Stray thoughts...

On game ops (for real this time), dugout vibes, RISP, pitching and defence, José Bautista, whatever Jays stuff I've been tweeting about this week, and more!

Things feel pretty good today here in Blue Jays land. The sun is out, birds are singing. Bees are trying to have sex with them—as is my understanding. The team put together some very good eighth inning at-bats against the Phillies last night, and actually managed to cash in a crucial run with the bases loaded (we need not discuss how). They put up a much-needed 11-spot on Sunday to ensure that their series with the Cubs wasn't a complete disaster. Kikuchi looks great. The bullpen looks lethal. A bunch of injured guys are nearly back to full health. Gausman takes the hill tonight. And we're all still a little bit awash in the glow of 2015 and '16 after Saturday's Level of Excellence ceremony honouring José Bautista (we need not discuss how that day's game went).

So I figured, let's do something that I don't do nearly enough. A medium-sized post!

Apropos of nothing but the good vibes, here are some stray thoughts...

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I’ll be honest here, friends. This site keeps the lights on for me, but it isn’t a cash cow. And I could live a lot more comfortably than I do right now if I was willing to put some of my work behind a paywall and push a bunch readers who are on the fence into becoming paid subscribers. But, the thing is, I know that times are tough for a lot of people and I really don’t want to become inaccessible to anyone. So, if you can afford it, and you value what I do and aren’t already a paid subscriber, I’d ask that you consider upgrading your free membership to a paid one. Thanks. — Stoeten

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Game Ops

There was some great discussion on Twitter this week—which I alluded to a little bit in my mail bag—about the unbearably incessant noise that gets pumped constantly into the crowd by the Jays’ game ops folks during every single down moment of every single game. Or, probably more accurately, the discussion was great as long as you’re not actually a member of the Jays’ game ops team. People get passionate!

Now, to be fair here, a couple of thoughts off the top. One, playing the Lisa Loeb clip every time Yusei Kikuchi strikes someone out is absolutely inspired. Two, I am sure—and indeed have it on good authority—that whoever is actually behind the board, pressing that insufferable “Let me hear your hands clap!” button 80 times a game isn’t some rogue employee who thinks they’re doing a great job. They’re just doing what some higher-ups have decided people want or need.

Now, I’ll acknowledge that it’s theoretically possible we saw an influx of these complaints because the crowd there to celebrate José Bautista on Saturday skewed a bit older than the demographic the incessant noise exists to titillate and cater to. But it had something else to do with the ceremony: during the big reveal of Bautista’s name they flooded everybody’s eardrums with a pumped-in “olé” song—with electronic drums!—that was not at a natural tempo for how fans in the stands ever chant José’s name, nor indeed for how they were chanting it in that moment. There was even a chance to cut the music and stop the dissonance between the song and the crowd at one point and they just couldn’t. let. it. breathe.

That, it seems, is the main complaint that fans have here. Letting it breathe. Enough confusing the prompts for the thing. Enough drowning out the organic for the inorganic, like this or like suffocating the chants at Robbie Ray during last year’s playoff series. Enough feeling like every idle moment needs to be occupied by noise.

I can’t speak for anyone else, but personally I don’t mind some noise. I’m not complaining about volume. I’m not yearning to hear nothing but the rush of corn stalks in the wind. Just a little humanity and the occasional hint restraint would be nice. Read the room.

Boo Jays

Speaking of idle moments, I got some great questions in the mail bag this week about the lack of fun these Jays seem to be having in comparison to the identity they forged as a fun-loving group prior to the departures of Teoscar Hernández and Lourdes Gurriel Jr. One of the questions I received wondered how this difference might be contributing to the way fans haven’t quite taken as much of a shine to this more stoic and red-assed group as they have others. There was a bunch of great theorizing around this—my take was that fans fall back in love with them just as soon as the team wins a bit more and is unbelievably frustrating a bit less—but nothing that quite hit the nail on the head like a response I got from Robin (aka @joyeful):

Honestly I think part of what we perceive as the "vibes" missing is an unintended consequence of the pitch clock. I think it just stems from not seeing the players off the field and in the dugout as often as we used to. With the pitch clock, there's about 30-ish fewer minutes in a game than previous years. This translates to less filler air time for the broadcast to zoom in on the dugout and show the relationships and conversations that we got used to seeing between pitches and at-bats. We still get glimpses, but it's nowhere near as much as we used to see.

It's clear that this team still gets along quite well. Bo unabashedly adores Vladdy. Varsho is always getting hugs. Whit and Springer hang around to clown on Varsho in post game interviews. They have a home-run celebration. The few glimpses we do get seem to indicate that the team isn't probably isn't quite as serious and stoic as we perceive them to be.

I couldn’t agree more.

The LOBster

Speaking of frustration, I don't know if you've heard but the Blue Jays have struggled to cash in runners in scoring position this season. Or, at the very least they did in May, June, and July. April was fine and they've seemed to turn around their luck so far this month, but it's going to take a lot more than literally turning around the exact problem that everybody has been grousing about for months to get people to stop believing that—lmao—“this is who they are.”

Reading Ben Clemens' latest at FanGraphs probably won't do that either. But he certainly says a bunch of stuff that ought to resonate around here.

After crunching a bunch of numbers on how often teams are able to get a runner on third in to score with fewer than two outs (which is all very much worth reading), he gives us his money quote:

The real winner, in other words? Randomness. Driving those runs across is doable – teams succeed more than two thirds of the time – but no one seems particularly great at it. Again, the correlation between success rate in the first half of this season and in the second half was essentially zero. This huge part of baseball – cashing in the opportunities you’re given – seems to be at the whims of the baseball gods, rather than the players on the field.

That’s not how it’ll feel in the moment. Of course the team with good fundies drove that run in. Of course the Mets squandered their chances. But as best as I can tell, that’s not how it works in practice. The Guardians were one of the worst teams at cashing in through June 7 (my cutoff point), and they’ve been one of the best since. The Brewers and Angels have converted runners on third into runs at an absolutely dire clip in the second half (58.8% and 60.8%, respectively), but they were both above average in the first half. The Braves – the Braves!! – were third-worst in the first half even while scoring a trillion runs.

Hmm. Fascinating stuff. Who’d a thunk.

Further to all this, Clemens tells us that “pretty much nothing other than first-half strikeout rate did a good job of predicting second-half conversion rate.”

The Toronto Blue Jays, with a rate of 20.9%, were the fifth-toughest team in MLB to strike out during the first half of 2023. *COUGH*

Dream Team

Hey, but who cares about all this hitting noise. Pitching and defence win championships! Everybody knows this!

Pitching and defence

We have fun, don’t we? But it’s not untrue that the Blue Jays are doing some great things on the sides of the ball that don’t require cashing in runners in scoring position between the months of May and July. To wit:

• The numbers in the tweet below are certainly eye-popping, but it's not like Kikuchi is the only Jays pitcher to be having incredible success this year. He's just the one whose incredible success seems the most absolutely bonkos and deserved and wonderful to see after the utterly miserable season he had last year that had us all wondering how we were ever going to get through the rest of that contract.

As of Wednesday morning the Jays rank first in baseball with a 3.68 ERA. Their starters rank fourth. Their relievers rank fourth. And that group is getting healthier by the day.

• The Jordan Hicks experience sure looks a hell of a lot better when it works, doesn't it? And it’s better still when Jordan Romano is active and able to bail him out of a jam—and looks positively rejuvenated after a spell on the injured list. (My Blue Jays Happy Hour cohost, Nick Ashbourne, wrote about this on Wednesday for Yahoo. New episode coming Thursday!)

According to Statcast, in just two innings on Tuesday night, the Jays' fireballers combined to throw nine pitches at 99.0 mph or higher—two for Romano, seven for Hicks. Across the entirety of last season, totalling 1,441 1/3 innings of work, Jays pitchers combined to throw just 29 pitches that hard. Lmao. Good lord they only need to just hit a little better and they're a genuine World Series threat.

• And let's not forget the fielders who have been instrumental in the way that the Blue Jays pitchers have performed this season. On Wednesday, Mark Simon of Sports Info Solutions highlighted this. Specifically, he wrote about how the Jays are 30 runs better than the next best team by Defensive Runs Saved.

Partly that's Alejandro Kirk, the second ranked catcher. Partly it's Matt Chapman, who ranks third at third base. But even-more-partly it's been the club's centre fielders, Kevin Kiermaier and Daulton Varsho. The Jays have twice the number of DRS in CF than the next best team, at +26 to the Royals' +13, and Simon’s piece shows that a lot of it has to do with how adept both players are at going and getting to balls hit to the deepest part of the park.

The breakdown is excellent and, because he doesn't write on a platform that has angered the thinnest skinned moron in the world, he's actually able to embed tweets with a bunch of excellent highlights in them. Must be nice!

Nick on José

Lastly, and speaking of Nick, though I didn’t actually get around to putting together a weepy piece about the legacy of José Bautista before his name went up on the Level of Excellence—I’ve never enjoyed watching a player more, what more do you want from me? Also there were, conservatively, a million of those—we did speak about José and the then-upcoming ceremony on last week’s episode of the podcast. I think Nick’s musings on the topic—romanticized somewhat, as he admitted they were—were outstanding, absolutely bang on, and went well beyond most of the typical “he had that one indelible moment” or “he helped bring fans back” kind of stuff.

I think the duality that you talk about, like you said, the menacing persona, the willingness to antagonize others, embrace the hatred that he engendered. Hatred might be a strong word, but not necessarily an overstatement when it comes to certain fan bases. And then at the same time, he was brilliant. I mean, he's a human being who's still alive; he is brilliant. When he would really talk the game, when he would deign to do that, it was very clear the way he saw it. And you could see it in his tension. You could see it in the way he controlled the strike zone. The way he manipulated at-bats. The way he made pitchers come to him even when it should have been so obvious that you could never come to him. He would find a way to manipulate pitchers into doing it. And he had this radical approach that other people really didn't have.

When you watched José Bautista hit—when you watch other people hit and you're cheering for that player, there's almost always moments of frustration. Of, like, "why the hell did you swing for that?" Or, "you had to know that this guy was going to throw another high fastball, because all his other pitches are going for balls today. You had to know that he was going to freeze you with this." Stupid shit, because if you yourself were at the plate you would just cower in fear while they threw three pitches down the middle, and you'd just be scared. But that kind of mindset you have—even very, very good other hitters, like some of the great—even Josh Donaldson, even Vladimir Guerrero Jr. when he's been really good has had some of that. Stupid swings on that slider that's just way out of the zone, and he chases away. It's not like that literally never happened with Bautista, but it sure felt like it never happened with him.

Amen. And cheers to the Jays for a great ceremony on the weekend, dumb noise prompts and all, and, of course, to José himself. As unique and interesting and talented a hitter as you’ll ever find.

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