Revisiting eight premature conclusions from April (and adding four more!)

A halfway-ish point look at Bassitt, Berríos, baserunning, Bass, Varsho, Vlad, Mayza, Manoah, Shapiro, Atkins, Tiedemann, Ryu, renovations, RISP, the playoff chase, and more!

Image via the Toronto Blue Jays/@BlueJays

You live, you learn. Back in mid-April, after the Blue Jays had played just 14 games of their 2023 season, I decided that I’d seen enough to very seriously draw some conclusions about what we’d be in for the rest of the way.

To wit:

The Jays at the time were 9-5 and, as I noted, on pace for 104 wins. They are, uh, no longer quite playing that well — their current pace would put them on course for 88 wins — even if, some-effing-how, they’re tied with Cleveland for the best record in the American League since May 25th. But they’ve played a whole lot more games now! We know more about them than we did then. Or, at least, we think we know more now than we thought we knew then.

So… how did I do? More importantly, what have we learned since then? And what else can we conclude now that the season is nearing its halfway point?

Let’s find out!

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The original eight…

Preamble

Though not officially part of the eight, I used the first part of my April piece to rattle off a few of what I thought were relatively obvious conclusions, which I didn't figure really needed too much expanding on, but that are worth taking a quick look at now.

• "Brandon Belt can actually make contact with a baseball."
His 38% strikeout rate is still pretty bad, and the third highest in baseball, but things are not nearly as awful they looked back then for the Jays’ “unofficial MVP.” He's making it work.

• "Alek Manoah might be due a little regression."
Uh.. check.

• "Kevin Gausman is great when not getting absurdly unlucky."
Check.

• "Kevin Kiermaier really does do all the little things right."
Check. (Mostly?)

• "Bo Bichette looks much more like the guy we saw last September than the one that took until mid-August to really start to heat up."
More of an observation there than a conclusion, but he's continued to look like September '23 Bo, and it's been awesome. He’ll be the best shortstop in Blue Jays history before he’s done, even if it’s only a couple years from now. And I say that as a person old enough to have been a huge fan of Tony Fernández. (And to have seen him once driving his team-issued Honda Civic!)

• Vlad "is an incredible player."
Enhhhhhhh... probably.

• Matt Chapman "is playing as well as he maybe ever has."
Well, he was. Heating back up a bit lately, too.

• "Jordan Romano is a great closer and a joy to watch. (You know, usually.)"
Might need to underline the bit in parentheses, but sure.

1. “Bassitt and Berríos starts aren’t guaranteed losses”

Thanks to my weaselly language, I think this one is holding up fairly well.

Chris Bassitt is not exactly having his best season just yet, but — as I touched on in this week's Weekend Up! piece — a lot of that is down to some especially unusual results against left-handers. Hopefully simply handing over pitch-calling duties to his catcher, which worked well against the lowly A's over the weekend, is all it will take to fix that.

His results against right-handed hitters, who are slashing just .183/.246/.263 against him, suggest that nothing has gone too far wrong here in the first season of a three-year contract. But I think it's prudent to note that, back in April, the main concern with Bassitt — other than an awful season-opening start in St. Louis — was velocity.

"Neither of Bassitt's first two starts saw his average fastball velocity top 92 mph — a continuation of a trend we saw in the spring, which he explained away as a deliberate sort of build-up," I wrote at the time. "Scary stuff when we're talking about a 34-year-old arm with more than 1,300 innings on it between the majors and minors over the course of his career. And while velocity isn't exactly his game anyway, pitching at that part of the velo spectrum gives you a much thinner margin for error. It could be a problem."

Bassitt’s velocity has come back up since then, but only to 92.6 mph on the season, down from 93.3 in 2022 and 93.5 in 2021. I doubt that's the reason for his struggles so far, but it's worth monitoring.

Data via Baseball Savant

Either way, struggling or not, he's a long way from being a guaranteed loss.

Berríos, meanwhile, is having a very Berríos-like season so far, even if it hasn’t necessarily always felt like it. Would you believe that the average exit velocity against him and the hard hit rate he's allowed are in the 79th and 84th percentiles respectively? I must just be especially scarred from last season — when those ranks were 13th and 11th — because I absolutely would have believed we'd have seen a whole lot more hard contact off of him than that.

Not only has he not been a disaster, I dare say he's been pretty good!

2. “They’re doing it more with instincts than speed”

Ahh. Here we've got one that we can actually sort of quantify. Back in mid-April the Jays were the best team in the AL by DRS at +13 runs, and 6th in MLB with 1.5 BsR (baserunning runs). Interestingly, though, it appeared as though they were doing this while fielding fewer players with above average speed than they did in 2022. This was largely because of some noticeable drop-offs among returning regulars Danny Jansen, Cavan Biggio, and Bo Bichette, and a surprisingly average number from Daulton Varsho.

I believed that the defensive improvements were real, but that it looked like these Jays were perhaps running smarter, not faster.

Fast forward to today and the Jays are tied with the Texas Rangers as the best defensive team in baseball by DRS at+42. Impressively, that puts them 12 runs ahead of the Milwaukee Brewers, who rank third. (Statcast's Outs Above Average remains less kind, as the Jays rank 14th with +3 OAA).

However, the Jays, perhaps surprisingly, have gone in the other direction in terms of BsR. They now rank 16th by that metric, grading out as slightly below average on the bases as a club so far (-0.9 BsR). A lot of that is down to the fact that they employ two of the 20 worst baserunners in the league this year: Alejandro Kirk (-3.9) and Vlad (-3.3). But part of it is also that Kevin Kiermaier has somehow cost them a little over half a run on the bases (-0.6). (Hence my “Mostly?” comment regarding him doing all the little things right above).

Varsho (2.3), Matt Chapman (1.7), and Whit Merrifield (1.6) have been especially good.

Interestingly, Danny Jansen checks in at fourth on the team with 0.8 BsR, and part of that likely is due to the fact that he actually hasn't lost as much speed as it appeared back in April. He, Cavan Biggio, and Varsho have all fairly significantly improved their sprint speeds since then. Danny Bats is up 1 ft/sec to 27.2, Varsho is up 1 ft/sec as well, and now sits at 28.0. Biggio is up 1.3 ft/sec to 28.3. (League average, as you can see below, is 27.0).

Data via Baseball Savant

That all being the case, perhaps I was wrong on this one. The defence is certainly better, but speed has likely been a more of factor than it seemed in April, and the players’ baserunning instincts haven't suddenly become elite (though they're still certainly on pace to be better than last year, when as a team the Jays cost themselves 10.5 runs on the bases).

3. “Anthony Bass is a bit worrying”

Lol. Lmao.

So this one might have been bang on, though not solely in the pitching-focussed sense in which I mentioned it. We don’t need to belabour this. Bass sucked and he also pitched poorly.

Not sure I’d be joking about the whole thing just yet if I was president of the team…

Screengrab via the Globe and Mail

…that so thoroughly embarrassed itself during the whole affair, but props to Mark for at least seeming human here.

4. “Zach’s Poppin’”

Remember those far-flung days when Zach Pop was healthy, getting Clay Holmes comparisons from his coaches, and not yet outed as following the same freak on Instagram that Bass controversially shared? Yeah, me either.

Turns out the only thing poppin’ about him was his hamstring. HEYO!

Pop hasn't pitched for the Jays since May 4th because of the injury — a timeline extended by the fact that he suffered a setback earlier this month, after he'd begun a rehab assignment in Dunedin. He's been back on the mound again lately, working a scoreless inning for Dunedin on the 17th before getting moved up to Buffalo to continue his rehab there.

The Queen City hasn't been kind to him so far, as he allowed a run on three hits in his first appearance back on the 21st, then on Saturday entered a game for the Bisons with the bases loaded and promptly walked in a run on four pitches before giving up a grand slam.

Noise aside, he's struck out five Triple-A hitters in 2 1/3 innings, which is an encouraging stat for a guy who seemed to be on the verge of becoming much more interesting than the pure groundball pitcher he was when the Jays acquired him last summer. The version of Pop who can pair his hard sinker with a slider good enough to generate a bunch of swing-and-miss is a tantalizing one, and the reason for those Holmes comps. However, he'll probably have to put in some better performances before the Jays are ready to activate him from the IL.

He might even have to bide his time a little longer in the minors — something the Jays will at least be able to have him do, as he can be optioned up and down without having to clear waivers. He remains an arm who should get some real run down the stretch, and has a shot at moving into a higher leverage role if things click.

5. "Daulton Varsho is handling LHP just fine"

It's impossible to tell now whether or not Daulton Varsho has solved the woes against left-handed pitching that plagued him in 2022, so I was way out of pocket even trying to make this one into a conclusion back in April. We're only talking about 58 plate appearances vs. LHP so far this season, which really is a tiny amount. What we've seen, however, hasn't been good.

As has been the case against right-handers as well, Varsho has progressively fared better against lefties as the season has gone on, moving from a 61 wRC+ in April, to 70 in May, and now 78 in June. But that, uh, still leaves you wanting, doesn't it?

And that's been the story of Varsho’s season at the plate so far. His 119 wRC+ against right-handers this month has really been the only bright spot, offensively, for him. In other words, in one split, for one month, he's met expectations. And even in doing so he's managed just a .314 on-base.

It's not good. And the indicators against LHP that I was worried about back in April haven't exactly turned around. Part of what was encouraging then was the fact that he'd already bunted for a pair of beautiful hits against left-handers, but unfortunately he's added only two more bunt hits since. The contact he's produced against lefties when not trying to bunt has also been noticeably weak. Bunts excluded, of the 52 left-handed batters with at least 30 PA against lefties this season, Varsho's average exit velocity (82.3) ranks 50th. Only Colorado veteran Charlie Blackmon and teammate Kevin Kiermaier have been worse.

I don’t want to be too down on Varsho here, because he’s definitely been a plus defensively, and is a whole lot of fun to watch. The bat is, hopefully, heating up, too. But he's been shielded from left-handers more this year than he was last season in Arizona, and the Jays seem completely unwilling to take advantage of his ability to spend some time behind the plate. The story of the trade isn’t written yet, but choosing to keep Alejandro Kirk, trade Gabriel Moreno (and Lourdes Gurriel Jr.), and only getting a platoon outfielder back has a chance to go down as an all-timer — and obviously not in a good way.

6. “Tim Mayza is an odd one!”

I was pretty worried about Tim Mayza back in April. Partly that was because of how the previous year had ended, not only against the Mariners in the playoffs, but with an ugly August and a few bumpy outings in late September. Partly it was because he failed to record an out in his final appearance of spring training, then did the same thing on opening day. Partly it was because of the three-batter rule and the fact that right-handed hitter slashed .291/.342/.476 against him in 2022. And partly it was because, for some reason, in the early going he had virtually abandoned his slider.

At the time Mayza was throwing his sinker at a 90% clip, its usage surging since he'd first added it to his repertoire with a few offerings back in 2018. There are relievers who can get away with essentially being a one-pitch pitcher, but could Mayza really have suddenly turned into one of them? Could he succeed?

Fortunately, in the weeks and months since, we haven't been forced to find out.

Data via BaseballSavant

Mayza's slider usage continues to rise. He's been deployed judiciously against right-handers, done better against them when needed (they're slashing .256/.319/.372 against him), kept the ball on the ground and in the ballpark, and has generally just been very effective.

With a 1.33 ERA and a 1.96 FIP over 27 innings, FanGraphs says he's already been worth nearly a win above replacement (0.8), which puts him in the top 30 among MLB relievers — and second on the Blue Jays behind Jordan Romano (0.9). Nice work, Timmy.

7. “Ricky Tiedemann might be ready”

I’m starting to reevaluate whether it’s such a great idea to push for prospects to be rushed to the majors before they’ve really had a chance to experience any kind of failure at the minor league level. *COUGH*

Of course, Tiedemann remains in that category this deep into the season not because he’s been dominating, but because he’s been hurt.

The Jays’ top prospect made just four appearances for the Double-A New Hampshire Fisher Cats before being shut down due to biceps inflammation in May. It was reported late last month that he was shortly going to begin a throwing progression, but Baseball America reported on Monday that he's still considered week-to-week. And on Wednesday, in a session prior to the Jays’ game against San Francisco, GM Ross Atkins told reporters, including SI’s Mitch Bannon, that Tiedemann is back to throwing (“velo is way back up, high 90s”), and that he’ll throw a live bullpen in the coming days.

Still, that’s not what you want! And he’s certainly not ready — though maybe there's a chance that, once healthy, he can still find his way into a relief role later on in the season.

8. “The Jays’ renovations appear to be winners”

I think it’s safe to say that this one has proven true. We’ll see what happens with the crowds way down the line when the team is bad and the spaces aren’t new, but even then I think the elevated bullpens, bullpen seats, and the bringing of the fans right down to the fence alone are pretty huge wins.

What they do next, with the infield portion of the reno, may not be quite as well received. Not just because it’s likely going to be much more explicitly about the team getting their hands in peoples’ wallets, but because it’s going to be the backdrop we see by far the most on TV.

From a business perspective, though, things seem to be going well with all of this.

Screengrab via Twitter/@JoshuaHowsam

Unfortunate as it is to see some longtime fans moved around and priced out of their seats, there’s surely a connection here to the way that the Jays have spent above the competitive balance tax threshold for the first time this season. So, in that sense, for the vast majority of fans, the renovations are also a win.

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And four more…

1. Alek Manoah can’t be counted on this year

A lot of fans received a reality check on Tuesday, when word broke that Alek Manoah had been lit up for 11 runs in 2 2/3 innings by a bunch of teens in the Florida Complex League. Thing is, the reality check perhaps should have happened when he stumbled so badly out of the gate this season. Or when we had to start rationalizing why the guy who blasted through the minor leagues with a 40% strikeout rate, and whose 2021 strikeout rate of 27.7% ranked 21st out of 129 pitchers with at least 100 IP, barely managed a league average K% last year.

I've been on the skeptical side of some of that stuff, but am guilty of trying not to notice those things myself. What I don't think I'm guilty of is believing that, once the decision was made to send Manoah to Dunedin, it was necessarily going to be a quick fix. Pop him in the lab for a short zap and he'll be back by Canada Day!

After Tuesday, I don't think anyone can harbour that illusion any longer.

The Athletic's Eno Sarris put it in especially grim terms.

It may seem like Manoah suddenly fell off the cliff because he had a 2.24 ERA in nearly 200 innings just last year, but under the hood, this has been a long time coming. Since he debuted, he’s lost 2 mph and two inches of sweep on the slider and gained 200 points of slugging along the way. But again, it didn’t happen right away. It’s been a long, steady march towards mediocrity for that pitch, and it used to be his biggest strength.

The Jays are saying all the right things publicly, of course. Spinning, in other words.

"I obviously saw the line score and all that stuff," manager John Schneider told reporters on Tuesday. "But I heard that the things we were talking about in terms of strike throwing, delivery, tempo, velo were all positive."

Privately, it appears to be a different story. TSN's Scott Mitchell tweeted Tuesday that he'd "talked to a couple people who had eyes on Alek Manoah’s Florida Complex League outing today and there’s not much positive to report that would say ignore the ugly line."

I think Scott’s TSN colleague, Steve Phillips, put it well in saying that despite results at this stage not mattering much (and a source telling him that there were a several plays not made behind Manoah that should have been), this result does matter because “this outing created a deeper rock bottom than Manoah experienced before being sent to the minors.”

It might come together for him quickly from here, and in Atkins’ session with reporters on Wednesday he said it was “the expectation” that Manoah will be back this season, but this made it clear that he's not just down there to iron out a few small things. The Jays, and their fans, need to be prepared for this to take a while.

(FWIW, Atkins also said that Hyun Jin Ryu is on track to return within the typical Tommy John window, as is Chad Green. Regardless, he acknowledged that starting pitching will likely be a priority for the club at the trade deadline. You think??)

2. Vlad will have a better second half

If I said back in March that by the halfway point of the season Vlad would have a 141 wRC+ and Bo would have a 123, I think a lot of fans would have taken it. Been fairly pleased, even. And while those are the marks that those two players are sitting on currently, Bo has been the elite one (he ranks 13th among qualified hitters), while Vlad has been merely decent for a first baseman. He ranks 12th out of 29 qualified 1Bs, just a few points ahead of Brandon Drury (119) — Brandon Drury! — and behind guys like Ryan Noda and Spencer Steer.

Those names all indicate that we're still talking about a sample of data with a lot of noise in it. I don't think anybody on the planet would take those guys ahead of Vlad, long term. But, as we all know, it's been ugly so far. And despite some nice progress against the A's over the weekend — which I wrote about earlier this week — he's not out of the woods just yet.

On Wednesday, Joe Siddall tweeted out a segment of his from Tuesday night’s broadcast that addressed Vlad’s struggles.

(Clip via Sportsnet/@SiddallJoe)

Not only is Joe on point, as usual, about Vlad still not quite seeming right, he’s also on point about how Vlad hits the baseball so hard that “he could OPS .800 in his sleep,” and — more importantly — he’s on point about how close he appears to be to getting it together.

It sucks that we're still talking about all this, of course. Everybody wanted to believe that 2022 was as low as he could ebb at this stage of his career, and he certainly made it look like that was going to be the case when he smashed his way through April and early May before tweaking his knee and — related or not — struggling thereafter. He's far from the only immense talent to have struggles at this point, but it sometimes doesn't feel like it, and you'd sure as hell like to see him get past it for good. But I think you have to still believe that he can.

I do. I definitely don't count myself among those who absurdly, post hoc, try to suggest that Vlad was a creation of the "minor league ballparks" in Dunedin and Buffalo in 2021 — take away all his home games that season and his 143 wRC+ still would rank in the top 10 in baseball — or act like he wasn't also a generational prospect who was getting HOF-calibre comps when he tore up the minor leagues.

Greatness is in there. We've seen it. And betting on him being much better over the next three months than we've seen so far is an incredibly easy call to make. How could he not?

3. The RISP thing will end

The Blue Jays have not been as bad with runners in scoring position for as long as you probably think. In 2021 they had a 113 wRC+ with RISP. In 2022 their mark was 119. Even back in April they were at 106.

If you're having a hard time wrapping your head around that you're not alone, because it certainly doesn't feel right to me either. But there it is. And, crucially, there it should be.

Good hitting teams hit well across all situations, generally. That's not to say that there won't always be variation depending on the split you're looking at, nor is it to say that there can't be reasons why a specific group struggles in a specific situation. The Jays have been acknowledging that for at least a couple of years with their desire to add balance to the lineup, the lack of which, it's believed, contributed to their late-and-close struggles by allowing opposing high-end relievers to get a little too comfortable due to the similarity of many of the club's hitters. I don't want to suggest that it's impossible that these particular guys fall into certain bad habits when the opportunity to cash a runner arises. But I also don't want to suggest that it's some sort of character flaw, or a fixed inability to be clutch, that is preventing this club from being more successful.

(Probably a bigger issue, as Josh Goldberg noted on Twitter on Wednesday, is the club's lack of home runs overall; he points out that Atlanta has been worse with RISP than the Jays (by batting average at least) yet have had a massively powerful offence this season, largely because they lead MLB in homers while the Jays rank 17th).

On Tuesday, with the Jays in the middle of maybe their ugliest RISP performance of this woeful stretch, Sportsnet Stats tweeted that the club leads the American League in strikeouts with RISP. The inability to even just put balls in play regularly has very much contributed to the problem here. But it’s definitely a bit of a deceptive number — and one that hides something in particular that ought to give Jays fans a lot of confidence that this is going to turn around.

The Jays are a good offensive club overall, and as such rank sixth in MLB by plate appearances with RISP. You’ve got to get those runners in scoring position first, before you can waste those opportunities! That may sound like a lipstick on a pig type of thing, but it's important to remember here. The Jays may lead the AL in RISP strikeouts, but they actually only rank 20th in MLB at avoiding strikeouts with RISP by strikeout rate. By that metric, six AL teams strikeout more frequently than the Jays do with RISP.

More to the point, the Jays are actually really good at avoiding strikeouts overall. It sure as hell didn't feel like it on Tuesday, but with a strikeout rate of 20.8%, the Jays rank fourth in MLB and second-best in the AL at avoiding K's. The gap between that number and their 23.4% strikeout rate with RISP is weirdly large, but largely weird. There's no reason to believe that it won't get much closer to their overall K-rate by the end of the season.

In his session with reporters on Wednesday, Atkins addressed the RISP situation in general, and Tuesday’s ugliness in particular. Per Hazel Mae he said that he "felt great the entire game. I felt like we've been playing better baseball recently. Felt like any moment we were going to put four on the board and we just didn't. I think you keep putting yourselves in those situations and eventually you will."

Some people are going to absolutely hate that, but he's not wrong. (Well, OK, maybe not about feeling great the entire game.)

4. That tiebreaker with Houston will be very comforting

Back on June 8th, behind six strong innings from José Berríos, the Jays beat Framber Valdez and the Houston Astros 3-2, to take the season series against the defending World Series champions. More crucially, this also gave the Jays a potentially all-important tiebreaker should the two teams finish with the same record at the end of the year. (Tiebreaker games were eliminated after 2021, so if the Jays and Astros finish with identical records and in the third wild card spot, Houston goes home.)

Surprisingly, the Astros have spent most of the season behind the high-flying Rangers in the AL West, and at times behind the Angels as well. Like the Jays and Yankees in the AL East, they've put together enough wins to stay afloat — the Angels, Yankees, Jays, and Astros are currently seven, seven, six, and five games above .500 respectively — while waiting for their fortunes to turn and those of the teams ahead of them to regress. With the stupid Orioles gripping the first wild card spot quite tightly at the moment, and the Rangers and Rays running away with their divisions, until something drastic happens, the battle for the other two playoff spots is between those four teams. And there isn't a whole lot between them.

Right now, FanGraphs projects the Jays, Yankees, and Angels to finish with 87 wins apiece, with the Astros right behind at 86. It wouldn't be shocking if things stayed that way for a long while yet, and without that tiebreaker to hold over the Astros' heads — plus a 2-1 head-to-head advantage on the Angels as well, with three games still to be played in late July at Rogers Centre — it's like they've got a game in hand.

It maybe hasn't sunk in quite yet — or perhaps thinking about this team actually being in the playoffs creates too much cognitive dissonance — but avoiding having to play a play-in game just to get to the play-in series is massive. As the stakes get higher and the scoreboard-watching gets more feverish, I think Jays fans are really going to start to appreciate it. There will be nights when it’s all we have to cling to.

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