Stray Thoughts... - Killer B2Bs
Pre-game reading on Barger, Bo, Vladdy in the three-spot, Swanson, Francis, relitigating the Teoscar trade, Devers, injuries, transactions, petty gripes, and more!
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Vladimir Guerrero Jr. came into Tuesday’s game on pace for just 18 home runs this season. Bo Bichette was looking for his first extra-base hit since before the start of the Jays’ recent nine-game, three-city road trip. Addison Barger had struck out in 37% of his plate appearances and was slashing .200/.259/.280 since the first game of the trip.
The Jays’ 1-2-3 hitters—with Barger now inserted between the veteran pair—needed to turn the page as the club returned to Rogers Centre after getting swept in Philadelphia over the weekend. And boy did they ever, powering the Blue Jays to yet another come-from-behind victory—and doing so as dramatically as in any of their comebacks all year so far.
You’ve undoubtedly seen it by now, so I won't dwell too much—because there’s a lot to get to today—but between them the trio at the top was 7-for-14 with three home runs, three doubles, all five of the club’s RBIs, and just a pair of strikeouts.
Bichette and Barger provided the real dramatics, of course, going back-to-back in the bottom of the ninth to rescue the victory. But it was Vlad who inflicted the most damage overall—a rocket of an RBI double into the left field corner in the first, an absolute moonshot no-doubter off the scoreboard above the second deck in the third inning, and a clutch single bounced between third and short to erase a just-scored D’Backs insurance run and make it a one-run game again in the bottom of the seventh.
His powerful bat was also looming in the on-deck circle in the bottom of the ninth, as mentioned on both broadcasts of the game, but thanks to Barger’s heroics, it wouldn’t be needed.
The Jays are now 9-5 in the month of June, and 14-6 since being swept by the Rays in Tampa three weekends ago. They’re just three back in the AL East, and 2.5 games ahead of Cleveland and Boston—the teams currently on the outside looking in when it comes to the AL Wild Card race.
By no means is anything definitive yet, but they’re in a strong position. They look fairly certain to be buyers when the trade deadline arrives at the end of next month. They’ve got the lowly White Sox coming for a visit after Arizona. And then they’ll get a chance to put a dent in the chances of the aforementioned Guardians when they head there next week.
The Red Sox, of course, put a dent in their own chances by trading their best hitter for literally no reason the other day—and the Jays will head to Fenway to face them after visiting Cleveland. Then comes the currently very enticing four-game Canada Day series with the division-leading Yankees.
It’s an exciting and fun time around here, in other words. Even if plenty of fans are having little trouble finding things to keep on being insufferable cranks about—many of which I suspect we’ll touch on below! Yes, it’s time for another batch of stray thoughts—once again, “Quickly…”-style!
Quickly…
• Speaking of Barger breaking up Vlad and Bo at the top of the lineup, it might be worth trying for a while. These splits are obviously a bit silly and lacking context, but since 2021 Vlad has a 119 wRC+ when batting second in the order (866 PA) and when batting third it's 155 (2,032 PA). And in none of those years has he produced better numbers in the two-spot than the three!
• Hmm, seems as though Shi wrote all about this stuff already, and posted it before I noticed and went tweeting about it and writing the above. Great minds, I suppose. (WE’RE GOING WITH GREAT MINDS. KEEP YOUR THOUGHTS TO YOURSELF.) Also probably worth noting at some point—here, for example—that last night could have just as easily ended with Vlad in the on-deck circle, which would have been incredibly annoying. Honestly, I’m generally very OK with the newfangled way of optimizing lineups.
• That said, while yes, it completely defies explanation that this sort of thing would be happening over such a long period and so many plate appearances for Vlad, until it changes I have no problem riding a little bit of superstitious energy.
• Interesting theory here:
• You know it’s going well for Barger lately when the thing that truly jumps out to me as unusual here is Vladdy’s launch angle.
• Speaking of: “Digging the company Addison Barger is in for batted ball profile,” tweets Sportsnet’s Blake Murphy. And, yeah… same…
• In a rare positively tinged tidbit from @SportsnetStats, we’re told that Tuesday marked just the fifth time in franchise history that the Blue Jays have hit back-to-back game-tying and walk-off home runs. Amazingly, that number stood at just one from June 1986 all the way until July 2017, when Kendrys Morales and Justin Smoak performed the feat. The Jays did it again when Smoak and Lourdes Gurriel Jr.—who, of course, was in the building on Tuesday—turned the trick a year later, in September 2018. Barger was part of the other recent one, too, pulling off the feat with Joey Loperfido last August. Unfortunately, Buck Martinez wasn’t in the booth for this one, as he was part of the first, walking off the Tigers 6-5 with a pinch-hit solo shot—the second and final pinch-hit home run of his career, and the second-last of 58 in total—after Cliff Johnson blasted a two-run shot to tie it. (Dave Stieb and Jack Morris were the starting pitchers that day, by the way.)
• Before we move on, don’t get me wrong here. What I say is true about the Sportsnet Stats account often tilting negative when it comes to the Jays, but despite the trolling we’re very much pro Steve Fellin around these parts.
Not so quickly…
• Speaking of Gurriel, it certainly seemed like it was the trade that sent him and Gabriel Moreno to Arizona that was destined to be relitigated in the lead-up to Tuesday’s series-opener, didn’t it? Turns out a funny thing happened on the way to a bunch of people being insufferably wrong: amid a flurry of transactions, reliever Erik Swanson was designated for assignment.
• First and foremost, it’s a shame to see Swanson go, and so quickly, too. He only pitched 5 1/3 big league innings this season before the Jays determined that they’d seen enough, but there do appear to be several things in his Statcast data pointing in the wrong direction for him, provided we’re willing to be kind enough to simply ignore the way he was getting absolutely torched by right-handed batters (7-for-17 with two doubles, two homers, and two walks).
Rather than get into the weeds of all that, though, I think the thing that maybe makes the issue clearest is this: back in his excellent 2023 season he managed to get hitters to chase pitches out of the zone 33% of the time, while also getting swing-and-miss on pitches in the zone 27% of the time. This year batters are chasing just 26.5% of his pitches outside the zone, but more damningly, his in-zone swing-and-miss rate is down to just 5%.
In other words, he just wasn’t really fooling anybody, and as tough a call as it must have been to designate him for assignment—partly because of what he went through last year and how much work it took him to get back, partly because of how high we know his ceiling can be, and partly because it’s not like there are a ton of guys banging down the door to take his place—it just sort of seems like he’s not physically able to do the same things as even a couple of years ago. The velocity is down, he doesn’t seem to be able to replicate the arm angle that served him so well in his 2022 and ‘23, and either because he just doesn’t have the feel for the zone, or because he can see what's happening when he’s in it, his walk rate has been stratospheric. His -6.7 K-BB% puts him in the bottom 10 of 563 pitchers to have reached five innings this year.
I may not have done it so soon, especially with Chad Green seemingly doing his best to pitch his way out of the picture, too. But I also didn’t see him or his under-the-hood data as he made his way up to the big leagues. If you worry that a guy may not be able to hack it, and he comes out and looks like he can’t hack it, there’s not much else to be done, I suppose. Free Tommy Nance!
• OK, second and foremost, for some reason this seems to mean that we need to talk about the Teoscar trade. I mean, I’m not going to pretend I don’t know why we have to do this— Swanson was, of course, the key piece coming back the other way from Seattle—but it would all be completely unnecessary if not for the need of every single person vehemently against that deal to twist reality in order to make themselves feel validated for thinking the Blue Jays are run by a bunch of complete buffoons.
The Blue Jays traded away one year of Teoscar after the 2022 season. He was due to be a free agent after 2023, and they clearly didn’t think it was prudent to re-sign him—an instinct proved correct when he put up a 106 wRC+ that year and was forced to sign a pillow deal for far less than they would have had to guarantee him. So they moved him a year early in order to avoid losing him for nothing, while also trying to achieve a number of other goals in one swoop—including trying to find better balance in their lineup after years of both internal and external discourse about how they were too right-hand heavy.
Swanson was the headline piece, but they also got prospect Adam Macko—their current number 12 prospect, according to FanGraphs, who we’ll likely see in the big leagues very soon. But those two players were not the only “assets” that the Jays received. In a slightly more abstract way, by moving Teoscar they cleared a path for George Springer to move out of centre and into right field, which would both allow him to stay healthier and provide an opportunity to upgrade their centre field defence. But, maybe even more importantly than any of it, they got a guy in Swanson who was entering his first year of arbitration and would go on to make $1.25 million that season, while Teoscar ended up taking home $14 million in what would be his final trip through arb.
And the Blue Jays didn’t just pocket the difference. Some of that money ended up going to Brandon Belt—who produced a 138 wRC+ that season, as he helped the Jays made the playoffs, while Teoscar managed just 106—and Kevin Kiermaier, who was worth 3.8 WAR that year according to Baseball Reference.
I mean… I suppose it requires a little bit of bullshit MLB executive logic to think about it that way. But that was the financial reality the Jays were living in then.
I even said at the time that I didn’t like the trade “because there’s no reason they shouldn’t have been able to do all that and still have Teoscar.” Yet it is undeniable that they turned a less-than-ideal situation—Teoscar being a year from free agency and wanting a five-year, $120 million extension to stick around or he’d walk for nothing—into an important reliever, a solid prospect, an elegant solution to the Springer-CF and righty-lefty balance problems, as well as a bunch of flexibility that helped get key players who led them back to the playoffs. Plus they got two additional years of Swanson, as well as six-plus years of a prospect they really liked in Macko.
And that’s really where the deal ends, if anybody’s interested in being honest about it. It’s not great that Swanson was only effective in 2023 or it could have looked even better. And we'll see how much gravy Macko ultimately provides them. But people need to get it out of their heads that the Blue Jays would have simply re-signed Teoscar or that he would have somehow been here in perpetuity had it not been for this trade. That is not reality. Reality is that they traded one year’s worth of him—a year in which he did not perform well—and benefitted quite significantly from it.
Yes, the 2023 Jays were flawed, and you can hate the way that the front office reshaped the roster that year (though to do so you’ll probably have to intentionally “forget” or dismiss how big the “too many similar hitters”/”they need to balance the lineup” conversations were back in 2021 and ‘22). You can hate that they didn’t just pay Teoscar what he wanted. You can hate that they didn’t re-acquire him in free agency the following winter and instead doubled down on defence and doubles power by bringing back Kiermaier, Justin Turner, and IKF. You can hate that they seemed to choose Anthony Santander over Teoscar when both were on the market this past winter. Nobody is saying that you can’t dislike what they did here, or what they did afterwards! Again, I didn’t like it myself. He’s an incredibly fun player who was everything they were missing these last couple of years. But those were all separate things. And there is a massive and obvious difference between “I didn’t like that they made this deal or the outcomes and decisions that followed it” and “that specific move was bad and dumb and obviously Teoscar would have magically stayed forever if they’d never traded him and look at what he did in the years after he reached free agency.”
If your analysis amounts to “they traded a good player”—who wasn't even very good in the one year the Mariners acquired him for!—“and they got back less good players, therefore the trade was bad” without bothering to think for a second about anything of the other context then it’s not serious analysis. And that where it seems to me that literally everybody still bleating on about this deal is at.
Which is fine if you just own up to that and don’t try to pretend you’re doing analysis!
You can still dislike a very sensible trade that ended up working out well. You can say it sucked without saying it was dumb and bad. You can use your brain here, I promise you.
Speaking of…
Devers quickly…
• It’s obviously not a completely parallel situation, but I can’t help but be reminded here by the Red Sox’ recent Rafael Devers trade. It’s a trade every Red Sox fan should absolutely hate—as should every fan sensible enough to understand that cheering for billionaires to achieve payroll efficiency soulless garbage, even if it means actually feeling bad for Red Sox fans and cheering against their club’s decision to take a huge competitive hit this season—but that plenty of analysts and executives will, I am entirely sure, tell you made a ton of sense for Boston.
Obviously Devers wasn’t a year away from walking for nothing—which, again, is a massively important dimension of the Teoscar trade—and the scale we’re talking about here is much different. The Red Sox doing it in-season while they have an otherwise competitive team is also vastly more odious. [Note: And funny!]. But it’s still about valuing payroll flexibility, role players, and a prospect more highly than paying market rate for the most talented player in the deal by far. And the unfortunate thing here is, it honestly might ultimately help Boston—or, at least, help a Boston team hemmed in by their own shitty cheapjack ownership.
Gotta pay for Florian Wirtz somehow, I guess.
Quickly quickly…
• Back to more recent Blue Jays transactions for a second, because the other big one on Tuesday was, of course, that Bowden Francis has been diagnosed with right shoulder shittiness and sent to the injured list. I had some thoughts…
• Thing is, I don’t want to act like Francis being out of options next spring would be that much of an issue here, though obviously that could change their offseason plans for him in theory. But I think the bigger driver of their offseason plans will probably… uh… have more to do with how HOLY SHIT this is completely untenable and now my eyes will need to be burned for having seen it:
• Eric Lauer gets the start for the Jays here on Wednesday, which is of course the same day that Max Scherzer will be on the hill for Buffalo. It will be another bullpen day for the Jays on Friday, with Spencer Turnbull likely getting involved. Hopefully Scherzer gets through his outing in Worcester without any setbacks, feels fine in the coming days, and can take one of those spots in order to have Lauer and Turnbull combine like some kind of a dollar store Voltron on the other day.
• A nifty little Tuesday injury update here, via Mitch Bannon of the Athletic, which blissfully means I can move on without having to type out all this stuff myself…
• There were, of course, a couple of injuries that occurred in Tuesday night’s game that aren’t accounted for here—and apparently aren’t as serious as initially feared. Prior to the game here on Wednesday, reporters—including Sportsnet’s Ben Nicholson-Smith—were informed that both Jonathan Clase and Myles Straw will be active, though only Clase will be available off the bench. Straw is “improving, and the hope is he can avoid the IL.” Don’t go and buy your R.J. Schreck jersey just yet, in other words.
• According to randoms with “sources” one of the names discussed when the Jays and Red Sox talked about Devers was José Berríos. Could be true, as there are a lot of names that get mentioned, I’m sure. And randoms sometimes really do have sources. Extremely confident this is not a thing anybody needs to think about for more than half a second, though. If that.
• Do we even care that Ken Rosenthal wrote some kind of a “gotcha” thing about the Jays and Ryan Yarbrough anymore? I doubt it, eh? That stuff was tired the day it was published.
• Personally, if I was going to go on a weird rant tearing down Ross Atkins just as the Blue Jays are playing their best baseball in years because some fans were supposedly calling him a “genius,” I’d probably stop for a second and ask myself if the people I’d supposedly heard this from were actually being serious or if I was just creating an absurd straw man. And if I was going to create an absurd straw man to argue against, it sure as hell wouldn’t be in order to suggest that a GM only wants the expensive players on his roster to be here and everybody else is just some random guy, that the expensive players he brought in during previous seasons don’t count as “people he planned on having here,” and that coaching and development systems implemented on the GM’s orders play no role in unexpected success stories. But hey, maybe that’s just me.
• Of 195 hitters with at least 160 plate appearances against right-handed pitching this season, Ernie Clement ranks 190th by wRC+. Love what Ernie’s done this year, but don’t let anyone tell you that he’s an everyday player.
• Thing is, I could say something similar about Andrés Giménez, who has been brutal over 47 plate appearances against left-handed pitching so far (24 wRC+), while being almost exactly league average (99 wRC+) against right-handers. If only there was some kind of mechanism by which he and Clement could be alternated depending on the handedness of that day’s starting pitcher.
• Tom Ruminski of theScore sat down recently to talk to Vladimir Guerrero Jr. about a number of topics, including the World Baseball Classic—“maybe if I'm not retired, I will play with Canada one day”—and the impending free agency of teammate Bo Bichette. “It's personal. He can decide,” Vlad explained. “To me, personally, I would like him to stay here, but I can't control that. He knows his value, and whatever he ends up doing, I will be happy for him.”
• There have been plenty of things of note happening down on the farm lately, and I’d write about a whole bunch of them here if it wasn’t getting dangerously close to the first pitch here on Wednesday. I still need to edit this thing!
• OK, we’ll end things off with some trade deadline content, as Mark Feinsand of MLB.com offered up 14 trade candidates here on Wednesday, and made some suggestions as to where they might end up. He mentions the Jays three times, twice on controllable starting pitchers and once on a late-inning reliever, which… ugh, yeah, that tracks.
• Alright, that’s it! Apologies if my editing was even worse than usual on this one! Now let’s win a dang series!
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Keep up the great work
With all the rehabbing players, the boys in Buffalo ought to be eating pretty, pretty well this week.