Mail Bag: What is "it"?

And how does it get fixed

It’s not often that I separate the mail bag into multiple parts, but it’s also not often that I end up with a single question-and-answer totalling 3,500 words. That’s more than enough to be its own post, so that’s what we’re going to do today.

The rest of the mail bag will arrive… sometime in the next couple of days or so. I don’t know! But thanks so much to everyone who had questions—I suppose you’ve still got time to submit one if you’d like—and, as always, for the support. There were a ton of great ones and I’m looking forward to tackling all of those juicy, big picture things, even if “fun” is not a word most people would use to describe anything to do with the Toronto Blue Jays here in 2024.

But first, uh… here is a whole big thing.

As always, I have not read read any of Griff’s answer…

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I've stopped watching games. I still follow the team in various ways (like reading your blog! #greatstuffStoeten) but I just hit my breaking point about a week ago, and decided to take a break.

This team was young and fun: hitting dingers, sunflower seed showers, home run jackets, and yes stupid mistakes in the field and brain farts on the basepaths too, and I honestly think the front office broke something through what I can only guess was a massive overcorrection to some very real flaws by way of 1) bringing on too many red-ass veterans and shipping our mistake-prone but dynamic players, and 2) what I can only surmise is some really bad hitting approaches driven either by players or the coaching staff. (The recent Danny Jansen comments about pulling the ball makes me think it's the latter but... Idk.)

I found myself in a constant state of frustration. This is supposed to be enjoyable! I like baseball! A lot! I'm not a guy hopping on social media after every random loss demanding people lose their jobs or coming up with ludicrous trade scenarios for a guy after a few rough days (or weeks), and yet... here I am. The Blue Jays did this to me!

This sucks, man. This should be their contention window, and while the pitching staff is certainly good enough the FO just couldn't/wouldn't make that one all-in big move to bring in the big bat they clearly needed. (Not going to re-hash the Ohtani thing, but where was your Plan B, guys?)

Firing the manager or even a coach or two doesn't solve this, I don't think. Does a big in-season trade to bring in some much-needed offensive help? Maybe! Does Atkins take the fall? Almost certainly. But it all feels like a much deeper problem than that, a kind of deep-rooted malaise (but maybe I'm projecting). There's just too much talent on this roster for them to be this tedious to watch. Anyway, here's my question, and it's half-rhetorical and half-earnest: How do the Blue Jays fix this? — steve-o

Great question, steve-o. Thanks for it, for the support, and for the kind words! I hear you about reaching your breaking point, man. I probably would if I could, too.

Before I get into the meat of it—which I suppose really is the question right now—I want to talk a little about those Jansen comments. Here's what Buck said in the bottom of the fourth inning back on April 27th:

You know there was a time Danny Jansen tried to meet the hitting coaches wishes by hitting the ball to all fields, and just try to hit for a better average, and everything else. And then he said, “You know what? I'm a pull hitter. I hit the ball hard to the left side and I've got to stay true to who I am.” And since then he's had much more success.

If you look at Jansen's career by the numbers it's not difficult to identify when we're talking about here. The decision was made to have Danny audition for the full-time catching job and let Russell Martin go play video games for a month back in September 2018, and it went about as well as possible. He looked maybe more competent defensively than expected and produced a 115 wRC+ at the plate. The following year, however, he was abysmal offensively. The lack of other options and the fact that the Jays weren't trying to win gave him a lot of rope, but he managed just a 69 wRC+ in nearly 400 plate appearances. He did so with a very similar pull rate (53.7%) to his rate in 2023 (54.9%). In an obvious attempt to get more out of his bat, he changed things up the following year. Clearly giving the all-fields thing a go, his pull rate dipped to 33.3%. That didn't work quite well enough (89 wRC+), and so we see the pull rate go back up the following year, where it has stayed since.

In other words, the coaches were encouraging these changes in 2020. A year before they coached the best version of the Jays’ lineup since 2015, and a year after both Dave Hudgens and Guillermo Martinez arrived—which, of course, means that they “let” Jansen be himself for a whole unsuccessful year.

I put “let” in quotes there because, as Jansen’s case makes incredibly plain, players have a ton of agency when it comes to this stuff—something that is badly overlooked when fans talk about coaches as if they’re out there trying to hammer square pegs into round holes.

Now, since your question was the only one that mentioned pulling the ball, I’m going to go off on a bit of a tangent about this.

There is a notion that’s out there that the offence is being ruined by coaches who don’t want hitters to pull the ball or, in particular, to pull the ball in the air. That’s why those comments from Buck about Jansen got attention. And while it’s true that the offence has been piss poor, and true that they could sure use some more balls pulled in the air, connecting that directly to coaching or—especially—specific coaches is pretty facile.

As we see with Jansen, when a player is struggling, the coaches are trying to help. If he thinks he was better off before, he can change back. If he’s going well, they’re clearly leaving him more or less alone.

We also know that there are more than just two coaches. There’s Matt Hague. There’s Hunter Mense. We sometimes see Edwin or Victor Martinez in the dugout. The players talk to each other constantly. We know Vlad has Wilton and Bo has Dante. Presumably other guys have figures like that in their lives, too. We know that guys go to Driveline in the winter, or work with other coaches we don’t hear about. We know they’re working all the time.

We know as well that Vlad, Bo, and Alejandro Kirk have been very successful using all fields. Could they all be pulling the ball in the air more? Oh absolutely. But pointing to their below-average pull rates (actually plain old average, in Vlad’s case), or the low pull rates of a team giving a ton of at-bats to guys like that, as an indicator of coaching malfeasance is misleading. Also, the idea—which I swear to god is out there—that anyone was going to completely change who they are as hitters because Don Mattingly arrived to be the bench coach and… I guess… told them to? Fully absurd.

That all said, as Jansen’s comments demonstrate, the organization has broadly liked an all-fields approach for a long time—from bad years to good years and back again. Ross Atkins praised the approach last year, when he joined Dan and Buck in the Sportsnet booth 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 driven 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.

That all will sound pretty damning if you think this is a deeply flawed approach—and it may well be—and if it was true that, as Buck said, everybody had bought into it. It’s possible. But is there actual evidence for that?

Jansen is a dead pull hitter who the Jays allowed to be himself until it didn’t work, nudged him in an all-fields direction when they thought it could help, then allowed him to go back. Davis Schneider has above average pull rates, despite coming through this system, because pulling the ball is what has enabled him to be successful. Orelvis Martinez is another example, and Guillermo pre-dates him in the organization. Kevin Kiermaier came to town last year and produced his highest full-season (i.e. excluding 2020) pull rate since 2016. The highest pull rate of Marcus Semien’s career? 2021.

In 2023, the only two guys with year-over-year pull rates that changed more than about three percentage points—George Springer and Matt Chapman—are precisely the two guys you might think could be starting to have trouble getting around on fastballs. Springer, for example, saw his weighted fastball runs drop from 17.4 in both 2021 and '22 down to just 0.2 last year.

I can't point to similar numbers for Chapman, and was surprised that he came out last year less pull-happy than in the final four months of 2022, because he really turned his season around when he started to pull the ball that summer. But I suspect he was so good last April that he spent the rest of the season chasing that all-fields success, though that’s only a guess. Yet his mid-2022 switch is another example of how the idea that the coaches are insisting that players do things one way—the wrong way! HEYO!—is truly incoherent.

This is not to say that these can’t be the wrong hitting coaches. I don’t know if the Jays’ hitting coaches are any good or not, and neither does anybody else who isn’t inside the organization. The results obviously don’t look good. But they’re not the ones swinging the bats.

A lot of what hitting coaches do is mechanical, granular. It’s about identifying flaws and helping players out of slumps. It’s about helping them with preparation. Again, it’s not unfair to wonder if this collection of coaches, and/or the people supplying them with data, are the right ones. But, also again, they’re not the ones swinging the bats.

People seem to find it satisfying to have a villain. Someone you can seethe about as another two-and-a-half hours of “entertainment” goes down the tube. And it’s a whole lot easier to make a villain out of a coach, who can be turfed at a moment’s notice, than a player you really like and want to cheer for, or that you know you’re going to be stuck with for years. What’s hard is actually showing in any meaningful way that the coach, or coaches, are the problem.

Being so sure that they are is a feeling. Being loud about it is venting. And that’s fine, vent away. But understand that that’s all you’re doing. (This all mostly goes for the manager as well, though there are at least some dumb-dick decisions to point to in that case.)

I’m not even saying don’t fire anyone. The margins are so fine and it’s such an easy lever to pull. Maybe you bring in a fresh set of eyes that sees something that can help someone click, and maybe that’s the difference between a win or two. But these aren’t miracle workers—just as they aren’t… whatever the opposite of a miracle worker is. They’re not teaching Little Leaguers, they’re glorified assistants! And you don’t fire the assistant when Jim from Marketing is bankrupting the company.

Anyway, for my money, the problem—if there even is one—is far more likely that the players simply aren’t good enough.

OK, back to the question. Almost…

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You suggest that whatever seems to have broken the Blue Jays could also have come from an overcorrection that brought in red-assed veterans and shipped out mistake-prone but dynamic players. I think that’s only part of it. They also tried to “diversify” their lineup. (Irony!)

The complaint for a long time was that the lineup was too similar, too right-handed, and thus too easy to attack. Now they’re too easy to attack, but for completely different reasons! HEYO!

What’s actually comical though, looking back, is that whole entire idea. Why give pitchers such an easy time as having to going through Springer, Semien, Vlad, Bo, Teoscar, and Lourdes when you can really mess ‘em up by replacing Semien with Matt Chapman, then a year later replacing Teo and Lourdes with Daulton Varsho, and Brandon Belt?

Ughhhhhhhhhh.

That, of course, is a little unfair. Nobody disagreed that the lineup was too similar and too right-handed, at least eventually. And I know I certainly felt that the Lourdes thing had just about run its course after five years of wild inconsistency and whatever no-my-wrist-is-fine-I’m-actually-trying-to-do-this slap-hitting thing he did in 2022. Plus, missing out on Teoscar’s 105 wRC+ in 2023 was hardly tragic—though his home park may have been a factor there, and the Dodgers so far seem to have fixed him (quelle surprise!). Also, Belt was really good!

Let’s not also forget that a whole lot of people—cranks, mostly—were put off by the goofiness in the dugout and those too-frequent mistakes you mention, to the point where the Jays felt the need to do a media blitz in late ‘22 to ensure everyone that the players cared. I genuinely believe that having Buck Martinez questioning the players’ attitude on TV every night really scared the front office, and I’m only half joking.

People were also—and not just cranks this time—already getting sick of the losing. The way 2022 ended left a worse taste in everyone’s mouth than 2021 somehow, and 2020’s end hadn’t been great either. So, it was a range of pretty understandable factors that brought them to that pivot point.

Was their response a “massive overcorrection,” as you say? Well, they did try to correct some things. And it certainly didn’t work as well as it could have. I mean, 89 wins is far from bad. But for the last three or four months nobody was confident that the season would end well, and you’re certainly not wrong that it was dismal to watch.

But, like, what did they really do? Yeah, Varsho had an awful year and I’m no fan of Merrifield. But Chapman was already here, and Springer, Vlad, and Kirk didn’t hit enough to turn the offence into something more. Put the 2022 versions of those guys onto the 2023 team and it’s not just good, it’s special.

That happens sometimes, and you’d like it if the front office had been better able to see it coming, but that’s how close they were. And that gets very lost among the hand-wringing.

Something that I think also gets lost is that, though the Jays obviously had a newfound dourness about them in 2023, it especially felt a world apart from ‘22 to some extent because the pitch clock came in and reduced the number of dugout cutaways we’d see on the broadcast.

As for this year, I don't want to act as though the story has already been written, but the winter was obviously very disappointing.

I do think they were a little bit between a rock and a hard place, though. They were obviously operating under some financial constraints and seem awfully reluctant to move prospects given where this all may be going—two problems that can be traced back to failures of drafting and developing, it should be noted.

And who did they even have that could be dealt for anything of genuine, knock-your-socks-off impact? Vlad. Bo. One of the starters. And Tiedemann.

Not Kirk or Springer or Varsho coming off the seasons they’d had in ‘23. Not Schneider—though he continues to steadily move into the other category.

There just wasn’t a lot to work with. Betting on internal improvements was maybe all they could do, really. And maybe not even as ridiculous as it’s felt in the first few weeks of this season. Like I say, the 2023 team was closer to greatness than we realize.

But I still don't think they allocated their money well—which became painfully obvious with some of the bargains that teams ended up getting late in the process. Granted, it wasn't a great market overall, and especially not for the specific holes the Jays had, but that’s the job. Kiermaier and Kiner-Falefa are fine enough players for what they do, but that the Jays are actually a luxury tax team—something I thought I'd never see in my lifetime!—and this is the product we get feels awfully grim.

So, OK… [deep breath]… how do they fix it?

Well, maybe they don’t. You know? That’s the unfortunate reality. “It” isn’t just one thing. “It” is a years-long string of interconnected decisions big and small. Life is messy. I don’t know if malaise is the right word for the state the franchise is in, but for fans? Big time. And with each successive failure, and each year shaved off the Vlad-and-Bo window, it only grows. How could it not?

But if it’s going to be fixed—and not to be too glib about it—the guys who are supposed to hit are going to have to hit. That’s really it. In the short-term, at least. A month of vintage Vlad, Bo, George and a lot of this goes away. A whole lot more of that last year would have done a world of good, too. Not just for 2023 and wherever it was going, but for how we’d have felt about running it back, and how we’d have felt about the way they’ve started here 2024.

There would be hope—game-to-game and for the season. And that, more than anything stylistic, is what I think is missing. That’s what’s making these games such a drag. That’s what killed the fun last year, even as they scratched and clawed their way into a tie for the ninth-most wins in club history. So much of our once-bottomless supply of hope has been bled out and drained away.

I don’t know if those three guys have it in them at this point but, fundamentally, that’s really the only answer for now.

Long-term? Well, first you have to decide if it really is broken. I know it feels that way now, I know there are flaws, and I know there is a bit of a ticking clock situation going on, but they came into the season in a group just behind the Dodgers, Braves, Astros, and Rays for the most wins in baseball since 2021. Nobody's flying a flag for that shit, but they’ve genuinely done some really good things here. There have been a lot of wins, literally and figuratively. Obviously nobody is satisfied, and the current trajectory feels worrying, but really only a couple of things would have needed to go differently along the way for this conversation to never happen. That’s worth remembering.

But if you do decide it’s broken then the answer is to fire Mark Shapiro.

Don’t get me wrong here, I think this is vastly more Ross Atkins’ mess than it is Shapiro’s. I think it’s probably—question mark?—a bad idea to fire Shapiro. I also think that Shapiro and Atkins are maybe not necessarily as tied-at-the-hip as people like to believe. But I think Shapiro really values stability. Not only has he explicitly said as much, we can see it in how he stuck with Atkins last winter, and how long guys like Chris Antonetti, Terry Francona, and Eric Wedge stuck around in Cleveland. I also think that his view of Ross’s body of work probably aligns more closely with those positives I was just highlighting than most fans’ would. I think that even if he did get rid of Ross, a lot of the entrenched systems, culture, etc., that may be part of the problem probably wouldn’t change all that much—particularly if he simply promoted someone from within the organization, or even just someone like-minded.

And I think he might look at how much is due to come off the books over the next year-and-a-half and figure that a well-executed reset could keep the team on the fringes of contention while his bosses pocket the savings—a move that would play well in the boardroom, and might even make some theoretical sense considering how much easier it’s become for mediocre teams to make the playoffs with the extra Wild Card spot.

Obviously these are just guesses, but if it needs to be burned to the ground—and I’m not saying it does—I don’t think you can do it with half-measures.

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