interested by all this.

Another thing that is likely contributing to the dip in offence is that, as Eno Sarris wrote this week for the Athletic, pitchers’ spin rates are moving back up — likely, he posits, because pitchers have found ways to continue to use “sticky stuff” for grip and extra rpm, which umpires can’t detect.

“It looks like pitchers have found something clear and wipeable that gives them more of a boost than sunscreen and rosin, because spin rate is back up in baseball,” he writes. “Almost back to where it was before enforcement started.”

Data via the Athletic

“Pitchers have the ultimate advantage right now, with sticky stuff, the dead ball, and humidors,” a big league hitter told Eno recently.

The data bears this out. We know, at the very least, that offence is down this year. Runs per game have gone from 4.83 in 2019, to 4.53 last year, to 4.31 this year.

That change in the run environment makes it so I can say something like, “Vlad hasn’t really fallen off that badly this year, his wRC+ has gone from 166 to 133,” whereas someone else could just as easily say, “Vlad has been massively down this year, going from .311/.401/.601 last season to .278/.343/.481!”

Now, Vladdy’s problems this season — and especially of late — aren’t simply because his numbers have been following league-wide trends. The return of his launch angle, groundball and walk rates to pre-2021 levels are concerning, and the fact that he doesn’t have a huge track record of big league success understandably leads to people getting a little nervous about it.

I’m not here to make excuses for him or for anybody else who has struggled. I mentioned Aaron Judge before, and he’s navigated the changes to the game more than ably, and his Yankees banked so many wins early that nobody had to have the “what is success?” conversation when it came to them. It’s not unfair to expect as much from Vlad and from the Jays — and I’m pretty sure they expect it from themselves too, and have been disappointed by the five months they’ve just had.

But if you find the disconnect between where you feel these Jays are at and the tenor of a lot of the conversations about them is pretty stark, as I do, then these are the places where it probably makes the most sense to look for answers.

Or maybe they’re just kinda bad! But with both FanGraphs and FiveThirtyEight giving them a 97% chance to make the playoffs, or better, right now, with the sixth highest likelihood of winning the World Series — and, in FanGraphs’ case, just about the same odds to win as the Braves had at the end of the regular season last year — I tend to think that’s not true.

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