Stray Thoughts... - Down Vlad
On disappointment, coaching, favourable counts, Vladimir Guerrero Jr., George Springer, Shane Bieber, Miles, Parker, Bloss, Fleming, Rogers, Yesavage, and more!
Your paid support makes independent, thoughtful, grass-fed, naturally raised, free-range coverage of Toronto Blue Jays baseball possible. Thank you.
So let’s get right into it: I don’t think it’s necessarily a massive indictment of the Blue Jays’ offence that they couldn’t score against one of the best pitching staffs in baseball. Or, at least, not as big of an indictment as it probably feels like right now, and certainly not as big as understandably frustrated fans want to make it.
There are plenty of things that are indictments of this team and how it has played so far. The overall numbers are an indictment. But one series? Against the team with the best WAR and second-best ERA in the American League? And the most WAR as a rotation in baseball? In a vacuum?
It was brutal, it was infuriating, it can’t keep happening like this… but does it mean it will? Does it mean heads should roll? Does it mean the jig is clearly up?
I actually don’t think so. I mean, “clearly” is doing a lot of work there, of course. For crying out loud, the Jays now have the same number of losses as the Red Sox. But, like, dreadful as that was, they went into the weekend 3.5 games back of the third AL Wild Card spot, and today they’re somehow only 3.0 behind.1
This isn’t to say that this team isn’t continuing to make things harder and harder on themselves, nor is it to suggest we’ve seen anything to indicate that any kind of sudden surge is coming, or that it might not soon get to a point where it becomes clear that their best move is to be deadline sellers and to reset for 2027 (ugh, or 2028). We’re just not there yet.
Or, more accurately, I am just not there yet.
And presumably the players and the coaches and the front office aren’t there yet. Because it would be insane to be. We’re getting closer, yes. It’s terrible to watch. But, crazy as it sounds, the club’s offence has slowly been improving as the year has progressed—a 92 wRC+ in April, 95 in May, 98 in June—and I just don’t think a tough road series in Seattle against a fantastic staff is a great litmus test. Unless you’re looking for an excuse to just throw in the towel and go do something else with the rest of your summer.
Which… fair enough if you are, I suppose.
Apart from a few individual stories it hasn’t been a very entertaining season so far, and there’s no certainty that it will get better. But saying that is a different thing than if I were saying that’s no reason to believe that it could get better. There is! There’s talent here. But these next six games—three in San Francisco and then three in San Diego—have the potential to be enormous when it comes to dictating what happens in the weeks between the All-Star break and the trade deadline on August 3rd. Especially if they go badly.
Deep breath.
Time for some stray thoughts…
Quickly…
• One thing that should be noted about the potential pivot that I was alluding to off the top is that there actually maybe isn’t a ton of value to be had from the Blue Jays’ pool of pending free agents. Kevin Gausman could fetch something if he keeps looking as though he’s beyond the struggles he’d been having prior to his start against the Mets last week. Daulton Varsho and Myles Straw could help teams, too. But Bieber? George Springer? Max Scherzer? Yimi García? Patrick Corbin? Is there a scenario where the Jays could see more value in just giving this group two extra months to get back into the race, rather than trying to tear things down a bit more comprehensively? If the return is weak, isn’t the opportunity cost of selling lower? Maybe I’m crazy, but... maybe? A question I’d rather not have to find out the answer to, of course.
• Look, I don’t love haranguing fans who are understandably upset at how badly this team has failed to meet expectations, nor do I want to be too much of a broken record on this stuff, but the “fire the manager, fire the coaches, tear it all down” stuff is just so tiresome to me. Especially when it seems like people just don’t grasp that baseball is a game that mostly functions on a granular level, and that what we mostly tend to notice—the results of a plate appearance, the results of an inning, the results of a game—is considerably more zoomed out. Hitting is a whole complicated process involving the kinetic chain, mental approach, swing decisions, game-planning, situational context, how well the opponent executes, where defenders are positioned. Players are tweaking things like box position, hand placement, toe taps, thought processes, etc., all the time, and the coaching is happening mostly on that level, within those unseen things. So I just think it’s a bit ridiculous when fans simplify all of that into believing a manager is doing nothing because he’s not changing the order in which his players come to the plate. Or that you can draw anything like a straight line between bad results and bad coaching, as though it’s the equivalent of a guy not inspiring his players to get those pucks in deep well enough. It’s a very different thing, and I’m not saying you can’t draw some kind of a line, but there are just so many variables! So much we don’t know about what they’re doing, why, and why it isn’t working. It’s just not worth the effort to keep getting mad about all this every few days, acting like your petty instinct to be vindictive toward the people who’ve brought us here is actually the super-smart diagnosis the people with actual skin in the game are too stupid or self-interested to figure out. Grow up!
• One thing that really got to me over the weekend—and, admittedly, this is probably a bit of a straw man, because I don’t think this attitude is rampant exactly (plus, I would probably do well to take my own advice and stop sweating this kind of stuff myself so much)—were conversations I saw online about Hunter Mense. A member of the Jays’ staff last year, over the winter Mense moved on to become the lead hitting coach for the Giants, and I swear there are people out there—granted, ones who surely have zero clue how bad the Giants’ offence has been this season—who think that the Jays’ struggles are proof that Mense must have provided the secret sauce all along, and without him everything has just reverted back to 2024 again (when Mense was... also here).
• It’s just... it’s unbelievable to me that someone could actually come to such a conclusion, rather than questioning whether their deification/vilification of hitting coaches might not just actually have always been stupid.
• That all said, it sure would be fucking nice if someone could figure out a way to help Vladdy stop being such an unbelievable mess, wouldn’t it?
• Also, this seems really bad.
• After Blake tweeted that out I decided to do some digging into those numbers, and it’s actually pretty interesting. There are only three teams this season that have had their wOBA when ahead in the count change by more than 32 points compared to last year: the Rockies are up .053, the Pirates are up .046, and the Jays are down .039.
• Looking at Jays regulars it is actually pretty shocking. Ernie Clement and Kazuma Okamoto have both been excellent this year, ranking 38th and 43rd in baseball respectively by ahead-in-the-count wOBA (among 176 batters who’ve seen at least 1,000 pitches when ahead in the count), but the rest of this group has been a real horror show.
• Giménez went from a .368 wOBA to a .330, Kirk from .427 to .361, Lukes from .471 to .349, Davis Schneider from .483 to .350, Straw from .360 to .348, Varsho from .432 to .417. But the especially glaring ones, you will absolutely not be surprised to learn, are Vlad (from .480 to .389) and Springer (from .519 to .381).
• With the count in their favour those two rank 143rd and 150th in terms of wOBA among that same group of 176. And if we drill down we see what we’d expect: they’re not walking at a massively different rate, they’re actually whiffing less, but their bat speeds are both down a little, and their exit velocities, hard hit rates, and expected SLG have all cratered.
• Springer’s hard hit rate in these situations has dropped from 54.5% to 38.7%, his average exit velocity is down from 92.9 mph to 88.3, and his xSLG has gone from .674 to just .403.
• For Vlad it’s a dip from 57.4% to 45.9% in hard hit rate, 94.3 to 91.5 in exit velo, and .638 to .473 in xSLG. Which, actually, maybe says even more about how badly Springer has been struggling here. Though I’d wager Vlad’s numbers over just the last month or so have been worse.
• As I hope I’ve made apparent above, I feel the bar to clear before fans can credibly start blaming coaches for things wrong is pretty high. But that doesn’t mean we can ask questions. And my question regarding this stuff would probably have to be: WHAT THE ACTUAL FUCK IS HAPPENING HERE?
• One thing we know is happening here, of course, is that neither of them is right, physically. How much or how little those ailments are affecting them is anybody’s guess—anybody outside of the organization, that is—but we know that Springer is not far removed from a broken toe, played through a lot of stuff last season (to great effect, it should be noted), and despite much teasing has—tellingly—yet to actually play a single inning in the outfield this season.
• And Vlad, of course, despite being rather hilariously voted in over the Yankees’ Ben Rice as the American League’s starting first baseman in the upcoming All-Star Game, has elected to bow out of the Midsummer Classic because of the back issues he’s been dealing with recently. “That comes first, for me to get ready, to prepare myself for my team to have a strong second half,” he told reporters over the weekend. “That was the main thing in my decision.”
• Yeah, no shit Vlad’s not been right. I don’t even know what to say at this point, man. We may be well past “credit to him for playing through it” time here.
• There are other indicators that something isn’t right with Vlad, too. Take his bat speed, for example. While his overall average isn’t down a crazy amount—from 76.7 mph on average to 76.2 mph—and is actually still higher than 2024 or 2023, that’s actually only when we’re looking at it per swing. If we look instead at the swings where he’s hit the ball into play, and the graph of it below, we see pretty clearly that a huge chunk of really good swings have simply disappeared. Not what you want!
• We also see in that graph that this year Vlad has had a handful of really hard swings, as compared to his more restrained 2025. Turns out there are only four of these, and they’re spread throughout the calendar, so there’s nothing really to interpret there about maybe hurting himself while swinging out of his shoes or anything. Interesting, though, that his fastest swing since 2024 resulted in a double of Freddy Peralta back in the Mets series last week. Maybe a sign of something?
• Speaking of guys who won’t be going to the All-Star Game, Shane fucking Bieber.
• Woof! That was yet another brutal one for the former All-Star and Cy Young winner out there in Seattle, giving up seven runs on six hits and three walks with just three strikeouts, and lasting over four innings. Eleven whiffs and just six hard-hit balls feels like progress compared to his debut (when he produced just six whiffs and allowed 10 hard hit balls), but this one was still pretty ugly. And concerning.
• The thing is, if you look at his velocity, spin rate, his IVB, and all that sort of stuff, it’s basically the same arsenal that he’s had success with in the past—including last year. Now, that’s not entirely true—he’s spinning his changeup more, throwing it slightly slower, and tends to be locating it differently—but that seems to be deliberate. The Stuff+ on that pitch is very much down at the moment (from 101 last year—by far the best rate of his career—to 81), but overall it’s not the quality of his stuff that’s dipped very much, it’s the command. From 2022 through 2025, when he’s actually been able to pitch, his Stuff+ has ranged from 90 to 93. So far this year it’s at 89. But when we look at Location+ we see that he was comfortably above average last season at 106, and this year he’s sitting at a career-worst 98. He’s a command guy who is struggling to command it. (Though I’ll give him that the Arozarena double was on a crazy pitch to have had smacked like that.)
• Not much you can do there. Just gotta let him keep grinding and hope that with repetition it gets better, I think. Definitely too soon to say he’s cooked—though it’s not out of the question, and it shouldn’t be lost on anyone that being a command righty with a 92 mph fastball is a harder thing to do now than even just two or three years ago. (JUST GIVE US THE 2025 VERSION PLEASE, SHANE!)
OK, time for some actual quick ones…
• Speaking of Springer (weren’t we), he’s back with the club and has been spotted on the field in San Francisco, so presumably his time on the paternity list will end soon, if not here on Monday evening. He’s not in tonight’s starting lineup, so maybe they’re going to give him an extra day. Whenever it happens, it’s gotta be Jonatan Clase who gets optioned back down to make room, though at the time of this writing that’s unofficial.
• And speaking of the All-Star Game (weren’t we), huge congratulations are in order for Ernie Clement, Louis Varland, and Dylan Cease, who will be representing the Jays in Philadelphia, along with manager John Schneider. Are those exactly the first three names you thought of when I referenced the great “few individual stories” that have run counter to this dismal season so far? I’d bet they were. Incredible players.
• Here we have a couple of must-reads from Sportsnet. In one, Shi Davidi takes the opportunity of the Jays being in San Francisco to look back at the selection of Spencer Miles (another great individual story this season, it should be noted) in the Rule 5 draft last winter, and what the plan is for his season from here as he continues to push far and beyond his previous workloads. And in another, Ben Nicholson-Smith checks in on the Jays’ red hot top prospect JoJo Parker, giving us this money quote from player development director Joe Sclafani: “He’s our most advanced teenager since Bo and Vladdy. In my 10 years here, I just haven’t seen anybody who’s that locked in and knows themselves that well.” Yowza.
• Things went a bit sideways on Jake Bloss there for a minute, so it’s good to see he got back on track like this on Sunday. (Might need him if they trade half their rotation options at the deadline good lorrrrrrrrrrrrrd)
• Over the weekend MLBTR caught that the Jays have released Josh Fleming and Justin Topa from their minor league deals. Now, you may be asking yourself, “Did I know that the Jays even had Josh Fleming and Justin Topa?” I, however, savvy analyst that I am, think it would be much more prudent to ask: Who the hell is Justin Topa?
• Hey, so Rogers finally reached the date where they were able to purchase Larry Tanenbaum’s shares in MLSE, making them the full-on owners of the Leafs, Raptors, TFC, Scotiabank Arena, and a bunch of other properties I should probably be able to remember—in addition, of course, to the Jays and the Rogers Centre. NOTHING OMINOUS ABOUT THAT!
• Oh shit, I meant to mention something about Yesavage, too. But this should just about cover it, I think!
• Uh… feel like I’m missing some things here, but I think I’m running out of steam with this one! Definitely agree with this, though!
• And this!
• OK, AND THAT’S IT! THE GIANTS STINK CAN WE PLEASE NOT FUCK THIS UP BOYS, WE DESERVE A REAL SEASON!! COME ONNN!!!!!!!!!!!!
Twitter ⚾ Bluesky ⚾ Patreon ⚾ 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. ⚾
Seattle and Texas were tied heading into Friday’s action at 45-43. Texas had a rare scheduled off day on Friday, due to the World Cup match between Australia and Egypt being played in close proximity to Globe Life Field, then lost on both Saturday and Sunday to Detroit to fall to 45-45, while the Mariners’ three-game series win against the Jays took them to 47-44 and gave them the lead in the AL West. Texas therefore dropped back into the Wild Card picture and now holds the third spot, making the Jays at 42-48 three games back.
Like you, I'm an optimist. 50% water, 50% air - actually the glass is completely full. But the amount of losses the past couple of weeks makes it hard to not be pessimistic.
I don't believe in sacking Schneider, Atkins, or anything drastic like that. This just happens to be one of those years. Take advantage of what's likely to be a very strong seller's market and restock for 2027 (or 28, God forbid). Not sure I would be a seller on Gausman, but if someone offered something crazy for him, then perhaps you consider, especially as there might not be baseball in 2027? Also Varsho perhaps? In fact, any of the outfielders should be offered out there. I wouldn't touch the catchers, and I'd leave the infield alone, but there might be a few interesting deals to do out there.