Stray Thoughts... - Bucking the Predictions
On hot bats, playoff odds, power rankings, poor punditry, analytics rants, minor moves, Ricky Tiedemann, Davis Schneider, big oil, the trashbag Texas Rangers, and more!
The Blue Jays find themselves in the second AL wild card spot as they head into their most important series of the season (until the next one), hosting the Texas Rangers for four games beginning here on Monday. And all this despite only going 10-5 in the 15 game stretch that they needed to go 12-3 in or else the season was going to be over.
*COUGH*
They’re hardly out of the woods yet, so do yourself a favour and refrain from dreading about the possibility of a wild card series at the Trop for at least a couple more weeks. But it’s going well. Or, at the very least, it could be going a whole lot worse.
I mean, yes, playoff odds are one of those things where it’s technically impossible to be wrong — Ahhh, but there was still a 0.3% chance! — but I’ll certainly take this…
Backing their way into the postseason isn’t where anybody wanted or expected this team to be, of course. They’ve really only managed to seem impressive against weak competition (they’re just 38-42 against teams above .500), and the Royals really let one… er, slip away there on Sunday. But the pitching continues to hold, the defence remains excellent, and some of the bats might just be getting hot at the right time.
George Springer has accumulated 0.8 of his 2.0 fWAR over the last 14 days. He finally has looked like himself. Add that to Daulton Varsho potentially figuring it out, Bo returning, Davis Schneider still doing Davis Schneider things, Ernie Clement riding some small sample weirdness of his own, and Vlad leaning into some kind of low rent Luis Arraez impression by cutting down his the strikeouts and perhaps accepting that his power is pooched—I still wonder about that wrist of his—and you don’t have to squint too hard to see a lineup that you might not even hate. Especially once Brandon Belt gets back.
Hell, even John Schneider got some love on Sunday by calling for a suicide—LET ME FINISH—squeeze—a bunt in an appropriate situation!—and putting on a hit-and-run for once, which always makes a manager look good when it’s actually executed properly. (The hit-and-run is kind of an “it’s not the band I hate it’s their fans” thing for me. I’m mostly agnostic on its value, but it sure can look nice.)
We’ll see how things go against Texas, I suppose. But this isn’t even just overly-hopeful fan talk. FanGraphs’ latest MLB power rankings are buying-in too. Also, as you can see below, they’re objectively hilarious. (Check out Jake Mailhot’s piece for the explanations).
I’m not going to lie, the Blue Jays putting it together, playing like the team FanGraphs’ data thinks it is, and making a deep October run would be an incredibly satisfying counterpoint to the season of howling from all those miserable-every-year-yet-somehow-even-more-miserable-this-year fans out there.
It’s obviously stupid to try to predict anything in this sport, but the possibility of that is genuinely there—ASK KEVIN KIERMAIER—as it always has been. Hey and speaking of predictions…
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
Dumbing down the discourse…
Look, Buck Martinez is an icon and it’s been great to see him healthy and back behind the mic this season. I’ve taken a couple of slight digs at him in this piece already, and if more of that isn’t your thing—if you think it unnecessary to get mad at old men for yelling at clouds—feel free to skip on down a couple sections. But the ol’ Buckaroo is having a moment here as the Jays head down the stretch, and not in a good way. Especially, in my view, because he’s an icon. Because he’s so respected. Because he’s a lifer in the sport. Because a whole lot of people listen to him.
And because it sure would be nice if he didn’t veer occasionally into shovelling red meat straight into the gaping maw of the outrage machine—which is what he did with his absurd “they need to go 12-3 or the season is over” thing that I referenced earlier, and also with Saturday’s innings-long rant about analytics—and instead used his wealth of knowledge and experience and access to help people learn and understand how the game actually functions rather than ushering them along in their worst instincts.
That is decidedly unsexy work, I know. I’ve seen enough rage from behind spittle-flecked screens at Mike Wilner for saying “it’s early” to understand that most people prefer to simply be told what they want to hear. I’ve seen the kind of engagement that those “here’s a bad thing about the Blue Jays, did you also notice??” tweets get when the authors don’t recoil in horror and push back at the slobbering goons who respond in agreement with 17 additional degrees of seething hatred. I know I’m fighting an uphill battle here with some.
I also know that antagonizing people surely doesn’t help, and that someone going on Blair and Barker and saying “well, the season could play out in myriad ways regardless of what happens over this next stretch” doesn’t exactly make for sizzling radio. Someone saying extremely dumb shit about this team this year certainly means they’ve got their finger on the pulse. But my god! I’m not asking anybody to care about goofy, inscrutable concepts here. The things Buck was so misguided—and misguiding—about in these cases were actually quite simple: you can’t predict baseball and information is good.
Who’d have thought the Jays could fail to go 12-3 without their season being finished in the process? I don’t know, anyone who has ever watched the sport before??? Anyone who saw that this was being said on August 25th, with the Jays just 1.5 games back of a playoff spot? Anyone who recognizes that the other teams fighting for a sixth playoff spot in a 15-team league are obviously going to have flaws of their own? Anyone who looked at the schedule and saw how many times these teams still had to play each other?
Now, I should be clear that most people certainly do recognize this. This isn’t even the stuff I’m mad about really! Plenty of people were saying things exactly this silly at the time, and it would have just been a throwaway comment if it wasn’t Buck, and if Sportsnet hadn’t chosen to push it through their social media channels. But he is and they did. And now you’ve got people replying to the below tweet of BK’s—albeit in vastly smaller numbers than the ones who get it or who have liked the tweet—with bizarre logic defending Buck’s statement on grounds that basically amount to “well we couldn’t have predicted those other teams would have played even worse.” YES, THAT’S THE POINT.
We can do better, is all I’m saying. And we can certainly do better than agreeing with the nonsense Buck was saying on Saturday…
The analytics rant
I am hardly one to think he has the right to criticize anyone for getting behind a microphone and saying something profoundly inarticulate, but the whole “analytics” thing from Saturday was truly a mess. And how could it not have been when the word has become a catch-all boogeyman for “things that are different from how I remember them and I therefore do not like”?
Analytics just means information. It can be misapplied just as easily as any other information, but because it’s often opaque and causes teams to do things we’re not used to seeing, some fans get really bent out of shape about it. No one likes it when there’s no villain to point at when things they don’t like happen, apparently, so it must have been those dastardly analytics!
Players and ex-players have a slightly different view it seems, but the result is basically the same: people twisting themselves in knots trying to say that they think teams should make less informed decisions without actually saying those words.
Let’s review. Our story begins in the top of the fourth inning on Saturday, with Buck’s response to Dan Shulman’s question about the Mariners’ George Kirby, who on Friday had publicly questioned manager Scott Servais for not taking him out after six innings and 90 pitches.
BUCK: When I initially heard it, I was very disappointed in George Kirby. But then I start talking to some pitchers with the Blue Jays today, and I changed my whole feeling about it. And a couple of the pitchers said: I hope baseball doesn't point a finger at George Kirby, but points a finger at the front offices. Because they have created this. Because the way they use pitching and protect pitching, and all of that. And Kirby was right, because he has been groomed to throw 90 pitches and come out of a game. That's the mindset now. Well, I hit my pitch count, I'm done. Well, you know what? I don't think we push pitchers hard enough nowadays, to push them later into the game.
Keep in mind here that, as he’s saying this, he’s watching Kevin Gausman make his 28th start of the season. In doing so, Gausman became the fourth Blue Jays starter to reach that mark this year—and if Alek Manoah hadn’t blowed up real good they might have had a fifth. Seems like protecting and not pushing the pitchers is working out rather well, in fact! Three cheers to the analytics and high performance departments!
Of course, you don’t need an analytics department to know that the “third time through the order penalty” exists. Hell, Arden even mentioned it on Sunday’s broadcast in regard to the Royals’ Cole Ragans.
As a group, MLB starters this year have a 3.68 ERA when facing batters the first time, a 4.57 ERA the second time through the order, and a 5.72 ERA the third time through. Outliers exist, sure, and teams do tend to let those guys go longer, but these numbers are like that every year. And teams now carry eight relievers in the regular season, and nine now with the expanded rosters in September.
Why are we stumping to push guys deeper into games, exactly?
Also, these easily accessible numbers barely qualify as analytics. They're, like, a shade above back-of-the-baseball=card stats. Frankly, I don't even think you need a stat to know that the more times a batter sees a pitcher in a game the better he can recognize and time up what's being thrown to him. I am very sure Buck knows this!
He continued…
The Blue Jays are an exceptional team in that regard, because their starters go deep into the game as often as they can. And they are right at the top in baseball in innings pitched by starters. Seattle, Houston, Minnesota, Philadelphia, and then Toronto. But I think the industry overall has done a terrible job of developing pitching.
Seattle, perhaps, shouldn’t be as high on this list as they are, but like I say, some pitchers can handle going deep into games better than others. Gausman is a veteran with plenty of seasons demonstrating he can log innings, and is so filthy he’s hard to square up regardless of how often batters have seen him. Chris Bassitt has so many weapons that the penalty hasn’t been noticeable for him—his second- and third-time-through ERAs (4.05) are identical this season. On the other hand, Yusei Kikuchi's ERA this season goes from 2.54 the first time through to 3.86 to 5.20, and so he doesn't get nearly as much leeway with this. Nor should he!
This subject was returned to in the bottom of the fifth…
BUCK: You know, we talk about how baseball develops pitching, and I don't think the industry in general does a very good job, because they protect pitchers. Even in the minor leagues, if they give up a couple runs in the first inning or a couple runs in the second, their pitch count's up, they take them out of the game. So they never really learn how to pitch in adversity. They never learn how to pitch when they're tired. They never learn how to pitch late in the game out of tough jams. I bring that up because Zack Greinke was 5-17 in his second big league season, and he got hit hard. And they kept sending him out there. He pitched 183 innings.
[Pause for some game action]
My point about Greinke was he had that 5-17 season, he learned how to pitch out of tough situations. He took his lumps early in his career, but later on he came back and won a Cy Young award. You just have to let these pitcher deal with tough situations and pitch their way out of things.
Did Greinke win the Cy Young by pitching out of jams? Or was it maybe because his stuff was so good (and Kauffman Stadium such a pitcher’s park) that he struck out 242 batters and had a 1.07 WHIP?
Like, I’m not saying there’s necessarily no value in learning to pitch out of jams or through adversity, but that will happen anyway and this narrative is wayyyy too tidy. Also, I think there’s probably value in not letting certain 21-year-olds get battered around and lose 17 times in 33 starts with a 5.80 ERA. And there’s definitely value in using your bullpen extensively if their arms are fresh and any good, as well as protecting the arms of your starters.
But… whatever. This stuff is fine enough. It’s when he uses the A-word that I bristle. And that’s what happened in the top of the sixth…
BUCK: John Schneider and Pete Walker, they're always talking about this, and how they're going to manipulate a series. And obviously at this time of the year you're trying to win the game they're playing today, you don't really look ahead. And with that, they made a couple of curious pitching moves last night. ... Going back to Kikuchi coming out of the game after five innings, he had 88 pitches, a walk and eight strikeouts, but they went to Hicks in the sixth because of where they were in the batting order. Garcia, Whitt, Sal Perez. And John Schneider, he's got a lot of people that give him advice. The analytical department, they talk about matchups and all of this. And yeah, it's good for a course of a season. The averages work out over 162 games, but I believe you have to allow baseball people to trust their eyes during the course of a game in that particular situation. And the Royals weren't coming close to Kikuchi.
I appreciate what he’s saying here, sort of. But if the baseball people don’t understand what a giant red flag it is to try to have Kikuchi turn the lineup over again when you’re down a run heading into the sixth-inning of the first game of a must-win series—coming out of an off-day with a fresh bullpen!—then you either need to take that decision out of their hands or get yourself different baseball people.
You might also want to look for baseball people who understand that Garcia, Whitt, and Perez are three right-handed hitters, and not only is Kikuchi worse the third time through, he's worse against those as well. Lefties have hit .202/.250/.355 against him this year, but right-handers are slashing .262/.321/.436.
Whitt, in particular, is an incredibly dangerous hitter, and if Garcia had got aboard and Kikuchi had been allowed to face him that would have been a real mistake. So you preempt that possibility by using the 105-mph-throwing right-hander in your bullpen who hasn’t pitched in five days. What is the issue here? Is the manager not allowed to use his eyes to look down at a couple rudimentary stats?
I mean, of course the pitchers you talked to don’t like this—they want the ball, their competitive drive is what makes them elite athletes. But there’s no issue, or analytics, here!
DAN: So Hicks came on in the sixth, and then they used Richards, Green, Mayza. And Jordan Romano wound up being asked to get four outs last night. Threw 29 pitches. So you wonder if Romano would be available today. We'll find out later on if there's a save situation.
BUCK: Yeah, it's really universal in baseball because analytics have been front and centre now in so many organizations, and the front office relies so much upon them. ... And because of that a lot of non-baseball people are making baseball decisions, and I think it's hurt the game. And it goes back to what George Kirby said last night. You had mentioned earlier that he apologized today for making the statement, and I can agree with that. He probably had a better situation had he talked to Scott Servais before he said something like he did post-game. But in the heat of the moment he said, “Yeah, I should have been out of the game, I threw too many pitches.” But that's a product of the front offices around baseball. It's not just the Blue Jays, it's not just the Mariners. It's universal. They put entirely too much stock in analytics, to a point where the baseball people aren't allowed to make pure baseball decisions during the course of a game. Granted, over the course of 162 games over a full season, it might average out. But, you have to trust your eyes during the course of a game to see what's going on during that game. Analytics treat every game like you're playing the '27 Yankees. And that's not the case.
DAN: And, as you say, as you get later into the season you think less about the tomorrows and more about the today, because you've got to win today.
BUCK: Absolutely, and that's when averages don't mean a thing. And this time of the year, baseball at its purest form. Because the only thing that matters is winning. You're not going to change your numbers at this point.
So… analytics, which are bad, treat every game like you’re playing the ‘27 Yankees. Managers’ gut decisions are better than averages because… uh… just because. And it would be better if teams chucked their analytics because the only thing that matters is winning.
But doesn’t treating every game like you’re playing the ‘27 Yankees mean you’re really trying to win? And the complaint I hear far more often from fans is actually that some of these “analytics-based” decisions lack urgency. Scheduled off-days, sitting a hot hitter because his swing plane is less than ideal for the opposing pitcher’s arsenal, etc.
SO, WHICH IS IT?
The answer is: it doesn’t matter. It’s a contradictory mess that doesn’t really even know what it’s opposed to except that guys in polo shirts are making hallowed decisions that ought to be reserved for guys with tobacco stains on their dicks. Yet, because he used the magic A-word, a lot of people absolutely eat up this slop. It’s dumb!
Quickly…
• The Jays have made official what many people likely heard on Sunday, which is that Jay Jackson has been optioned to Buffalo, and Erik Swanson is off the IL for tonight’s game one with the Rangers. This stinks for Jackson, who has been a fun guy to watch and a great story this year, but there’s still a chance—maybe even a likelihood—for him to rejoin the bullpen later on in the season, or potentially the playoffs, even if everyone stays healthy.
• What you may not have heard on Sunday is that Jackson, contrary to some reports that were out there, apparently hasn’t been optioned for a fifth and final time this year. To wit:
• We haven’t talked much about Ricky Tiedemann around here lately, but speaking of guys who could (theoretically) factor into some October bullpen decisions, the Jays’ top prospect is back on the hill and in his start for New Hampshire on Saturday he went deeper into a game than he has all year, putting up a nice little stat line while doing it: two runs (none earned) on three hits and one walk (six strikeouts) over 4 2/3 innings. That’s three very good ones in a row now. Seems like he's back on track.
• Some pre-series reading for you, as my Blue Jays Happy Hour cohost, Nick Ashbourne, has been impressed with Davis Schneider’s patience at the plate—a trait that isn’t as sexy as the home runs, but that might be the more important contributor to his eventual staying power.
• While we’re on the subject of Schneider, here’s a tweet of mine that I liked…
• Even more pre-series reading here, as my friend and former colleague Kaitlyn McGrath of the Athletic contrasts the Jays’ and Rangers’ rosters heading into this week’s pivotal series.
• Changing gears, I tweeted about this on Sunday, but it sucks more than enough to share it again:
• Lastly, unlike the previous monstrosity, we can file this next tweet under “things you love to see.”
Now let’s push these odds even higher by making the Texas Rangers eat absolute shit this week—a Blue Jays playoff-year tradition!!!
⚾ Be sure to follow me on Twitter // Follow the Batflip on Facebook // Want to support without going through Substack? You could always send cash to stoeten@gmail.com on Paypal or via Interac e-Transfer. I assure you I won’t say no. ⚾
There were people bitching about Kikuchi being pulled after 5 and Schneider's a moron. My reply was exactly the same logic as you just wrote. Agree on your Buck take totally. It makes me laugh when people bitch about managerial decisions and call the FO and the Manager idiots, as if they're smarter than the people who have literally spent their whole lives playing and being involved in professional baseball
So because contrary to standard for the Jays fanbase I am assuming things are going to work out, I've been thinking about the playoff rotation. Gausman is obvious, but after that it gets a little complicated. Like you'd have to think it's some combination of Berríos, Bassitt, and Kikuchi, but in what order? That also leaves out Ryu, which makes a certain level of sense except that I don't think you use Ryu out of the bullpen, and Kikuchi was alright at that last year, but you're also not going to start Ryu in favour of the guy who you could argue should be the #2 or #3 starter in an ideal rotation the way he's going right now. I suppose it's a good problem to have.