Some thoughts on the last two games before flushing the memory of them forever...
Ughhhhhhhhhhhhh…
But first, please indulge me while I attempt to make a living. Because if you’ve been sent here by a friend, or are an existing subscriber who would like to move 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 upgrade or become a subscriber. You’ll be helping keep all posts free for everyone, and I will be eternally grateful, too!
It’s been a rough week for the Blue Jays. There are no two ways about that. But before the Orioles series begins, and before George Springer returns (which, according to Bisons manager Casey Candaele, may not be until Tuesday at the earliest), let’s dwell on the last couple ones just a little bit longer. Even though there are only so many ways to say “this is awful and should stop” or “HELP YOUR BULLPEN ALREADY YOU FUCKING COWARDS,” there were certainly some things to talk about that I really shouldn’t let pass by.
Wednesday
You all remember it. It sucked! But let’s go through a couple key points to Wednesday’s loss to the Yankees in Buffalo with a slight twist from the usual format. Let’s play a little three down, three up…
▼ The Gurriel call
The umpires blew a call that cost the Jays the game-tying run in the bottom of the ninth — or at least a chance for them to move the tying run to third base. We all saw it on the broadcast. I don’t think I need to show it here. Loudes Gurriel Jr. swung through a pitch from Aroldis Chapman, clearly didn’t make contact with the ball, and Yankees catcher Gary Sánchez flubbed it, allowing what should have been a live ball to sail to the backstop.
From there we have two problems, one that can’t be helped, one that is by design and needs to change. Home plate umpire C.B. Bucknor took Chapman’s 100 mph pitch off the mask. He was the only umpire on the field in a position to have made the correct call, but was also, obviously and for obvious reasons, not in a good position to make correct call. That is precisely the kind of situation replay is perfect for, yet according to MLB’s rulebook that was a non-reviewable call. Totally baffling.
To steal something my cohost Nick pointed out on this week’s podcast: how on earth is it that you can review a hit-by-pitch but not that? In both cases replay is used to determine whether the ball struck an object, the only difference is that in one case it’s a bat and the other it’s a person. MLB should fix this immediately.
▼ The Charlie Discourse
“Look, relentlessly dog-piling a guy on my own team’s side three or four times a week for increasingly incoherent reasons whether he deserves it or not is just what sports fans do when they’re angry. If you can’t understand that then you should shut up.”
Ahh, my bad. How silly of me.
▼ The Stripling incident
Ross Stripling had another very good performance, allowing two earned runs over 6 2/3 innings with nine strikeouts and just a pair of walks. He may have been in line for the win, too, if the Jays had anything close to a properly functioning bullpen. Instead, Charlie Montoyo and Pete Walker tried to get him through seven, which is when he gave up the pair of earned runs.
That, of course, wasn’t the incident I’m referring to.
Not great! Fortunately, Stripling eventually rectified it well. But not before Sportsnet’s Joe Siddall did an excellent job of calling him out.
▲ Ross Stripling owning up to it
It wasn’t great that any of this happened in the first place, but respect to Stripling for his response. More contrition came when he spoke to reporters after the game. “It’s the most disrespectful thing I’ve ever done — maybe ever. Certainly on a baseball field. I’m completely embarrassed about it,” Stripling said.
He’s right about him being wrong!
▲ Ross Stripling owning up to it, Part II
Something that I think was less focussed-upon, but definitely delicious, was another part of Stripling’s apology.
“I saw when it kind of jammed Stanton and it was rolling, he didn’t run out of the box. If you’ve been watching him all year, he doesn’t really run down the line, and I’m just screaming at Joe, ‘he’s not running, he’s not running.’”
LOL.
I mean, it would be easier to laugh at a Yankees star seemingly loafing it (manager Aaron Boone said afterwards that Stanton deliberately doesn’t go all out to first base on routine plays because of health concerns) if the Jays hadn’t just spent the last few days losing winnable games to them. But still!
▲ Vlad’s passion
You have to feel for Vladimir Guerrero Jr., who is doing everything in his power — which right now is a hell of a lot — to win. He clearly felt it on Wednesday night when he had a hand in the Jays losing (or at least in extinguishing a potentially game-changing last-ditch rally). Vlad got hung up between third and home on Santiago Espinal’s comebacker to the mound and ended up being the second out of the inning. He took it hard.
HELP YOUR BULLPEN ALREADY YOU FUCKING COWARDS
Thursday
Though Wednesday felt like a real low point, Thursday somehow ended up, remarkably, being even worse. We’re not even going to bother with the up arrows here — it’s time for six down.
▼ The triple play
This was terrible, obviously. But shit happens. I don’t think there’s a need to look too deeply into the hows and whys of this one. It’s not the sign of a team that’s given up or perpetually doesn’t have their heads in the game, or who think the manager not having a performative hissy fit the night before means he doesn’t care and it’s OK for them to not care too. It was mostly just poetic, considering how things have been going for this team over the last week or so. Sometimes you’ve got to laugh to prevent yourself from cryin’. A wise man who used to DJ at The Tap told me that once.
▼ The Judge catch
It was a fine catch. A downright handsome catch. But I’m a petty man, and I’d very much like for that catch to eat all of the shit.
▼ The Bullpen/Hatch/Zeuch/Injuries
That’s a multi-pronged heading, but what I really just mean here is “roster stuff.” And how the Jays weirdly seem to be compounding the bad hand they’ve been dealt on that front by acting with zero urgency to fix their obvious problem. It was only a couple days ago that I wrote about the sense of urgency the Jays should be acting with to find an external fix for their bullpen. At this point I’d just settle for some urgency when it comes to any of the internal ones.
Thomas Hatch pitched well for the Bisons in a rehab start on Thursday. Could he not have been available to the big league team instead? Could he have been expected to do worse than T.J. Zeuch? And if Zeuch was just going to be sent down today anyway (spoiler: he was sent down today and Anthony Kay is up), maybe you didn’t need to bring up Jared Hoying (a real person, I have been led to believe) just so he can get demoted in a couple days when Teoscar Hernández comes off the paternity list. Joe Panik or Santiago Espinal can’t stand in the outfield for a few innings in an emergency? You need arms, guys!
Then again, perhaps that’s a moot point if the Jays aren’t willing to churn through the ones who keep failing them. I appreciate that maybe the team sees something in a Jeremy Beasley, but it’s a long shot that something clicks for him before he gets squeezed off the 40-man in the coming months. Give Charlie something to work with! Because clearly Charlie, for all the heat he took Thursday night for trying to stay positive, is well aware the he simply doesn’t have the horses right now.
I said it earlier in the week, but I’ll say it again: this team punted on months of rebuilding in 2018 because they “owed it to the fans” to give it one more try. Granted, no one actually believed that — it always seemed more like a cynical cash-grab driven by ownership’s desire to maintain 2017’s robust season ticket base (which was inflated by the fact that a ton of fans bought 2017 season tickets in late 2016 in order to get first crack at playoff tickets that year). But either way, clearly the the front office isn’t that afraid of pissing away a little future value for spurious reasons. Now they have a very good reason to! Because it turns out that this isn’t working:
Playing against the Orioles this weekend — and then the Mariners, and then the Orioles again! — should help, but man alive.
Oh right, and Rafael Dolis landed on the injured list on Thursday. Had I mentioned that yet?
▼ The Jays record dipping below .500
▼ Yankee fans in Buffalo
I realize that it can’t be helped, but it truly sucks to watch the Jays keep having to play road games in their home park. And no, I do not equate this to the way Jays fans from B.C. invade T-Mobile Park in Seattle whenever the two teams play a series there. There are no border restrictions preventing Mariners fans from filling those seats themselves. This feels more like Paul Godfrey’s egregious sell-single-game-tickets-to-visiting-fans-before-they’re-available-to-Jays-fans scheme in the mid-2000s.
But hey, at least the Yankees seem happy about it. (Via the Buffalo News):
"It has been definitely unique," manager Aaron Boone admitted prior to the game. "This is a different setting, being a Triple-A setting, a little different than being in a major league, three-tiered stadium, but you can definitely feel their presence and feel the excitement. I'm sure obviously a lot of upstate and Buffalo and Western New York Yankee fans all came out.
"It's been nice from our standpoint to hear them behind us and to know how excited they are to see us come in. That's been pretty cool to witness."
Slugger Aaron Judge said he was skeptical Tuesday when a couple cameramen told him it might be an 80-20 split in the crowd for the Yankees, a figure they clearly underestimated.
"Then we come out in the first inning and they're doing a (Yankee Stadium bleacher-style) roll call over that hill (in the right-field party deck). That was pretty cool. Even last night when Gary (Sanchez) hit the big two-run pinch homer, I was just looking at the sea of arms, hands and high-fives. It was pretty special."
Cool cool cool cool cool cool cool.
I hope the Jays at least gouged the hell out of them on ticket prices.
▼ The Charlie Discourse, Part II
A part of me thinks that people, myself included, who roll their eyes at messaging like this are really just asking to be lied to better — a clear sign they’re mostly looking for something to get mad about. But the thing is, people are going to notice when you do a shitty job of lying, even if the lies mostly fall into the “bullshit a baseball manager says” category.
They’re especially going to notice you’re bad at it if you demand your manager lies all the time. And if that really is what the Jays require of their manager, sorry to say, but this may not be the right guy for them, or for this market.
Alternatively, if Charlie thinks “we’re having fun” is what the front office wants to hear, it’s high time someone goes and makes it clear to him that it’s not. Or if it’s that both the front office and Charlie think “we’re having fun” is the right public posture for the players to see the manager taking after the run they’ve been on, Godspeed I guess, but that’s fucking weird and I can’t imagine the players are that gullible.
Top image: Screengrab via Sportsnet/MLB.tv
I saw the best minds of my generation destroyed by watching the Blue Jays bullpen, dragging themselves through Twitter threads at dawn looking for an angry fix... (notwithstanding you of course Stoeten ❤️)
I'm so done with the "Charlie discourse" at the this point... Colour me extremely skeptical of throwing the second Latino manager in club history (very long overdue and underrepresented) under the bus because the moronic white-dude-dominated emotionally-infantile Twitter groupthink has decided he isn't intelligent and they don't like his emotions. Cry me a fucking river. I'm no expert in this area and certainly some criticism of Montoyo is legitimate but the absence of race from discussions about Montoyo's reception in the fanbase is notable and suspect (especially in what I suspect is among the least Latinx markets in the sport).
1. It is the humane and reasonable thing to do not to scream at an umpire who got hit in the head by Aroldis Chapman's fastball (the racial dynamics of the Twitter mob on this play also give me pause).
2. This bullpen would make any manager look bad.
3. Why does it matter if he says they're having fun? At particular moments it seems like they aren't, but on the whole they remain pretty jovial and I don't really think that's a bad thing. If that means he's not the right guy for the market, maybe they should look in the mirror. Should the team be depressed, constantly angry? That seems unreasonable. He certainly has expressed frustration.
4. Save the Stripling incident (no big deal) the squad has been extremely drama free and he deserves at least a little credit for that.
re: The Gurriel call
This exact question (did the bat hit the ball) comes up all the time in cricket, and they do something I'm surprised MLB doesn't do, and that I've never heard baseball fans talk about (perhaps merely through my ignorance).
Cricket pitches have a mic near the wicket, and if the question comes up, they play the mic audio and waveform alongside the slomo of the batter. There will be a distinct jump in the waveform as the bat and ball pass each other if they did, in fact, touch. Very easy to tell, and it doesn't rely on seeing a blurry smudge make a miniscule change in trajectory, which is hard to tell.
Maybe it just doesn't come up enough in baseball for anyone to care about solving this problem, or maybe just nobody has thought of it? Maybe there's not a lot of crossover between cricket and baseball workers (seems very likely lol) so the idea hasn't cross-pollinated?
Anyway, yes, should be reviewable, and with a good audio feed, should take about 5 seconds to do the review.