Opening Day overreactions, injury updates, the All-Star Game gets moved, Atkins Speaks!
The Blue Jays season is underway. Life is good. So let’s talk about it!
But first, before I hit publish, indulge me for a second while I attempt to make a living. Because the thing is, if you appreciate what I’m doing here in this little corner of the internet, I would love it if you’d tell a friend.
And if you’ve been sent here by a friend, or are an existing subscriber who would like to upgrade to a paid membership so you can comment, ask questions the next time I open up the ol’ mail bag, or just plain old support what I do, click below to become a subscriber.
Let’s overreact to Opening Day!
Well that sure was a hell of a lot of fun, wasn’t it? Thanks to MLB’s pre-scheduled off-day, I trust everybody has been allowed to take a deep breath after the heart-in-throat ending to Thursday’s wire-to-wire tension.
What a ballgame! Or, more aptly, what a ride!
So what were the big takeaways? Before it all gets a bit too far in the rear view, let’s play a little three up, three down.
▲ Julian Merryweather
I have to go with the incredibly obvious one here to start, because it was impossible not to be wowed by what the Jays’ best 29-year-old prospect did. It… I mean… he just… it was unbelievable. The quality of the stuff, the velocity, the batters he faced, the way they were being fooled, the moment he absolutely seized to do it all in. It was a perfect topper to a near-perfect start to the season.
The Jays have said this spring that they’d like to use Merryweather in the same kind of “hybrid” reliever role he excelled at during his brief run last season, but he sure looked like he had all the makings of an elite closer on Thursday afternoon. If not a front-line starter (though obviously his spotty track record in terms of health probably dictates that the Jays shouldn’t push it on that front).
Words and numbers just can’t really do his performance justice.
Just filthy.
(Let me add something here: I don’t want to give this a full down arrow, because there are better things to complain about, but I couldn’t help but notice a few people on Twitter mention that Merryweather’s great day coincided with another unfortunate leg issue for the player he was traded for, and I don’t know, man. I’d be real happy if Josh Donaldson had a Hall of Fame calibre few years in Minnesota. I know Merryweather will always be the guy the Jays traded Donaldson for, and it’s cute to imagine a world where the Jays maybe did pretty well for themselves, but Donaldson being hurt is a bummer. No bummers on Opening Day!)
▲ Teoscarnandez
Apologies to Vladimir Guerrero Jr. (a hit and two walks), Lourdes Gurriel Jr. (RBI single), Randal Grichuk (two hits, including an RBI double), and Hyun Jin Ryu (four hits, two walks, and five Ks in a delightful 5 1/3 innings), but a very difficult day of work against Yankees ace Gerrit Cole belonged to the Blue Jays' Sliver Slugger.
Yeah, so mayyyyyyybe the pitch from Cole that he took deep was a bit of a cookie…
…but who could possibly care, right? There are so many Blue Jays hitters poised to have big, big years, and if young Vladdy didn’t exist Teoscarnandez — yes, I unironically love the Buckism — would probably be first among them.
▲ Blue Jays baseball!
The big green field of Yankee Stadium. The voices of the great Dan Shulman and Buck Martinez. Vladimir Guerrero Jr. hitting pissrods. The annoying Yankee Stadium strikeout chime. Blue Jays Twitter hanging off of every pitch. Charlie Montoyo infuriatingly asking his players to bunt.
IT’S BASEBALL SEASON BABY! HELL YES!!!! FINALLY!!!!!!
▼ The Yankees are terrifying
I think part of the reason the Jays’ victory on Thursday was so exhilarating, and why every pitch thrown was filled with such tension — for Jays fans in particular — was the simple fact that the Yankees are just straight up scary good. Hyun Jin Ryu is a genius, and the way he was able to get through 5 1/3 innings against that lineup barely scathed was nothing short of incredible, but his impeccable skill doesn’t make watching mountain-sized men like Aaron Judge and Giancarlo Stanton stride to the plate any less nerve-racking.
With a lineup that relentless, and Gerrit Cole virtually untouchable despite not seeming to be his sharpest, it felt for Jays fans like everything could fall apart at any moment. In the bottom of the ninth, thanks to a couple of walks and Jordan Romano’s complete disinterest in paying attention to runners, it very nearly did.
It was great to see the Jays put one over on them on in a very tough battle on Opening Day. I don’t think it’s going to get any easier against them from here.
▼ Bunting
So I guess nobody with the Blue Jays talked to Charlie Montoyo about his unrestrained love of bunting over the winter, eh? I know I mentioned this above, but boy oh boy, choice to have Danny Jansen bunt in the top of the 10th was bad. And the choice to have him keep bunting with two strikes was even worse.
I know that’s how Charlie likes to do it — to give a guy three chances to get the bunt down, consequences of a two-strike bunt be damned — but I guess my question is, can he not?
I touched on this a little in my most recent mail bag, but pitching is just so incredibly good today that, a) hitters have less and less time to work on refining that skill, and b) it’s just straight-up much, much harder to do than ever before in the history of the game. The world that bunting fetishists are living in is long gone.
And what I really don’t understand is how the Jays can impart on Montoyo all sorts of newfangled ideas about pitcher usage, fatigue, lineup construction, etc., but that when a “traditional” bunt situation arises we go straight back to living in the dark ages.
Do the Jays think this is OK? Have they found data to indicate that bunting is actually a better idea than modern sabermetrics would suggest? If so, maybe there’s more value in saying as much and giving the manager some cover than there is in keeping it some big state secret. And if not? A conversation with Charlie. Please!
▼ The off-day
Yeah, I suppose we’re used to there being a day off following Opening Day every year, but that doesn’t make it any more of a buzz kill. I understand it’s important for teams to have a proper Opening Day because it’s such a big money maker, but how about you putting it on the following Monday or something? I don’t know. But it makes the start of the season such a tease!
Injury updates…
Jays GM Ross Atkins spoke with media on Friday, which included providing several updates on injured players. To wit!
• George Springer (oblique strain): "I think there's a real chance that he's ready to go and at that 100% strength level as soon as he's eligible, which would be our first game back home in Dunedin (April 8)."
• Robbie Ray (elbow contusion): "He is throwing with 100% aggression and feeling much more like the Robbie Ray that he was before the injury. I believe he'll be on a mound (Friday) as well, and building back up to being an option for us. And he won't have missed too much time, so we won't have to have too significant of a buildup." Atkins added that they're looking to get him to 80 pitches before bringing him back, but wanted to see next couple of bullpens/live BPs before getting specific about a timeline.
• Nate Pearson (adductor strain): "He will be ready again as a starting pitcher before we know it and I'm very much looking forward to that day. " Atkins added during a later appearance on TSN’s Overdrive: “He's encouraged, he's really strong, pain free. He was off of a mound today. A lot of good news on that front. And he'll be back in the starting mix as soon we can get him built up to that innings workload.”
• Thomas Hatch (elbow impingement): "Now throwing again after a brief shutdown and building back up."
• "Each of our updates are exceptionally encouraging, with very positive trends, and all pain-free and symptom-free, which is great news for us."
MLB announces the All-Star game will be moved from Atlanta
Major League Baseball stood up for what’s right on Friday, announcing in a statement from commissioner Rob Manfred that the league is relocating this year’s All-Star Game and draft festivities away from Atlanta. They are doing so because of the Republican-controlled state of Georgia’s recent assault on democracy and voting rights in the form of the just-passed Georgia Senate Bill 202.
The New York Times calls the bill “a breathtaking assertion of partisan power in elections, making absentee voting harder and creating restrictions and complications in the wake of narrow losses to Democrats.”
"Major League Baseball fundamentally supports voting rights for all Americans and opposes restrictions to the ballot box," adds Manfred's statement on the decision. It's a move that has the support of The Players Alliance, a group of more than 150 Black current and former pros. LeBron James has tweeted to voice his support as well. And very quickly on Friday afternoon it became apparent that the move was making many of the worst and dumbest people in the world extremely and hilariously mad online.
Sounds like a win for the league, right? Well, it definitely is. But it’s also complicated.
Let’s start with this giant doofus, South Carolina congressman Jeff Duncan.
Threatening to “own the libs” in MLB by inflicting on the league perhaps the most left-wing punishment available is truly delicious, and speaks crystal clear to the right’s total abandonment of anything resembling a coherent ideology as they sink deeper and deeper down the suck-hole of petty grievance and power-hoarding. But it also forces us to ask why the league has an antitrust exception in the first place, and what exactly they’ve done — who they’ve paid — to ensure its protection.
We can all guess the answer, I’m sure. It’s lobbying. It’s donations to campaigns and PACs. It’s putting their own financial interest ahead of doing the right thing.
For example, when the league suspended political donations in the wake of the January 6th Capitol insurrection, the Associated Press reported that since 2016 it had made donations to two of the senators and nine of the congressional representatives who had refused to certify the election of president Joe Biden — among them Ted Cruz.
An even better example of the league’s disgraceful political manoeuvring was the Save America’s Pastime Act. A piece of legislation that was included on page 1,967 of a $1.3 trillion omnibus bill in 2018, the incredibly cynically named bill exempted minor league baseball players from federal labour law in the United States.
MLB’s ability to exploit non-union minor league workers did not become enshrined into law by accident. According to an OpenSecrets.org report from March 2019, the league had spent roughly $1.32 million in each of the previous three years on lobbying, with the Save America’s Pastime Act a significant focus of that.
And here we’re only talking about the league as an entity. Individual owners are just as bad, if not worse. According to an October 2020 piece from USA Today, San Francisco Giants owner Charles B. Johnson had donated $3.25 million to Republicans in the 2019-20 election cycle, including $435,000 to “Trump Victory” in February 2020. Ken Kendrick, owner of the Diamondbacks, donated nearly $450,000 to Republicans. The White Sox' Jerry Reinsdorf donated just over $252,000 to Republicans. And then you have the Ricketts family, owners of the Chicago Cubs. One of those freaks, Todd Ricketts, not only sits on the team's board of directors, but was also finance chair of the Trump Victory Committee, which, as an October 2020 profile in the New Yorker points out, "makes him the chief fund-raiser for Donald Trump's reëlection." (Umlaut theirs.)
While I understand that a lot of fans don’t like to see politics and sports to mix, the unfortunate reality for them is that sports and business are inextricable from politics. And that MLB’s politics are generally pretty odious.
Obviously that doesn’t mean that the league can’t possibly do anything good. I’m certainly not saying that they shouldn’t have moved the All-Star Game from Atlanta — though it should be noted that there are some leaders in Georgia, such as Bernice King and Stacey Abrams, who are wary of the fact that boycotts will further punish the same people already punished by the state’s new racist voting laws.
I’m also not saying that it isn’t great to see the Atlanta Braves — a team that itself abandoned the city of Atlanta for the white suburbs of Cobb County — getting roasted for their own absurd press release (which featured highfalutin language about unity under fucking cartoon tomahawk letterhead, and whining about their own victimhood while a faction of shit heads wields the “election fraud” lie to literally disenfranchise people).
By the way, John C. Malone, the largest private landowner in the United States and chairman of Liberty Media, which owns the Braves, donated just under $520,000 to Republicans in the previous election cycle.
MLB has real political and economic clout, and for them to use that in service what’s right is a good thing, full stop. That we’re having this very conversation is good. That such an entity might actually stand in solidarity with communities of colour in the face of a racist political party’s power grab is great. We need more of it. But it absolutely must be pointed out that the endeavor MLB is opposing here is supported by people the league and its owners will happily give money to when they deem it to be in their own financial interest.
Then there’s this:
So, let’s just be careful not to pat the league on the back too much here.
Atkins Speaks!
As mentioned above, Jays GM Ross Atkins held court with local reporters on Friday morning, and then in the afternoon he had a quick hit on TSN’s Overdrive. Some highlights!
• On Opening Day
We’ll start with Atkins’ quote from the Overdrive hit, which he gave after being asked about how nice it was to get a win on Opening Day.
It did feel good. After a long off-season and an exciting one for us and for the fan base, to come together and, not with our full health and full squad, facing Gerrit Cole — and spring training in a pandemic and the protocols our players were under — to start off against Gerrit Cole with a 'W,' it felt good. It felt good to have a pint on the patio after the game with Charlie Montoyo.
I don’t know if he was serious about the pint — I think it was a callback to something the hosts had been talking about just before the segment actually started — but I can tell you that the one time I visited Ross in his office at the Rogers Centre he did offer me a beer. I guess my reputation precedes me. Naturally, even though it was 11:30 a.m. and I was the only one having one, I accepted. How could I not?
He had a different focus when speaking about the opener during the Zoom session earlier.
The energy in both dugouts, the intensity of it, it was a lot of fun. I was extremely happy for the players, for the coaches, for the Toronto Blue Jays fans, to have a very entertaining game out of the gates. And a lot of positive things happened. I think six of our eight defenders had well above average defensive plays — that was probably the highlight for me, watching each of those plays. Cavan had several exceptional plays. Really encouraging on the defensive front.
I didn’t mention this above, but he’s not wrong about the defence. We definitely saw the good version of the Blue Jays in that regard on Thursday. I’m not quite ready to believe that we’re going to see it on a regular basis this season, but I’m not surprised that Atkins is encouraged. I mean, he sort of has to be, right? Given the importance he placed on run prevention heading in to the off-season and how little progress the team seemed to make on that front.
He elaborated on his club’s defence during the Overdrive hit.
• On defence
If you saw — and we have the benefit of being under the hood in spring training and seeing — what they're doing on a daily basis to prepare for those types of plays. Cavan Biggio, and Marcus, and Bo were out there every single day, very early in the morning, to work. All of those plays that you saw executed were worked on. Every angle, every different read they could think about. They were having fun with it, (but) it was a very disciplined approach, which gives you a lot of confidence that it's going to be sustainable. And that's huge for us. That makes our pitching better. It puts them in a better mindset when they're coming to the plate.
There were definitely times on Thursday when it was clear that Marcus Semien is a shortstop playing at second base, and with apologies to Cavan Biggio and Devon Travis, it’s been a while.
(Speaking of Travis, he finds himself this year on the coaching staff of Atlanta’s Gulf Coast League affiliate — one of several former Alex Anthopoulos “guys” throughout that organization.)
• On Julian Merryweather
Asked during the Zoom session if he was surprised by Merryweather’s performance on Thursday, Atkins made clear he was not. He added that, though Merryweather “wasn't quite there from a sharpness standpoint in his two outings in spring training,” everything else had already been there.
The more noteworthy comments he made on Merryweather, I thought, came during the Overdrive hit, after a question that mentioned the way that he’s struggled to stay healthy so far in his career.
We wouldn't have gotten the player if he didn't have health issues. Where Josh was at the point in his career, it wasn't like JD was coming off of MVP performance sustained. He obviously was, and still is, a very good player, but the reason we had access to Julian was because he'd had Tommy John surgery. Now we're seeing: he is healthy, he is effective, and if we can help keep him healthy he's obviously a weapon. That was a near immaculate inning, and overpowering, and about as high leverage as you can get, too. It was interesting, the stadium, with only 20% capacity, sounded and felt, in some ways, almost full. It was a very good environment and a great challenge for our guys.
Noticeably absent from any of Atkins’ discussion of Merryweather is the notion that he could be a starting option. Given that the club is clearly concerned about maintaining his health, and now also having seen a boss-ass performance in an incredibly high leverage spot, maybe that’s OK.
• On naming a closer versus “closer by committee”
In a perfect world I think every executive would like to have eight regular starting position players, five regular starting pitchers that are going to be out there every turns, and then a closer that you can count on every day and year in and year out. And we're working towards that, and we'll continue to work towards that. But I the interim I think having the open-minded approach that Charlie and Pete have, and then the open-minded approach that David Phelps, and Jordan Romano, and Ryan Borucki, and Rafael Dolis, and Julian Merryweather have about being at the back of a bullpen gives us different ways to put guys in positions to match up. Whether it's the split of Dolis, or the power of Romano, Merryweather, the different weapons of a David Phelps, and who they're facing will allow us to put those guy in positions to be successful on a regular basis. I'm not sure if that answers your question specifically, but we're excited about the options that we do have, and yesterday was a good start towards deploying that with Charlie and Pete.
It’s supposedly a baseball truism that the “closer by committee” approach doesn’t really work, and anecdotally it' certainly feels like that’s true. But saves aren’t necessarily the driver of relievers’ fortunes the way they’ve always been, and with changes potentially coming to the way players get paid when the CBA between the league and the union expires at the end of this season, it’s entirely possible that teams may be able to change that narrative.
Will the 2021 Blue Jays be one of those teams? I doubt it.
• On convincing George Springer to start the year on the IL
This one’s from the Overdrive hit:
It was an interesting process for him, because it's a relatively new relationship, right? We're building trust with one another and wanted to make sure that he was a big part of that decision. His desire to be there Opening Day, against Gerrit Cole, against the Yankees, with that new group, could not have been higher. And his pain tolerance, and his toughness, is very high. His strength is very high. So he felt capable, and I think in the end understood what it could mean if that set him back, even if it was just a minor setback and he had to play for a month or two with aggravation, or tightness or stiffness. I think he got to the point where he recognized that it just wasn't worth it. So, it did in the end did not feel — obviously it was our call, and us taking us out of his hands, but he absolutely understood it.
Obviously a bit of a tricky situation, but I’d imagine everything will be fine.
• On Vladimir Guerrero Jr.
Another one from Overdrive:
Having seen it over the course of time now, over the 40-plus plate appearances, and then for him to be in at-bats that really matter against, as we were just talking about, such an effective pitcher, is very encouraging. It's been very consistent. The very good takes. Laying off of really close pitches, and just being willing to take that walk is incredibly powerful for the rest of our lineup. And for him over the course of the year. Over the last year-and-a-half he'd had a harder time than he did in the minor leagues laying off those borderline pitches, so he's in a great spot. He's in a great spot. Obviously the bat speed — I mean that line drive right back up the middle was hit exceptionally hard, and (chuckling) it was an electric fastball that he turned around. So, really encouraged.
He’s not wrong about how impressive the way Vladdy turned around Cole’s heater was! The kid is special. And it would be utterly enormous for the Jays if he actually managed to really tap into all the potential he has this season.
• On returning to Canada
I can't wait for that day, for us to be in Toronto, and for it to be electric in that stadium. Our players haven't experienced it. Teoscar to some extent, but most of them haven't experienced it when that stadium is packed, just how energetic it is, and I can't wait for that day.
Hard same, Ross. Hard same.
Top image via the Toronto Blue Jays/@BlueJays
"I guess my reputation precedes me." Lol!
I only managed to watch the game late and was lucky to start with the Grichuk double and then was mesmorised by the Merryweather inning. I've been watching the Jays since I was 12 in 1977 and that had to be one of the best pitched innings I've ever seen. I had to watch the entire inning again on replay. Wow.
What type of beer was Atkins stocking in his office?