Slipping back... (to still being comfortably in a playoff spot)

On Rob Manfred, Ross Atkins, the watered-down playoff field, and this year's weird Jays Malaise (TM).

Image by Arturo Pardavila III, CC BY 2.0 via Wikimedia Commons

It’s easy to pick on Rob Manfred for the anti-fan policies pursued by the league under his stewardship… so let’s!

MLB’s commissioner, in his role as consigliere to the owners’ cartel, is the man who ultimately bears responsibility for Friday’s Yankees-Red Sox game being shown only on Apple’s streaming service, sparking a furore among Yankees fans that stretched all the way to the office of New York’s attorney general because of Aaron Judge’s potentially historic night. Manfred’s MLB has continually chosen to farm out select games to a variety of streaming services, cashing in on the sport’s ability to generate big audiences at the expense of fans who feel they’ve already paid to see every game when signing up for cable TV packages promising — or at least implying — exclusivity.

This stuff is nothing new, of course. I’m sure that many in this market still remember the way that, in 2010, Sportsnet moved Blue Jays games to their new channel, Sportsnet One, as a way to strong-arm fans into ponying up for the wholly pointless service — and to get non-compliant cable providers to carry it. But here in 2022, even when these games taken hostage are free to watch, as is the case with Apple TV+ (for now), the league is betraying fans that are older, that don’t own smart TVs, that are tech-averse, that are Apple-averse, as well as those that don’t need all that much of a push to simply not care.

It’s bad business, long-term, but a cash grab that will I’m sure help make a few payments on the owners’ fleet of yachts. (It also gave Joe Sheehan a chance to make one of the dumbest tweets I’ve ever seen, so maybe it’s not all bad.)

There is another decision that has come recently from Manfred’s office, however, that I think is more impactful than any of this, and that clearly is affecting the Blue Jays in a particularly large way: the expansion of the playoffs to six teams per league.

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This weekend the Blue Jays and Rays are playing a four-game set at the house of horrors known colloquially as “the Trop.” The Rays have won the first two, in typically maddening fashion, pushing the Jays down into the second of three Wild Card spots by virtue of their head-to-head record.

Were this last year, the two teams would be vying not only for home field advantage in a one-game playoff that would see the winner head to Houston for the ALDS, but to try to keep a very good Mariners team at bay.

Can you imagine the drama? The hype? Yes, it's a big series as is, but there's also a cushion there. The fraudulent Baltimore Orioles sit 4.5 games back of the Jays and Rays as of Saturday morning. Even if the Jays keep stumbling down the stretch it will practically take a miracle for Baltimore to catch them. For example, if the Jays go 5-6 over their final 11 contests they would end up with 89 wins, and Baltimore would have to go 10-2 in their final 12 to catch them.

Stranger things have happened, of course. But, anecdotally, this scenario sure feels as though it's sucked some of the life out of this stretch drive.

A loss like Friday night's — a game where at one point it almost felt like the Jays were on their way exorcising all of the Trop's demons, only for it to agonizingly fall apart in the eighth — or Wednesday's — a game that felt like it could have ended after Vlad's impossibly violent eighth-inning three-run blast, but fell apart in the hands of the typically reliable Jordan Romano — should have been absolutely agonizing. Should have felt like learning life is one crushing defeat after another until you just wish Flanders was dead. But while obviously those losses were no fun and absolutely hurt a whole lot, from where I’ve sat — i.e. on Twitter! — they’ve just hit a bit different. And, I think, not as hard as some of the losses earlier in the season, when the playoffs felt like less of a fait accompli, and the possibility of the team actually falling out of the race seemed more genuine.

Maybe I’m reading that wrong. Maybe I’ve just insulated myself well from the worst gnashing of teeth, or maybe it’s more to do with fans’ hopes simply being deadened to the wild swings between great and terrible that have become a key characteristic of this stupid team. But I don’t think so. The stakes of every pitch, every swing, every event, just don’t seem as high as they were, say, last year. Which… uh… is because they aren’t.

The most charitable reading possible of MLB owners’ profit-over-product insistence on expanding the playoff field during last winter’s lockout was that it was at least a chance for the thrill of a playoff race would be open to more markets, more fans. I recall being resigned to the fact that they were going to do this anyway, and being hopeful that, at the very least, this would be the outcome. We only have one year of data, but clearly that has not materialized.

Granted, things in the NL are better at the moment. There is a real race going on for the final NL Wild Card spot between the Phillies, Padres, and Brewers, while the Mets and Braves are fighting for a bye past the Wild Card round altogether and home field advantage should they meet in the ALDS. That's not nothing, but the loser of the Mets-Braves race gets a pretty swell consolation prize: home field in a best-of-three against a considerably weaker team and whatever advantage may be gained from not having to take nearly a week off between the final game of the regular season (October 5th) and the start of the NLDS (October 11th).

You'd obviously prefer to be the team with the bye and home field in the LDS — those teams are playing for a very tangible prize here — but not only is this essentially the best case scenario for this format, it pales in comparison to the Dodgers and Giants jockeying last year to avoid a one-and-done play-in game, the AL scenario is not especially compelling, we’ve lost the possibility of ultra-exciting game 163 situations, and a year after the 88-win Braves won the World Series there’s a chance we’ll see an even worse team crowned champions.

And for what?

A dirty secreat about last year’s Blue Jays heartbreak is that in this sport good teams should end up on the outside looking in. Watching the +31 run-differential Brewers who've had the benefit of playing a ton of times against Cincinnati and Pittsburgh — teams on pace for 99 and 103 losses respectively — jockeying for a chance to upset a team that is more than just slightly beyond mediocre is not quite as exciting as one might have hoped. The +4 Orioles being the main outsider in the AL Wild Card race is about as exciting as Cleveland being gifted another AL Central title through their rivals' incompetence and ill-health.

The playoffs themselves will obviously be incredible, because they’re the MLB playoffs and they’re always incredibe. But this is not what you want. That is, unless you’re Rob Manfred and the owners, who have gone from two very lucratve and highly-rated play-in games prior to the Division Series round to having at minimum eight, and potentially as many as 12 games in the new Wild Card round.

Is Manfred responsible for all the ills of the Blue Jays right now? Absolutely not. The mood of the fans and some of the softer-than-expected attendance numbers…

Unsold seats for Monday vs. NYY as of noon Saturday (via BlueJays.com)

…are the product of a number of factors. On the latter front there are things like COVID hesitancy, the increased number of downtown office types working from home, cost, and the lack of novelty that existed in 2015 and after last year’s homecoming. There are also all the factors that have shaped the mood, which includes the watered down playoff field but is certainly not limited to that.

There’s no use sugarcoating the fact that the team hasn’t been good enough often enough to give fans faith that there’s a month-long run of success against the best teams in baseball in them. Fans may be wrong about that, and I’ve written recently that we may simply need to recalibrate our brains to what a good team looks and feels like, and that the Jays’ frustrating grind of a successful run in 2016 may be a better template for what a good season looks like than the magical 2015 we all remember, but try as some might — and I’m clearly guilty of this myself — to intellectualize those feelings away, after 150 games it’s hard to blame anyone for believing that this team is anything but what it’s been.

That’s certainly not a Rob Manfred thing, it’s a Ross Atkins thing. And while this is definitely not the whole story, and it’s easy to get overly discouraged about things in the middle of an inopportune skid, it’s pretty striking to think about the rough last few days had by José Berríos, Mitch White, Yusei Kikuchi, Yimi Garcia, and Anthony Bass — the exact guys brought in over the last year or so to make this pitching staff better — and how this all connects. Nothing about this team has ever felt quite elite, it has rarely had all four elements — offence, defence, rotation, bullpen — going well at the same time, and lately we’ve been watching the bullpen fall apart in the wake of numerous bullpen days necessitated by the organization’s inability to find adequate pitching depth despite stating that as priority number one when they arrived here nearly seven years ago. I believe in the long-term potential of those guys, but it’s not exactly tough to figure out why the mood has been so dour so often.

But I do think that, even with the extreme volatility, it would be easier to be more engaged with this team, easier for fans to be swept up in the playoff race, easier for Blue Jays Fever to be gripping the country right now, if they were playing for more. If it didn’t feel like a trip to the Trop and then to the golf course was such a high probability outcome. And while I don’t think that’s as likely an outcome as many believe — a more-fluky-than-meaningful historical record against them and the constant tongue-bathing given a Rays team that hasn’t been any better than these Jays when a certain pair of broadcasters are in the booth certainly doesn’t help drive positive perceptions — it’s far from impossible.

If just getting to the dance meant more than simply being better than Baltimore, I think it would feel like more of an accomplishment. If getting the first Wild Card spot meant home field advantage and beginning the series up a game — like they do in Japan — the race would be considerably more riveting. And if only one or two of the Jays, Rays, and Mariners would be going to the playoffs, we’d be losing our minds over these games.

Obviously every year, every league, every race is going to be different, it’s just it really doesn’t feel like these format changes have done anything but prove the detractors right and enrich an already exceedingly wealthy league. It’s nice that the Orioles have seen a few more people through the turnstiles than expected, I guess, but they’re still the seventh-worst team in baseball in terms of average attendance (albeit higher than the playoff-bound Guardians and Rays). And… like… to have watered down the playoffs for this? To have fought the players tooth-and-nail for this?

I can’t say I don’t get it, because I do. It’s about TV money. The stupid day off between game one and game two of the ALDS is about TV money. The Apple and YouTube and Peacock deals are about TV money. Or, well, streaming money. And that can be fine! But at the expense of excitement? At the expense of best-on-best competition?

I should be thrilled that the Jays have an easier path to the playoffs. It’s something a lot have Jays fans have understanably felt was warranted for a long time, given the unbalanced schedule and the fact that they’re stuck with two financial juggernauts in the AL East. But something just feels a little off here, no? And I think the team is only part of it.

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Lastly..

That all said, as I’m about to publish this the Blue Jays are about to start the third game of this weekend’s four-game set against the Rays, sending Alek Manoah to the hill in what is obviously not a must-win start, but one they’d very much like not to waste — in part to save the bullpen, and in part because it will be five long days before we’ll see him take the ball again.

Fortunately, Manoah continues to be one of the best pitchers going, and is having the best stretch of what’s been a fantastic sophomore season for him, as we can see in the chart below of his earned runs on a start-by-start basis from Props.cash — player prop research made easy!

Data via Props.cash

• Also! A note on the podcast, which we weren’t able to do this week because Nick’s schedule was pretty tight, and we’ve run into some issues with Callin’s software of late. In short, our audio keeps dropping out when recording. This does not make for a good show, and we’re hesitant to invite anyone to listen in live until we get the issues sorted out — which hopefully will be next week!

Apologies for the lack of shows this week, but fear not, you’ll be hearing from us again very soon!

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