Stray Thoughts... - Lost Gaus
On the state of the Jays, Gausman's frustration, Alek Manoah, Jon Trolololosi, Vlad Jr., a rough day in MLB, Orelvis Martinez, Davis Schneider, and more!
On Wednesday night the Blue Jays' season once again continued its unrelenting slog toward inordinately frustrating oblivion—a strange thing considering they're a pretty good team with a still very strong chance of getting into the playoffs, the kind of pitching and defence that make a deep October run legitimately plausible, and enough offensive potential to make them a real World Series threat if their hitters could ever get it together.
Of course, it's exactly because they are that team that it's been so difficult to watch the season unfold.
A lot of energy has gone into thinking and grousing about the runners in scoring position thing that plagued them for so much of the year, and understandably so. Doing a better job in those situations overall would have picked up enough key runs along the way to turn a bunch of losses into wins. But that simple fact alone doesn't fully capture the many strands of underachievement woven into the 2023 Blue Jays' tapestry of failure.
As the team gets set to try to salvage a series against the Orioles, and avoid going 3-10 against a rival that has given nearly 300 innings to Kyle Gibson and Dean Kremer this season, we'll start off with that kind of stuff.
Here are some stray thoughts...
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Gaus goes off-ish
Man alive, as a person who tries to stay on the optimistic side of things in this sport there are few things I find as life affirming as reading the unhinged replies on a tweet like this...
…or this…
…and being reminded that the people who always are the most absolutely, lemon-suckingly, loudly, proudly, smugly certainly, unwaveringly, Marty York-ingly, miserably, shit-eatingly, Dunning-Kruger-ingly, Sun-readingly down on this franchise are… uh… not exactly a good bet to be right about anything ever in their entire lives.
Things are probably not quite as irrevocably doomed as @ArtieBork69696969 has convinced himself they are.
That said, things aren’t great! It’s not as though there’s anything in those tweets to react positively to. And the stat in the second one, in particular, is one of the things I was referring to when I wrote above about there being more to the frustrations of this season than just the RISP thing.
The Blue Jays could have been just as bad at cashing in runs overall, yet in a much more comfortable place in the standings if they could have just found a way to give Gausman any kind of run support this year. The same goes for their record against the O’s. As I noted yesterday, they have had the better offence (by wRC+), better starting pitching, better relief pitching, and better defence. Yet, to a huge degree because of their struggles in this matchup, they find themselves 8.5 games back of the division lead. Take the games against the O's away and the Jays only trail by 2.5.
Similarly, they're 3-7 against the Red Sox—another team they've been better than by wRC+, starters’ ERA, bullpen ERA, DRS and OAA—with four of those losses coming by just one run. Turning some of those into wins would have helped! And George Springer, Alejandro Kirk, and Vladimir Guerrero Jr. going from a combined 10.8 fWAR to 2.9 fWAR with a little over a month left in the year is also, you know, equal parts mind-bending and infuriating. Their ability to be excellent baseball players has been desperately missed.
It’s all connected to varying degrees, obviously. If those guys were better, if the records in Gausman starts or against the Red Sox and Orioles weren’t so awful, the RISP numbers would almost certainly have not been quite as abysmal. But I guess what I’m saying is that it’s been a real mélange of stupid, shitty, wasted talent and opportunity that has brought us here. A sickening, unbelievable shame considering—again!—they’ve been better by wRC+, starters’ ERA, bullpen ERA, DRS and OAA than the team with the best record in the American League.
Doubly so because, thinking back to those Twitter replies I was referring to earlier, a whole lot of people are going to take absolutely the wrong lessons about viewing the sport through the lens of statistics from a season like that.
Of course, as Gausman points out, things could still change.
Unsurprisingly—also: pretty hilariously—Ben’s follow-up tweet to the one above, which included the second part of what Gausman had to say, got less than a tenth of the views of the first one.
The big takeaway for the vast majority of fans here is going to be the “need a little bit more sense of urgency” line in the first tweet, because that’s the part that’s telling them what they want to hear. But looking at the full quote I’m not sure that’s exactly what Gausman saying there—urgency is generally not a great thing in baseball, and part of all the RISP discourse this season has been the idea that they’re gripping the bats too tightly, trying to do too much—or in general.
I won’t try to parse it more than I already have though. They do urgently need to start winning and hitting better. But part of the beauty of the sport is that you can’t try to go Hero Mode at the plate or you’ll find yourself all tied up in knots. It’s also part of what makes it so frustrating, I suppose.
Anyway! Hopefully the stretch of games against weaker opposition that begins this weekend will be good for what ails them. They’re not incapable. But, as the man said, and as another awful outcome from a strong Gausman start underlined, they’re—now, finally—starting to run out of time to figure it out.
Man back oah-n board
Back to Benny Fresh we go, as he tweeted here on Thursday afternoon that the Alek Manoah “not reporting to Buffalo” saga has ended. The demoted one-time ace will join the Buffalo Bisons in Syracuse today and begin to ramp back up and continue his season. The reason for the nearly two-week delay? He was in Toronto "undergoing a wide range of medical tests."
No major structural issues were found. Which is good news! Also good news: my non-speculation speculation yesterday was off the mark.
In a piece that expands on his tweet, Ben adds that it was soreness in Manoah's quad and back that led to the testing—not anything to do with his arm. At the risk of injecting more baseless speculation into this story, it seems like nearly two weeks is quite a long time for that, but I'm obviously no medical expert. It also seems odd that he wouldn’t have been put on the big league injured list, given his absence was medical, and odd that he and his agent wouldn’t have made a stink about that on account of his losing big league pay and service time because, officially, he was in the minors. But… well… I guess this is the story.
While, in a warped way, it might have been nice if the doctors actually did find something more tangible that could explain what's gone on with Manoah this year—remember when Melky Cabrera was awful for most of 2013 before they found a benign tumor on his spine and he came back to be one of the Jays' best hitters the following year?—I'd be a real jerk if I was actually disappointed that he has no physical ailments.
It's interesting that the club would so thoroughly investigate the physical side of things though. Especially since they've obviously felt all year that Alek has been healthy enough to pitch.
I also say this because it seems possible that something physical might have been behind, say, the fact that all year he couldn’t seem to get his release point up to where it was last year, or even in 2021.
Thing is, as you’ll note by the scale on the graph above, we’re looking within a range of a tenth of a foot here, i.e. 1.2 inches. What we’re seeing is not exactly an abnormal variation. Kevin Gausman’s average vertical release has dropped twice as much between this year and last, for example.
So… who knows!
What we do know is that Alek is apparently fine, and once he’s ramped back up he’ll be a valuable piece of rotation depth in Buffalo throughout the stretch drive. I highly doubt he’ll be anything more than that, unfortunately. But hopefully he can take advantage of the fact that the Triple-A season is longer than it used to be, finish strong, and take some positives into next year. The Bisons’ finale is September 24th.
Quickly…
• Speaking of Manoah, uh, no, I really don’t think “the Jays’ phone is going to ring this offseason with people who want Alek Manoah,” as MLB Network’s Jon Morosi told the Fan 590 last week (per Jays Journal). I do think Morosi’s phone will ring with producers trying to book him for radio hits about this nonsense though, now that he’s planted the seed.
• Going back to Vladdy for a second, because… ugh. Anyway, I thought this was a good tweet. Now, if I were Vlad I would simply stop doing these things. Also maybe get my eyes checked.
• Speaking of bummers, the Anaheim Angels everybody! HEYO! Seriously though, the news about Shohei Ohtani’s UCL tear is absolutely awful—Jeff Passan’s ESPN.com column on it, and the Faustian bargain that had made him such a unicorn, is well worth the read—even if Mike Trout landing back on the IL on the same day gave the whole uber-Angels-y series of events a tragicomic tinge that was impossible not to notice.
• Also, it appears as though the Drake Curse has struck again.
• There are bummers elsewhere around the league, too. Stephen Strasburg, once the most electric young pitching phenom in the game, is set to officially retire early next month at age 35—because, the Washington Post notes, of “severe nerve damage” due to pitching that has left him, for now, “struggl(ing) with mundane tasks, such as lifting his young daughters or opening a door with his right hand.” Awful.
• Late career Patrick Corbin is a hell of a bummer, too. Fortunately, Michael Baumann of FanGraphs is at least here to give us an outstanding piece of writing about it, and about the nature of baseball itself.
• Looking ahead to tonight’s game—which is rapidly approaching as I type this—and once again there will be no Davis Schneider in the lineup for the Jays. I know Cavan Biggio has been alright of late, but it seems a bit weird. Less weird, mind you, when you remember that the Jays clearly didn’t think Schneider was any kind of game-changer, otherwise they surely would have called him up prior to Bo Bichette getting hurt in late July. Still weird, though! Stop giving our small adult son the Nathan Lukes treatment! (Also, in case you missed it, Nick and I talked about this very thing, and plenty more, on this week’s Blue Jays Happy Hour.)
• Lastly, to end on a high note, check out the latest from MiLB.com’s Brian Frank, who gives us an update on Buffalo’s Orelvis Martinez. The former top Jays prospect is back on the prospect map again, and slashing .272/.342/.515 in 28 games since his promotion to Triple-A. International League caveats apply, and the strikeout rate is back on the high side so far, but it's a welcome sight after the disaster that was his 2022. And his coaches and teammates have a bunch of great things to say about him, too.
• Now can we please get a stupid win in stupid Baltimore???
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Players who say they want to win are so boring. For once I just want a guy so say, "I don't give a shit about this city, the fans, a flag, or a ring. I'm gonna retire at 38 with more money than y'all would make in a hundred lifetimes. Peace."
I watched that Sportsnet clip interview with Gausman which editing conveniently finished with the 'urgency' statement. There was nothing in it. He stated the truth and there was nothing in his intonation to suggest that he was casting blame. Of course there's a sense of urgency this late in the season when you are on the fringes of a playoff spot. But then of course it makes headline/twitter news as a standalone statement without context. That's....media.