Runs!!!
On patience paying off, three beautiful dingers, Kevin Gausman's brilliance, locked-in Vlad, Jano the All-Star, Monday's debacle, a post-victory Blue Jays Happy Hour, and more!
Kevin Gausman was brilliant on Tuesday night in St. Louis, the bats finally — finally — exploded, and the Blue Jays gave us a win by more than four runs for just the third time in 43 games. So let’s talk about it!
Here’s Three Up…
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Up: That whole stupid beautiful game!
For those that missed the game, the experience of it was pretty much exactly like this.
And boy did the Jays need that. Fans, too!
The team was, somehow, just 2-for-14 with runners in scoring position, despite producing 12 hits and eight walks, but we'll take it!
Two hits apiece for Vlad, Bo, Kirk, and Jansen. Springer and Chapman both went 1-for-3 with a pair of walks. Teoscar had an RBI single. Raimel Tapia singled and walked. Santiago Espinal was the only starter not to get a hit, but he took a walk and hit a sac fly to score Springer's triple. It was simply a complete offensive performance — something that has been all too rare for this incredibly talented Jays lineup.
It's probably not very useful to try to take meaning from team-wide data in a single game, because the sample is so small and the results so specific to the opposing pitchers they happened to face on the night but, just for fun, let's look a few numbers that will highlight the ways the Jays differed in this one as compared to the rest of their dreadful May.
For one thing, the Jays swung at the first pitch just 7.1% of the time in this one, which is down from their May average of 8.8%, and well down from the 9.7% rate at which they’d swung at 0-0 pitches since the start of the Rays series on May 13th.
Perhaps unsurprisingly, given their eight walks, the Jays avoided swinging in three-ball counts much more than they had been throughout the month, too. Prior to Tuesday, in May they had swung 5.2% of the time with three balls, and on Tuesday night it was just 2.7% of the time.
One thing that might be even more telling is when we look at what the Jays were doing with pitches outside of the strike zone in more general terms. Through Monday, 51% of the pitches the Jays had seen in May (1,396) were out of the zone, and of those, 929 (67%) had been taken for balls. On Tuesday, 57.1% of the pitches the Jays saw (104) were out of the zone, of which 75 (72%) were taken for balls.
Five percentage points may not seem like a huge difference, but that's five pitches called balls that for the May 1-23 Blue Jays would have been either strikes, fouls, or balls in play (on which they produced a wOBA of just .222). Anyone who has followed the awful umpiring we've seen so far this year will understand how big those swings in the course of a plate appearance can be!
We can drill even deeper into that one, too. On Tuesday night, when Jays hitters were in either an even count or behind in the count they saw a pitch out of the zone 69 times (nice). Those pitches were taken for balls 51 times (74%). In May prior they had seen 1,084 pitches out of the zone when behind or in an even count, and they turned only 732 of those into balls (68%). Again, that maybe doesn't feel like a huge difference, but six percent of 1,084 is 65 pitches. The Jays had played 20 games in May heading into Tuesday night, so that's 3.25 times per game where, if they had simply been as selective as they were on Tuesday, they would have given themselves a better chance to do damage. Given some of their close losses this month — including five games by just a single run — that could have been very impactful.
And speaking of umpires, out of curiosity I also looked up how often Jays hitters, when even or behind in the count, had taken a pitch outside of the zone for a called strike. From May 1-23 it happened 34 times, or 3.1% of the time they were in that situation. On Tuesday it happened only once, or 1.4% of the time. So kudos are in order for home plate umpire Pat Hoberg, too, for not being nearly as terrible at his job as some of his colleagues this month.
That’s not a new thing either! You may not be shocked to learn that, according to Ump Scorecards, the number one umpire in terms of call accuracy so far this season is Pat Hoberg at 96.4%.
Now, it must be said here that not all takes on pitches outside of the zone are created equal. The Cardinals were certainly not pitching as tightly to the zone in this one as the Jays were, for example.
Still! You’ve got to do what you can do with whatever’s being thrown your way, and the Jays definitely accomplished that here.
It was a great offensive performance, and hopefully a sign of better things to come.
Up: Those pretty dingers
Jansen’s first:
Vlad’s first in ages:
And the second from newly minted pull-side slugger Dané Jantista:
“Everybody needed this day,” Charlie Montoyo told reporters after the game, including Ben Nicholson-Smith of Sportsnet. “It was great to see the offence come alive.”
Better still, Ben reports that right before Vlad went deep, he told his manager that he was starting to feel locked in.
“I’m on the way to being comfortable,” Vlad told reporters afterwards (via translator Hector Lebron), including the Sun’s Rob Longley. “I’ve been working hard. I’ve felt the more I’ve worked, the better I’ve been and I’m feeling more comfortable.”
"It's been pretty quiet in there lately,” Kevin Gausman added (also per Ben). "For us to get our mojo back, have that high energy, everybody talking in the dugout was nice to see because that's what we are normally.”
Let’s goooooo!!!
Up: Kevin Gausman
Ho hum, four hits and two walks over six shutout innings for Kevin Gausman, who struck out eight. Gausman threw 105 pitches and allowed just four balls in play that were more than 95 mph off the bat. He had his magical splitter-fastball combo working, picking up eight whiffs on 35 swings with the fastball, plus seven more for called strikes, and 13 whiffs on 26 swings from the splitter, with one called strike for good measure. Add in a couple whiffs from the slider and he totalled 23 on the night — a significant improvement from his previous start, last Wednesday against the Mariners, when he managed just seven (though still only allowed two earned runs over five innings of work).
Gausman is now the MLB leader in fWAR for pitchers by a full win over second place Tarik Skubal. His 2.7 WAR puts him into a tie with Mookie Betts for the fifth best mark in all of baseball, trailing only Manny Machado, Mike Trout, and Aaron Judge.
The Baseball Reference version of WAR, which tilts more to ERA than FIP, doesn't have him in the top 10 — and in fact doesn't even have Gausman as the best Blue Jays starter so far, as Alek Manoah's 1.8 rWAR ranks seventh among all pitchers — but so what! It's been an astounding start for Gausman so far, and his fWAR pace through nine starts would put him above every single all-time Blue Jays pitching season except for Roger Clemens' 1997. Pretty good!!!
Other notes
• I tweeted this on Tuesday night, but I’m just going to go ahead and say it again: “All-Star catcher Danny Jansen” has a nice ring to it.
• I can absolutely get behind this sentiment.
• This one, too. (Apologies for having to take a screengrab of this tweet, but the image in MLB’s tweet wasn’t showing up when I embedded it into Substack, and it’s kind of necessary!)
• Benny Fresh had a good one about Monday’s debacle come out at Sportsnet after Tuesday’s game had already started, but I hope people still check it out. In it he takes a look at Jordan Romano’s usage this year, gives some context for why the Jays didn’t bring him in for the 10th inning (which elides Charlie’s bizarre justification), and I think correctly explains that the Jays “attempted to finesse their way to a dream finish” by having lesser relievers face a weaker part of the lineup (David Phelps came in to face the Cards' 8-9-1 hitters), with Jordan Romano held back in order to see Nolan Arenado and Paul Goldschmidt.
Clearly it didn't work. But, Ben says, "in talking with Blue Jays personnel, including Montoyo, a more complete picture emerges. The Blue Jays are open to using Romano in a wide range of situations, including ones that resemble Monday night: tie games, extra innings, on the road."
This kind of stuff, to me, is much more valuable that whatever fantasies enraged fans have about reporters demanding accountability — or whatever such nonsense spews forth on Twitter when certain folks vent at a manager they default to vilifying the second they think they have a chance. It was a bad decision and a worse justification, but approaching this game rationally will always work out better than knee-jerking oneself into a lather!
• I mentioned Jordan Hicks and his curious lack of strikeouts prior to Tuesday’s game, and that trend — which you can see below via the data available at Props.cash — continued.
Hicks couldn’t get out of the fourth inning in this one, and managed to strike out only three Blue Jays on the night. The Jays’ four strikeouts in total are tied for their third fewest in a game so far this season, and their eight walks are the second most they’ve had in 2022 so far. Sounds good!
• A couple of fresh ones here on Wednesday from my Blue Jays Happy Hour cohost Nick Ashbourne. In one, for Yahoo Sports, he breaks down Vladimir Guerrero Jr.'s struggles at the plate here in May — something that appears to have a lot to do with the premium Vlad is putting on making contact ("and it's often the wrong kind of contact"). In the other, for Sportsnet, he looks at the early returns on the Jays' "4-3 defence," which has still allowed its fair share of singles, but has done a good job of protecting against extra base hits — a trade-off that the Jays are probably happy to make.
• Lastly, Nick and I finally got a chance to talk about a Jays victory again when we went live at the conclusion of the game in St. Louis. In case you missed it, check out this link for where to find the show, and where to find us on Callin so you can tune in live next time.
We’ll be hosting live again on Sunday at the conclusion of the finale of the Jays-Angels series (4:07 PM ET first pitch).
Next up:
Wednesday: Off
Thursday, 9:38 PM ET: Jays @ Angels (Hyun Jin Ryu vs. Shohei Ohtani), TV: Sportsnet One, Radio: Sportsnet 590
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𝓐𝓷𝓭 𝓲𝓽 𝔀𝓮𝓷𝓽, "𝓾𝓱"
𝓐𝓷𝓭 𝓽𝓱𝓮 𝓰𝓲𝓻𝓵 𝓬𝓪𝓻𝓮𝓼𝓼 𝓶𝓮 𝓭𝓸𝔀𝓷
"𝓤𝓱", 𝓪𝓷𝓭 𝓽𝓱𝓪𝓽’𝓼 𝓽𝓱𝓪𝓽 𝓵𝓸𝓿𝓲𝓷𝓰 𝓼𝓸𝓾𝓷𝓭
𝓐𝓷𝓭 𝓲𝓽 𝔀𝓮𝓷𝓽, "𝓾𝓱"
𝓐𝓷𝓭 𝓽𝓱𝓮 𝓰𝓲𝓻𝓵 𝓬𝓪𝓻𝓮𝓼𝓼 𝓶𝓮 𝓭𝓸𝔀𝓷
"𝓤𝓱", 𝓪𝓷𝓭 𝓽𝓱𝓪𝓽’𝓼 𝓽𝓱𝓪𝓽 𝓵𝓸𝓿𝓲𝓷𝓰 𝓼𝓸𝓾𝓷𝓭