Staff Infection?
Guillermo Martinez is coming back, Don Mattingly is having his role expanded, and people are confused—but maybe not in the way that they think.
The Toronto Blue Jays had the best offence in baseball in 2021 and 2022, producing a 115 wRC+ across both seasons combined. During those years, and even as far back as their playoff exit in 2020, there was no shortage of talk—including acknowledgement from GM Ross Atkins—about whether the reason they were unable to translate that firepower into more success was because their lineup was too monolithic. Too full of hitters who could be attacked in the same way. Too easy to pitch to late in games.
Deliberately, in 2023—and with the endorsement of the vast majority of the fan base, I think—they changed things up. Out went Teoscar Hernández and Lourdes Gurriel Jr., and in came guys who could give opponents a little bit more to think about. Brandon Belt not only hits from the left side, but is more of a doubles hitter—he's topped 20 home runs only once in his career—that is elite at taking walks. Daulton Varsho also hits from the left side, further helping to balance the lineup, and has some pop against right-handed pitchers, yet can also lay a bunt down against lefties. Other new faces were Kevin Kiermaier and, as of mid-2022, Whit Merrifield—a pair of wily veterans, the latter being one of the league’s better contact hitters over the last several years.
You can't say the lineup was as similar top-to-bottom as it had been in the days of Springer-Bo-Vlad-Teo-Lourdes-Jansen/Kirk and either Matt Chapman or Marcus Semien.
Unfortunately for the Jays, you also can't say that it worked.
There were myriad reasons why they were such a frustrating offensive team in 2023, and after a summer of absolutely insufferable chatter about their struggles with runners in scoring position—a painfully obvious statistical quirk that ultimately proved to be exactly that—a lot of fans landed on something else: the team hit for far too little power and, relatedly, some guys went away from pulling the ball.
The power thing was absolutely true, but really—thanks to the humidor, the outfield changes, and a bit of randomness—only when they were playing at home. And the pulling the ball thing was only partially true.
Matt Chapman, George Springer, and Whit Merrifield all saw dramatic dips in their pull rates. For Vladimir Guerrero Jr., Alejandro Kirk, and Daulton Varsho the change was more subtle. It was also maybe less intentional and more to do with Varsho's constant tinkering and the tough-to-strikeout Vlad and Kirk not being selective enough about which pitches they could do damage on. (For everybody else it was more or less the same as in 2022, except for Belt, who actually pulled the ball quite a bit more than in his last year with the Giants, though I'd suspect that was likely because his knee was in better health.)
There were issues with the lineup and the Jays’ style of offence, to be sure, but a lot of fans—and I've been guilty of this too—seem to have reduced this stuff into believing that the guys in charge decided that home runs are icky and started insisting that everybody must always try to hit the ball the other way.
Not helping this perception were things like Ross Atkins effusively praising the all-fields approach when he joined Buck Martinez and Dan Shulman in Sportsnet’s broadcast booth on Opening Day, or Don Mattingly saying "I don't look at us as a club that's just going to go out and have six, seven, eight guys hit 30 homers, that's just not how we're built"—which, for some reason, people got very mad about.
Contact-over-power is a tendency we've seen in the way that the Jays have drafted hitters lately as well. And, as I noted in Monday's Stray Thoughts, this year's minor league Statcast data shows that the organization grades out very well in terms of plate discipline but is near the bottom in exit velocity, perhaps confirming the trend.
If your point of view is that the people running the Jays are inherently clueless, and if you’re determined to read every quote and tea leaf with as much bad faith as possible, then I suppose this might seem like damning stuff—an organization blindly trying to force square pegs into round holes so as to turn itself into the Cleveland Guardians even though it has the resources sign or keep that all-too-valuable power. So, too, would the club's decision, made public on Tuesday, to run it back with hitting coach Guillermo Martinez. (They’ve also added "Offensive Coordinator" to Mattingly's job title.)
Go nuts, I guess. But, to me, such criticisms are utterly incoherent.
Did Martinez suddenly get stupid between last year and this one? Did the Jays, in their quest to be less monolithic, decide to simply be monolithic in a completely different and worse way? How do you explain pull-happy Danny Jansen being allowed to keep on doing his thing? Why is it that the Jays were fifth in slugging percentage on the road, and 10th in home runs? Did new VP of Baseball Strategy, and former Astros GM, James Click get to Toronto and decide that his previous team had been doing it all wrong?
Atlanta’s Kevin Seitzer told Cody Stavenhagen of the Athletic back in January that “a hitting coach comes alongside to help and support, encourage, prepare, and then hopefully we’ve got a button or two to push when guys are scuffling to get them going again.”
The Jays’ staff certainly seemed to struggle to find those buttons in 2023, and questions about hitters’ preparedness are valid as well.
But the thing is, the dynamic between players and coaches doesn’t really exist in the way a lot of fans conceptualize it. I think “help and support” are key words in Seitzer’s quote there. Players not only have agency in this, they also have immense expertise and dedication to the craft of hitting in their own right. They know their swings, they know their movements, and they know what’s been successful for them in the past. They have plenty of their own ideas about how they’re being attacked. And they have the bat in their hands.
Joey Votto is obviously elite among the elite when it comes to being able to think and speak about his craft—it’s a huge part of what’s made him so good—but I don’t know how anyone can hear or read him talking about hitting, or watch Joe Siddal’s excellent breakdowns on Sportsnet, or Caleb Joseph, or Mark DeRosa on MLB Network, or listen to Kevin Barker, yet still come away with the idea that hitters are blank canvases, or that hitting coaches are more than exactly what Seitzer says they are. Facilitators. Sounding boards. Pairs of extra eyes. People who work with the players, not people the players work for.
Parsing information and understanding and relaying concepts and data presented from the analytics department is also a big aspect of the modern version of the job, because a coach needs to help players prepare as efficiently as possible. Some coaches can be better or worse at doing this than others, to be sure. But the same can be said of the information coaches are receiving. And what this also means is that what we’re talking about here is a chain. There is a whole, big apparatus at work in service of helping players be as good as they can be. There are a ton of voices in players’ ears, too—and not in a bad way, like Buck and other old school types would have you think.
Here’s another part of Stavenhagen’s piece, in which he talks to Derek Shelton, the current Pirates manager, and a former hitting coach for Cleveland and Tampa Bay, a bench coach in Minnesota, and a “quality control” coach for the Jays in 2017.
“Six years ago, when I was a hitting coach, you didn’t have to be a movement specialist,” Shelton said. “Now you have to be some sort of movement specialist or you have to have someone on your staff who is a movement specialist. You have to be able to let them have conversations about what hitters are doing.”
Players, too, are exposed to more voices than ever. Most players work with private hitting instructors during the offseason. Such outside influences were seen as taboo only a few years ago. Now, most teams have worked toward embracing private hitting instructors. Aaron Judge, for instance, works with hitting instructor Richard Schenk, a pool hall owner who studied hitters online before morphing into a hitting guru.
“Years ago, and I can speak from experience, you were extremely sensitive that they were going elsewhere,” Shelton said, “almost like it was an indictment that you didn’t have the information to provide. It’s become such a norm now.”
A really intricate and multipronged system exists here, operating in service of the talent itself. And because of that, when players falter, the answers aren’t necessarily as simple as fans want them to be. You just can’t draw a straight line between “this player had a bad season” and “this player must have had bad coaching.”
Now, I don’t know whether Guillermo Martinez is a good coach or not, but more importantly you don’t know whether Guillermo Martinez is a good coach or not. The Blue Jays obviously value what he brings, value stability, value the existing relationships he has—“connecting with players is the No. 1 responsibility (of a hitting coach),” explained Tigers manager A.J. Hinch in another Stavenhagen piece from last year—and think he can help them get right.
That’s… fine? Fair? Something very much suggested by the results we saw in 2021 and 2022? Sorry about your pound of flesh, I guess?
Much of the same goes for Mattingly, too. And I think the fears are similarly unfounded.
People took his early August quote downplaying fans’ concerns the way they took literally everything about this team in 2023: incredibly stupidly. Many of them also only saw the first part of it, since that was the only bit from Kaitlyn McGrath’s piece that made it onto Twitter. Here’s the full version:
“I’ve read a lot of our stuff and one thing I haven’t liked all year, it’s like, ‘Oh, they’re not doing what they’re supposed to do, they’re not living up to what they are on paper,’” he said. “Sometimes you’re like, this is who we are. This is how we have to win. We got to be able to chip in runs here and chip in runs there. I don’t look at us as a club that’s just going to go out and have six, seven, eight guys hit 30 homers, that’s just not how we’re built.
“We have to play that kind of style, right? To be able to chip in those runs, so that’s why it really probably has been talked about so much, with men in scoring position, ’cause that’s how we score, right? We got a few guys hitting homers, but we’re not really a bunch of guys hitting 30. We really have to be able to go one run at a time, sometimes multiple, but really keep getting guys on base and then have to get our hits with men on base.”
I think one can quibble with the idea that the Jays were doing what they were “supposed to do,” because expectations were absolutely higher for several hitters. But when you see that he’s talking about a team that only has “a few guys hitting homers” rather than “a few guys who are supposed to be hitting homers” it makes a big difference. And seems downright reasonable to me.
Another thing I’ve seen used to criticize him are some comments he made on the Dan Patrick Show a year ago, in which he was dismissive of practicing launch angle. Not necessarily of launch angle itself, and certainly not of hitting home runs. Mattingly simply explains that he thinks practicing for launch angle in BP will lengthen a player’s swing at game speed, to negative effect. He also notes that pitchers have adjusted to the launch angle revolution by pitching up in the zone more often.
This again, to me, seems pretty reasonable! I can’t speak with authority as to what’s good or not for a big league hitter to be working on in batting practice, but I think if it had been Dante Bichette saying this stuff people would have been completely fine with it.
And then, of course, there was the outrage caused by Mattingly’s utterly benign comments, quoted by Mark Shapiro in his season-ending press conference, about the team’s preparation ahead of what would ultimately be their final game of the season.
“I was in Schneids’ office the day after we got eliminated, when we flew home, with Don Mattingly, with Scheids, and with Ross,” Shapiro explained, “and Don Mattingly said—he was kind of miffed at, you know, the reaction to the game planning and the preparation. He said, ‘Our planning and preparation was identical for that game as it was for the 162 games during the season, the process wasn't any different.’”
So, let me get this straight: you definitely don’t change how you deploy your pitchers once the playoffs begin, but you should absolutely scrap your routines and processes? Were people hearing themselves?
There’s nothing in this quote to suggest that the Jays didn’t understand the stakes or that their season was on the line. And it would have actually been a problem if the implication had been that they weren’t putting in the same amount of prep work during their listless regular season.
He’s just saying that anybody thinking that they were unprepared doesn’t know what they’re talking about. Which… yeah, probably!
I mean, I get it. This team made people absolutely insane, and that’s almost understandable. It wasn’t a lot of fun watching them struggle to score runs and waste great opportunities. And, unfortunately, I can’t tell anybody that bringing back Martinez and expanding Mattingly’s role will necessarily go well—just as I can’t say that cleaning house would change anything either.
But, I don’t know, man… can we maybe look beyond one frustrating season and give a bunch of smart people just a sliver of the benefit of the doubt? Can we at least try to understand the things we’re raging out about? Can we get a grip?
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I found the criticism of Mattingly particularly deranged. Firstly, I don’t believe anyone shouting on Twitter (myself occasionally included!) has much of an understanding of his role. And secondly, the guy is incredibly well respected across the game - not some shmuck Ross met in a bar. He’s called Donny Baseball for a reason.
I think the criticism in the playoffs regarding Berrios specifically was that the team WASN'T doing the same thing they were doing all year. Can you recall a regular season game in which a pitcher was going gangbusters and taken out after a mere 60 pitches? What drove many fans insane (myself included) was the sense that the staff was overthinking things, getting too clever by half, rather than using a common sensical eye approach (it's hard for me to believe that Bruce Bochy would have pulled Berrios in that situation).
More broadly, the team didn't score enough runs, so they lost. And that was a recurrent feature all year. Maybe there were some statistical quirks, but you rarely had a sense of a team with an offense firing on all cylinders.
I don't actually mind many of the changes the Jays made. They were all defensible at the time (including the Varsho trade, which might still work out well for Toronto). But the front office might have overcorrected from the previous year.
Perhaps in 2024, we can get a lineup that strikes a happier balance? As painful as this last season was, there's still a good foundation on which to build a great club. Much depends on what they do this offseason.
PS I was happy to see Ross Atkins finally take some responsibility for the team's failures this past season, after that absurdly "tin ear" presser he held in the immediate aftermath.