Spring wrap-up! (And more!)

All the Jays spring stories you need to know to be up to speed for opening day. Plus: News, notes, thoughts, tweets, podcasts, a bit of housekeeping, and more!

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Finally, mercifully, the long slog of spring is over. No more massive caveats around every performance good or bad. No more agonizingly waiting for Hayden Juenger to get Gilberto Celestino out just to say you managed to watch all the way to the end of a meaningless game. No more hoping to hell that, above all else, nobody gets hurt—something the Jays could have been better at over the last six weeks, though after Kevin Gausman’s exquisite debut performance in Monday’s spring finale, their injury troubles don’t seem quite as catastrophic as they might have otherwise.

Don’t get me wrong, spring training is always nice at first. Verdant fields on our TV screens! Ball! Dan and Buck! Hey, there’s Vlad! It’s also necessary for the players, obviously. From my end it’s always good for pointless busywork if that’s your thing (you likely have noticed it’s not mine), and occasionally produces a few storylines worth following. But ultimately it mostly feels like reporting on warm-ups. And that most of what anybody needs to know to get up to speed coming out of the Grapefruit League could probably be summed up in a series of bullet points.

Hey, here are a few of those right here!

Rotation

• As I noted, Gausman looked great and got up to 52 pitches against the Pirates on Monday. Provided his arm felt fine on Tuesday morning it seems as though he should be ready to open the season in the rotation.

(Halelujah. One has to think, after that performance, that we’ll see him in the opener of the second series of the year, against the Astros in Houston on April 1st.)

• Alek Manoah did not have the spring that he or anybody wanted. After looking awful in his first outing he found that his throwing shoulder—the same one he received at least one platelet-rich plasma injection in last summer—wasn’t recovering well. An MRI showed no structural damage and he’s back throwing again now, but isn’t close to ready to begin the year, having thrown just 23 pitches in his last outing, a live BP session back on Friday.

(In my view, a successful Manoah season would simply mean making 25 or more big league starts. That’s still in play. And if can’t quite get there but comes back and looks like it’s 2022 again that would be great too. But things are going to have start going right for him very soon.)

• Taking Manoah’s place in the rotation for the time being is Bowden Francis. It's an unsexy name for those who haven't been following his trajectory, but Francis just keeps getting guys out whether in the majors or Triple-A. He is certainly more intriguing than he was as a Brewers prospect, as the Jays have managed to coax some more velocity out of him. He'll never be a big strikeout guy, but had a nice spring, striking out 15 in 18 2/3 innings, limiting walks and keeping the ball in the ballpark while facing mostly upper-minors and major league opponents.

(A back-end guy, but that's all they need him to be—provided the team can score runs for him *COUGH*.)

• Yusei Kikuchi got roughed up in his final two spring outings, with walks and home runs—two things that plagued him during his awful 2022—both being problems.

(He was BABIP'd a bit though (.409), and either way I'm not going to worry about this until it starts happening in games that matter. He genuinely earned some rope in 2023.)

• Unsurprisingly, Yariel Rodríguez will not make the opening day roster. Surprisingly, plugged-in Cuban reporter Francys Romero tweeted on Tuesday that he is “expected to get 2-3 starts in Triple-A.” That's surprising because Rodríguez left his Japanese team, Chunichi Dragons, way back in March 2023 in order to try to sign in the majors, but the club maintained that his contract with them was still valid. He didn't pitch competitively in 2023 and only threw 54 2/3 innings as a reliever in 2022.

(I don't know how much he needs to get built up—he's 25 and threw 424 innings over the four previous seasons combined between Cuba and Japan, so it's not a Tiedemann situation—but I can't say I've ever expected Yariel to grab a full-time spot before May. Depends on how Francis and Mitch White start off, I suppose.)

Bullpen

• Relievers Jordan Romano and Erik Swanson have battled injuries throughout camp—and Swanson also missed time after his four-year-old son was hit by a car (which fortunately ended with the boy being OK)—and manager John Schneider told reporters this week that it’s “reasonable to say” they’ll probably start the season on the IL. Swanson is a little ahead of Romano—he played catch on Thursday and Friday, while Romano didn’t resume throwing until Saturday—but ideally both aren’t too far off. Those might be the team’s most important relievers, yet in Yimi García—who was throwing harder this spring than in any season of his career before—and Chad Green they at least have some genuine back-end options.

(It doesn’t exactly make a truly brutal early-season schedule—@TBR, @HOU, @NYY, vs. SEA—any easier though does it?)

• A theoretical option to take a bullpen spot if Swanson and Romano (or Gausman) start on the IL is Ricky Tiedemann. The club’s top prospect didn’t have a lights out spring, but looked fantastic—and ready to get big league hitters out—against the Pirates in Bradenton last week.

(Tiedemann is impressive but, as I alluded to above, he has thrown just 36 innings above A-ball and has never topped 80 innings in a season. The goal for him this year has got to be building up to be a full-time rotation option as soon as possible. I’m not sure the big league pressure cooker is the correct place for that, especially right away. And the fact that he doesn’t have a spot on an already crowded 40-man surely renders the idea moot.)

• Farther down the pecking order, in terms of both numbers and the eye test, both Nate Pearson (6.52 ERA) and Zach Pop (1.71 WHIP) didn't exactly blow the doors off in camp. And those numbers were especially rough because according to Baseball Reference's OppQual stat, at 6.7 each, Pearson and Pop saw a lot of Double-A level guys and below. Yet due to injuries, one or both may break camp with the club by default— likely just one, as according to Eric Treuden of Jays Journal, Wes Parsons has made the team.

(Oof. Uh... maybe some options will hit the waiver wire as teams finalize their rosters this week. Either way, the Parsons thing makes some sense if the idea is to have some extra length out of the bullpen early, due to guys—Gausman in particular—not being fully built up.)

Offence

• On the other side of the ball in one of two sorta-ish position battles throughout camp, Ernie Clement emerged victorious over Santiago Espinal, who was dealt to the Reds last week for low-minors pitching prospect Chris McElvain. The deal seems to be less about the return and more about getting Espinal’s salary off the books, and him off the 40-man. Clement just keeps on looking like completely different guy than before he arrived in Buffalo a year ago—plus he was out of options and surely wouldn’t have cleared waivers.

(Espinal is a fun player and was very useful until taking a bit of a step back last year. He amassed 4.7 fWAR in just over 1,000 plate appearances, which works out to nearly 2.7 WAR/600—a nice little return for half a season of Steve Pearce. I’m not convinced that either of these guys is worse than Isiah Kiner-Falefa.)

• With apologies to Spencer Horwitz, the other sorta position battle is, of course, between Dan Vogelbach and Joey Votto. Except it really isn’t. Votto rolled his ankle after hitting a home run on the first pitch of his first game in a Blue Jays uniform and still isn’t back doing “baseball activity” just yet. More to the point, Vogelbach is unfortunately just a better fit for the role that the Blue Jays have available. Of 192 left-handed batters with at least 500 PA against right-handed pitchers since 2019, Vogelbach's 128 wRC+ ranks 26th, Votto's 117 mark ranks 48th. On the same list since 2021, which is about the kindest we can be to Votto, Vogelbach ranks 23rd (131) and Votto (123) ranks 35th.

(And yet I do not care. Vogey may be a wonderful, beefy man, but if the difference is going to be like a half a win—incredibly meaningful as that might be—give me a year of Joey Votto in a Blue Jays uniform!)

• I suppose there was also a small position battle behind the plate between Payton Henry and Brian Serven because once again Danny Jansen managed to break a bone in his hand/wrist area. Serven rather easily won out thanks to his strong defensive reputation and a very good spring at the plate, during which he led the Jays in average air exit velocity in part because of a reworked swing. Interesting! Also: PROTECT YOUR HANDS DANNY!

(Serven did well to make the club and is a nice story, but with the hope being that Jansen will return in relatively short order, it would have been an ideal time to make use of Daulton Varsho or Isiah Kiner-Falefa's ability to get behind the plate. Either would certainly be a poor solution even in the medium term, but Varsho caught in 31 games as recently as 2022, and caught in 41 the year before. You really can't have one of those guys catch a couple times and save yourself from having remove a player from the 40-man for Serven? It wasn't ideal, but Alejandro Kirk started behind the plate in 14 of 16 games last September, with only two scheduled off-days. He can handle a heavy workload, and to me it’s such a waste of their ability to rule out those other guys from catching on day one. Not great roster management either! I’m sorry, does 81 career wRC+ IKF need to spend all spring focusing on his hitting?)

• The guys who the Jays need to rebound this season look healthy, locked-in, and generally played their asses off this spring. Vladimir Guerrero Jr.: 227 wRC+ (7.4 OppQual). George Springer: 223 wRC+ (7.5 OppQual). Alejandro Kirk: 180 wRC+ (7.6 OppQual). Daulton Varsho: 123 wRC+ (7.6 OppQual) plus eight stolen bases in eight tries. Triple-A OppQual is 8.0, so there are those spring caveats. But still!

(These are the only spring stats that matter, if for no other reason than they’ve at least made it feel like the internal improvements this lineup badly needs may really be possible.)

• Lastly (for this section), though we haven’t heard much about it for a couple of weeks, perhaps the biggest story of the entire spring was the fact that we might see the home run jacket return this season!

More!…

Let’s start out with a little housekeeping before we move on to a few news items and things.

First, for opening day this year I’ve decided to do a quick mail bag. I’ll be putting out a post asking for questions on Wednesday afternoon. I’m not sure I’ll be able to get to every one that comes in, because Thursday is fast approaching, but I’m eager to see what everybody’s thinking about this team now that we’ve had the chance to spend some time with them over the last six weeks. And if anyone would like to get a head start and drop a question in the comments on this post, feel free to do so!

Second, also coming up on Wednesday will be the return of Blue Jays Happy Hour. Nick and I will be recording our first episode of the new season Wednesday morning—which will also be our first for Blue Jays Nation! It’s very cool to return as a small part of a site that I helped to start way back in 2016, which is certainly much bigger now, and should help Nick and I make the podcast even better—including expanding beyond audio-only into the video realm sometime in the near future.

If you already follow the podcast, the new episode should pop up as normal. And if you don’t, just search for Blue Jays Happy Hour on your podcast app of choice and be sure to add us—or just wait for my post on here to go out.

Moving on…

• You’d have already known this podcast news if you had caught my appearance last Friday on Episode 199 of Blue Jays Nation Radio—in which I also chatted with Cam and Tyler about the Espinal trade, pitching injuries, the worst-case scenario for 2024, and a whole lot more!

• You’d have also heard about it if you’d listened to my chat about all things Kevin Gausman with my old pal the Zubes for his outstanding 40 in 30 series on Less Than Jays this week. Be sure to check it out!

• I linked it a couple of times in the section above, but I think it’s worth mentioning here that Arden Zwelling’s look at the Jays’ spring Statcast standouts was full of a bunch of interesting stuff. One tidbit from the piece that I didn't mention above was the fact that Ernie Clement led the team in sprint speed this spring, edging out Steward Berroa, Cam Eden, Devonte Brown, and Kevin Kiermaier. Clement swiped 13 bags in 15 tries last season after stealing just two in the previous two years combined. Truly a fascinating guy! (He also struck out just once in 49 spring plate appearances, and hit two triples and three home runs!)

• Speaking of great stat-related reads, I loved Esteban Rivera's piece at FanGraphs late last week about Daulton Varsho and his swing. To summarize, and gloss over all the esoteric numbers, Varsho says he wants his swing to be flat, but by measuring the angle of his bat at various points, Rivera says the data shows that in 2023 he was setting up to have a steeper swing and then deviating off the bat's natural path in order to be flat at the point of contact. Sub-optimal! “If he started his downswing flatter, he would be in a better position to execute on the flat swing he intends to have,” Rivera writes—and then shows us how Varsho seems to have made exactly that sort of adjustment this spring. Intriguing stuff! And a pretty good entry point into the world swing data for those who've yet to really encounter it.

• Rob Longley of the Toronto Sun tells us that Jays manager John Schneider—who I keep reading is on shaky ground in terms of his employment, which honestly seems pretty silly to me—is looking to hit Vladimir Guerrero Jr. second in the lineup this season. Or, at least, he says that “having him between George and Bo is a good thing.” I agree! Though at this stage it probably should be Bo leading off and Springer hitting third, no?

• Elsewhere from Rob, he spoke to Schneider and Alejandro Kirk about the great camp the young catcher has had, and how important it’s been that he was able to get to Dunedin early this year—unlike last season, when the birth of his daughter delayed his arrival and prevented him from getting into a Grapefruit League game until March 13th. Hopefully a full camp will help him get back to where he needs to be at the plate, and the early results are encouraging.

• I’m not going to rephrase all this, so here are a bunch of tweets I made. (And here’s a link to the article I’m referring to.)

• Great stuff here from Brandon Wile of theScore, who looks back on the pandemic year of 2020, and talks to prospects from then about what was lost—and gained—due to the complete shut-down of the minor leagues for a full season.

• Lmaoooooooooo

• I know that nobody wants to think about the next era of Blue Jays baseball quite yet, but oh man, I sure do enjoy watching Arjun Nimmala swing the bat.

• Lastly, how on earth can Yusei Kikuchi read 258 books in a year when he sleeps 21 hours a night????

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