Spring Notes: Monday, March 1st
On missing broadcasts, Sunday's results, Monday's lineups, Travis Bergen, Patrick Murphy, Bo Bichette, Rowdy Tellez, Tinnish Speaks!, and more!
It’s home opener day in the Grapefruit League, as the Blue Jays take on the Pittsburgh Pirates in a game nobody who isn’t at the ballpark can see. More on that below, plus a ton of notes from Sunday’s game, a little three up, three down, some very interesting quotes from Andrew Tinnish on guys like Orelvis Martinez, Alejandro Kirk, and Sem Robberse, thoughts on the Travis Bergen trade, and more!
Before we get to all that, I just wanted to remind everyone that you’ve still got time to get in a question for my next mail bag, which, unless something catastrophic happens today against the Pirates, should be out tomorrow. (Of course, I should note that, as always, asking mail bag questions is for paid subscribers only — and thanks so much to all of you who do for making that format possible!)
Now, on to today’s notes…
Game stuff!
On Sunday the Jays opened up their Grapefruit League schedule with a game against the Yankees. I’m pretty sure they won, not that the final score matters. Frankly, it doesn’t even matter who performed well or who didn’t, it was just nice to have big league baseball back, even if we had to be listening to Michael Kay, David Cone, and way too much Aaron Boone and various other Yankees.
I mean, who wants to see Jordan Groshans’ first at-bat of the spring when you could hear Aaron Boone prattling on about lord knows what?
“Now, come on, Stoeten,” you could say here. “Even if Sportsnet was producing as many games as they could, they wouldn’t have been calling the game from Steinbrenner Field regardless.”
Not so! At least, I don’t think that’s true. The Angels will not just, as I noted in yesterday’s Spring Threat, have every spring training game on TV this year, they will have their own crew calling those games as well. It can be done! And though sharing the YES feed may have meant some awkward broadcast moments during all the screen time given to the Boones and Luke Voits of the world, a Jays crew could have at least been talking about someone like Groshans, even if we weren’t seeing him much.
Hell, Buck Martinez and Ben Wagner were both in attendance yesterday anyway! Put ‘em in the booth! Promote your team!
Of course, we won’t have any of that kind of stuff to worry about here on Monday, as the Jays host the Pittsburgh Pirates in a game that, if it’s available at all, will only be on the Pirates’ radio feed.
Three up, three down…
▲ Rowdy Tellez was smoking the ball on Sunday, and though we obviously can’t put a lot of stock in the first game of spring, I know I’d love to see that become the start of a trend. Randal Grichuk said over the weekend, when asked about how he’ll share time in both right field and at DH, that he expects that the way playing time is handed out will be performance based. That doesn’t bode very well for him, does it?
Teoscar Hernández should be the Jays everyday right fielder (Gregor Chisohlm wrote today for the Toronto Star about how Teoscar doesn’t want to be a DH, and why it would be a mistake for the Jays to change his routine), and Tellez needs to get as many at-bats as possible, I think. The Jays may have something special there, if he’s the same guy the he looked like he’d become late last year. The sample is small, but things like strikeout rate stabilize quickly, and Tellez made a huge improvement there.
Grichuk, I think we understand at this point. And, sure, it will all shake out in the end based on performance, but I’m ready to get Rowdy here. If Shulman is in, I’m in!
▲ The Jays are obviously not going to work guys too hard here in the early days of camp, so we’re not seeing many repeats from yesterday’s lineup in the one that goes here on Monday against the Pirates, but Rowdy Tellez did indeed earn another look, which really means he gets another chance to impress after scorching the two balls he hit on Sunday. Danny Jansen gets a chance to swing the bat without having to worry about catching, as he’s in at DH. And that’s it for repeat starters (however, Forrest Wall and Chavez Young came off the bench on Sunday and will both start on Monday).
Locomotive Kirk gets a chance to catch Robbie Ray — something that bodes well for him beating off Reese McGuire (HEYO!) in the backup catcher competition. But the most interesting lineup stuff is actually among the infielders. Breyvic Valera, Santiago Espinal, and Joe Panik are all in the lineup, yet none of them is being asked to play at shortstop. That honour goes to the club’s top position prospect, Austin Martin. It’s still very much up in the air whether Martin can handle short, so it will be interesting to see him get an early chance there, and to see Valera playing in centre, where he apparently spent some time last year in Venezuela. Or, well, it would be interesting to see all that. *COUGH*
▲ With my third up arrow I will simply tip my cap to the guys who put in some especially good work in Sunday’s game. Most importantly, I thought Bo Bichette’s patience during his plate appearances was really impressive. Bichette walked in just 3.9% of his plate appearances in 2020, which would be a worrisome number if not for the fact that he is so damn good at hitting the ball otherwise. Yet he managed to work a walk in both of his plate appearances against the Yankees' Michael King on Sunday, and neither was a cheap one. Bichette went down 0-2 in his first at-bat but managed to work an eight-pitch walk. In the second he got ahead 1-0, but swung through a changeup and fouled off a sinker before working his way back for another eight-pitch walk.
In his career so far, Bichette has as many multi-home run games (two) as he has multi-walk games, so to see him start off spring with a pair of walks was a great sign. Bo knows you don't get that Fernando Tatis Jr. money with a walk rate below 4%.
Another good performance came from former first-round pick Logan Warmoth, who had a pair of hits, including a home run off a pitcher with some real big league experience, Nick Goody. I also thought Joey Murray — whose "invisiball" was talked about a lot on the YES broadcast (and elsewhere) — looked good, and right-hander Bryan Baker, who was up to 98 and struck out two of the three batters he faced, may have been even better.
Both Murray and Baker are non-roster invitees to camp, but if the Jays get a good churn going with bullpen arms going up and down between the big leagues and Buffalo, it's entirely possible we could see them quite a bit this year.
▼ One consequence of the fact that Monday’s game with the Pirates isn’t on TV is the fact that we’ll not only be deprived of a chance to see the spring debut of Austin Martin (and Valera in centre, if you’re really so baseball-deprived as to want to see a thing like that), but also our old friend Anthony Alford. Alford is not in the starting lineup for Pirates but Sportsnet’s Ben Wagner tweets that he’s part of the squad that made the trip from Bradenton. Hopefully that means he gets to see some action, though if he does it will only be as the DH. (UPDATE: Oh, wait, he’s in the starting lineup and has homered in his first at-bat.)
Alford, you may remember, fractured his arm back in September when he crashed hard into an outfield wall in just his fifth game with the Pirates after coming over from the Jays. Injuries have been such a huge part of Alford's career that you can't help but feel for the guy. Hopefully this is his year to really put things together in Pittsburgh, but for now he’s still limited defensively because the arm.
The starting centre field job in Pittsburgh is there for the taking — the Pittsburgh Post-Gazette post I just linked suggests it’s a competition between Alford and 30-year-old Brian Goodwin, who is on a minor league deal with an invite to camp — and man alive, you would just love to see him take it. I would also like to see him on my TV today, but alas!
▼ Let me make something clear: this isn’t a down arrow for Anthony Kay, who pitched very well on Sunday. But Gideon is correct.
▼ As above, for the last down arrow I’ll go with the Blue Jays who struggled a bit on Sunday, and really it’s a list of about one: Jacob Waguespack.
Waguespack managed to record just one out, allowing three hits including a pair of home runs. But, as it’s still very early spring, there is actually a positive shine we can put on his day. According to Baseball Savant, Waguespack’s average velocity in 2020 was 92.5 mph. And according to the data at Brooks Baseball, the hardest pitch he threw last season was 95.5, and there were only three games in which his maximum velocity topped 95.0. On Sunday his four-seamer averaged 94.9 and he broke 95 on seven of the 15 of them he threw, including one that reached 96.0, his hardest pitch thrown since mid-2019.
The short stint or the fact that he was struggling may have caused him to “hump up” a bit, but who needs to worry about that? We’re trying to turn a negative into a positive here!
The Robbie Ray trade: A victory (The Patrick Murphy news, less good)
It was a small one, so you may not have noticed, but the Blue Jays actually made a transaction on Sunday, sending cash to the Arizona Diamondbacks in exchange for left-hander Travis Bergen.
Unfortunately, the Jays were able to do this and give Bergen his requisite spot on their 40-man roster because right-hander Patrick Murphy has been placed on the 60-day Injured List with a sprained AC joint in his shoulder. We knew that Murphy was hurt, but Murphy is an impressive talent who has been absolutely bedevilled by injuries, so that’s obviously not great news. Nor is the fact that it seems like his return is a little farther off than we were originally hearing.
“It's an AC joint injury,” GM Ross Atkins told reporters two weeks ago as camps opened. “We know 100% what he's dealing with. It happened over a month ago. So, 100% aware of what he's dealing with, we do not need any more information, now it's just a matter of getting him back and built back up. I'm confident that will be occurring maybe not for the start of the season, but not too long after.”
With Murphy now ineligible to be activated until 60 days of the regular season have elapsed, I think we’d be stretching the definition of “not too long after” if we stuck with that description.
As for Bergen, you may remember him as the player the Blue Jays sent to the Arizona Diamondbacks last summer in exchange for Robbie Ray. Ray, of course, liked what he saw from the Jays’ organization enough to stick around, signing a one-year, $8 million free agent deal with the Jays early in the off-season. Hard not to call that transaction a win now, isn’t it?
Bergen had been drafted in the 7th round in 2015, lost to the Giants in the Rule 5 draft in December 2018, then ended up returned to the Jays in August 2019. This will be his third stint in the organization. Obviously they like something about him, just not enough to have ever really given him a shot. His grip on that 40-man spot is tenuous, I’d say.
Tinnish Speaks!
Last week, Keith Law of the Athletic had Andrew Tinnish on his podcast, the Keith Law Show. Tinnish, of course, is the Blue Jays vice president of international scouting, and one of the rare holdovers from Law’s time with the club — which ended during the Ricciardi era!
The Jays have been doing some excellent work on the international side under Tinnish, which is great news as long as you can put out of your mind how supremely effing weird that whole side of the industry can be. Law and Tinnish are both veterans of the industry, and so were able to talk with nonchalance about some of the gory details of how big league teams operate in Latin America. It’s not great! But, uh, I guess there are some exciting prospects entering the Jays’ pipeline because of it.
• On the difficulty of evaluating players so young
The 12- and 13-year-olds down there, especially in the Dominican, don't look like they do here up in the US and in Canada, and I think a big reason for that is because these kids are getting into academies at a young age, sometimes as early as 10 and 11 years old, and they're training every day. They're playing baseball six days a week. They're on training programs at an early age, and they're just getting a ton of reps. It's eye-opening to see a 13-year-old hit a ball 350 feet. My son is 13 and he's a decent player, but I can't imagine him doing anything like that. So, it is challenging, but at the same time, it's a great experience, and it's certainly rewarding when you see a kid at such a young age, and then sign a player at 16 or 17, move forward and make their way to the big leagues.
. . .
I'm sure a lot of teams do this: we involve our high performance staff, our training staff, to try and gain some insight into certain body compositions and whether or not they think that this type of frame will grow, will have the ability to add, depending on the player, 20 pounds, 30 pounds, 40 pounds. I mean, honestly, as much as 50-60 pounds when you're seeing some of these kids at such a young age who are lean and wiry. Again, that's part of -- I say guesswork, I mean, we're obviously taking gambles on all these kids because they're so far away. But we're doing as much as we can to try and check as many boxes as possible, especially before making some of the larger investments.
At one point he noted that the scouting on the international front is “a more challenging environment than domestically, but a ton of upside obviously.” I don’t know, the challenging thing here to me sounds like being the 11- or 12- or 13-year-old kids who are having adults from North America out there sizing up their body composition, but that’s me!
Baseball is hardly the only sport where professional operations are scouting kids from very young ages, but it’s pretty galling that MLB can’t really get their hands on kids from the U.S. and Canada until they’ve at least graduated high school, whereas kids in Latin America are able to sign at 16, which means they have handshake agreements in place even younger, which means the whole unseemly process begins at absurdly young ages.
There has to be a better way here, no?
• On Locomotive Kirk
He has really short arms. Not always a good thing for a baseball player, but in this case — and I think he showed it in his limited time in the big leagues last year — if you try to come in on him hard he has the ability to turn on it. And, you know, he can also handle stuff away. So, for a guy who has short arms, the way his swing works, the way he's setup, he does have very solid plate coverage, and he's a very disciplined hitter.
He has some skills that you can't teach. His ability to slow the game down in the box is very impressive for a young guy. Defensively, he's actually a very solid receiver and thrower. And really we saw that (at the) youngest age. I want to say the first time he came into our complex in the Dominican, everyone was like, 'Who's this guy?' You don't even know who he is. It was during instructional league in (the) Dominican, and we had a kid come in who was throwing a 'pen at, like, 91 to 95, I want to say. With a bowling ball sinker. And just the ease with how he received the ball was really impressive. Again, 17 years old — or whatever it was, 17 or 18 — his ability to handle heavy, heavy movement was impressive. And he moved around well for a big guy.
I mean, look, there's a lot of big catchers in the big leagues who have shown that lower half flexibility and ability to move around, and I think he does have that. Obviously, he's working hard to get in better shape, and I think that will give him a better chance to play more. But at the end of the day, it's a skillset that's really hard to find. The ability to make good decisions in the box and hit the ball hard at a very high rate is pretty impressive.
CHOO-CHOO!!!
• On Orelvis Martinez
He's really impressive. He's one of the better performers that I've seen down in Latin America as an amateur, and fortunately I was probably able to see 50 to 60 at-bats at least with him before we signed him. And what struck me was, he has big movements, he's got a big leg kick, but it's an ultra-loose swing, it's a really quick bat. He showed the ability to hit the ball to all fields for power. He showed the ability to handle velocity. I remember at a workout, essentially every fastball he fast was — and he might have been 14 at the time, maybe 15 — but essentially every fastball that he faced at this particular workout was between 88 and 95. We had some older guys in there. And, you know, no fear, no panic.
The big leg kick — which you worry about with a young kid — on time consistently, really didn't get beat. And that's— the bat is really impressive.
I've been down here for a couple days now, we've just had our second day of workouts — he's in big league camp — and, I mean, the ball is exploding off his bat (laughs). It is really, it is impressive power. And he's actually trimmed up a little bit. Not that he was ever thick but his dad a shorter, stocky, strong guy, but Orelvis is a leaner body, a leaner frame, and moving around really well on the infield. There's just, there's a lot of looseness to him, and obviously strength. So, I'm really excited about him. I do think he has a chance to move a little bit quicker. He got a little taste of the alt-site towards the end last year, which was a good experience for him, and obviously this big league camp will be a good experience for him as well.
Now here’s a guy I’m really curious to see this spring. Or hear about from opposing radio broadcasts, as it were.
• Dutch Clutch!
I love the Honkbal too. It's great, it's fun. I remember going over in the spring of '19 to see them (Sem Robberse and Jiorgeny Casimiri) pitch — I went over twice actually — and really, at the time they were both 17 years old, and it's a wood bat league, but I would probably comp it to a good Division II conference. So, you know, for a 17 year old kid, that's not easy.
Jiorgeny was used in sort of a closer, high leverage reliever type situation that year, and Sem was a starter. And Sem absolutely dominated. At the time he was throwing, like, 83-87, maybe touching 88. But his ability to pitch and spin the ball and command the ball, and his unbelievable delivery and athleticism were very appealing. Jiro was a little more power. Jiro was, like, 90 up to 94, pitching around 91-92, so it was a little easier — less guesswork involved. But Sem may have, I mean, probably top five deliveries all-time that I've evaluated as an amateur. Just extremely efficient and athletic and pretty impressive. But I would highly recommend Honkbal games. They get decent crowds, there's plenty of beer. It's like these Rotary Clubs. It's really a good time. It's a pretty neat environment, especially in some of the rivalry games. But it's a fun league to scout, for sure.
I will get to a Honkbal game one of these days, I swear it. And as for Robberse — and his top-five-delivery-a-long-time-scout-has-ever-seen-from-an-amateur — consider me full-on absolutely in the tank.
“The velocity has already crept up from the high-80s to the low-90s and the projectable frame has many believing he’s just scratching the surface,” wrote TSN’s Scott Mitchell last month in naming Robberse his number 24 prospect in the Jays system. Hup Holland hup!
Top image via @DunedinBlueJays
Imagine how good this team could be if they can somehow manage to exactly time Grichuk's playing time with his short term heaters that he seems to go on at some point every year.
Rowdy has the best personality since Devon Travis and actually comes across as not having a big ego, which is rare for a professional sportsman. I'm pulling for him big time...oh that sounds bad given the McGuire reference in the article.