Stray Thoughts... - Never In Doubt

On a wild Wednesday, playoff odds, projection-beating, doing the thing, nice feelings, 2022, Judge, Bautista, Schneider, Buck, Springer, Atkins, Kirk, catching, Pillar, prospects, and more!

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Well that sure got a bit more hairy than it needed to be, didn’t it?

Nonethless! Your Toronto Blue Jays have a share of the AL East lead in the month of July for the first time since 2016. They’ve won three straight from the Yankees after taking a series in Fenway last weekend, and will look to complete a four-game sweep tonight.

Their playoff odds, according to FanGraphs, which had dipped to just 25.2% as recently as May 25th—their third lowest trough of the season—now sit at 77%. In 34 games since that date they have gone 23-11, a mark equal to the L.A. Dodgers and topped in the AL only by the Houston Astros.

Since the start of June, their 113 wRC+ as a team is fifth in baseball. The 6.4 WAR they’ve got from their position player group ranks third in the sport, as do their 153 runs scored. Alejandro Kirk (150), George Springer (142), Vladimir Guererro Jr. (141), Ernie Clement (133), and Addison Barger (132) have all produced wRC+ marks above 130 over that span, meaning that each have been in the top 60 among qualified hitters.

The Blue Jays and Tigers are the only teams with five such hitters over that span. Only two other teams—the Rays and Dodgers—even have four.

Oh, and speaking of the Rays, they’re frauds! (Oh, you’re not sure why beating up on teams above .500 makes them frauds? Maybe you’re a fraud! Also… shut your goddamn mouth!)

The Yankees, on the other hand, are bungling whiners with a fan base that hates them with a fiery passion all the way up until the moment they get a chance to repeat the lamest, most tired chirps in the universe toward someone else.

Meanwhile, the Blue Jays are finally doing the thing that it has seemed forever that only other teams do and only other fan bases get to experience.

And the crazy thing is, Ross kinda called it…

Now, it’s certainly not going to be easy from here, of course. We saw quite powerfully on Wednesday night just how fleeting joy can be in this sport. But that’s why we’ve got to take it where we can get it.

Fans and rage-baiting pundits alike have gotten too much mileage over the years out of the “no playoff wins” thing, as opposed to more honestly, but less punchily, acknowledging the accomplishment that even just getting there is. But it’s pretty undeniable that it’s really only been once in the Vladdy era—back in 2022, when they went 16-12 in September—that it’s felt like they weren’t just backing their way into the postseason, if they even made it there at all.

That team felt like it could really make some noise in October—albeit not in the way it would have felt if the 2021 version of the team hadn’t fallen heartbreakingly short—whereas the 2020 and 2023 experiences were more of the “hey, anything can happen once you get in” variety.

I want the former feeling back, and I am certain you all do as well. Again, we’re a long way from September still. Maybe this team will end up backing their way in, or not making it at all. Stranger things have happened. Hell, them being in their current position—atop the division, holding the tiebreaker over the Yankees—may count as one of them! But that we can actually see the other possibility? That we don’t have to think seriously about backing in or missing out right now?

Man, oh man. That sure is sweet. That’s the good stuff. Savour it for however long it last and fuck the Yankees.

Now here are today’s batch of stray thoughts—once again, “Quickly…”-style!

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Quickly…

• Speaking of that 2022 Jays club, I’m sure we all got vibes reminiscent of that game as the Yankees managed to come back and erase the Jays’ early 8-0 lead on Wednesday. The atmosphere in the dome certainly came off very similarly on TV, though I can’t be sure, because I was there in 2022, watching live in all its excruciating glory. Genuinely almost went home early to beat traffic, and have never regretted not doing that more in my life.

Anyway, I’m not sure it means anything that, in this one, the Jays bent but didn’t break. And I’m not sure they could ever exorcise those demons in a regular season game anyway. Yet, as much as I’ve railed over the years against understanding baseball through the lens of baseless narratives, I’ve got to admit that this team feels different—feels genuinely resilient. When we humans talk like that it is surely just a way to help our insufficient brains process something all but unexplainable. But in this case, I’ll allow it.

• It honestly sucks that MLB very likely futzed with the baseball as Aaron Judge was chasing the completely irrelevant “single season American League home run record” back in 2022 so they could cynically make it a thing and try to further erase the Steroid Era guys who are the real single-season home run champs (not to mention the league and the media’s thoroughly whitewashed complicity in that era). Because I’m going to be talking about Golidlocks Balls until the day Judge retires, and the truth is he might just be truly, epically, generationally, incredibly good.

• That said, I was fine with letting Yimi García pitch to Judge, rather than intentionally walking him to give the Yankees runners on first and second with one in a two-run ballgame, by the way. But I might just be stupid. (Cody Bellinger is slashing .226/.295/.392 against right-handed pitching this year, I probably should note.)

• Coming into the game Judge had homered just 30 times in 378 appearances. It’s called playing the percentages. It’s what smart managers do to win ballgames.

• Several other players have reached the 54 home run mark—Shohei Ohtani, Matt Olson, David Ortiz, Alex Rodriguez, and Babe Ruth (twice)—but huge respect to Baseball Reference for listing them alphabetically so we get to see our boy Hosey in the graphic that shows up when you click to see the all-time single-season home run leaders. And it truly underlines what an incredibly special player he was to see him up there with all those incredible hitters and Ryan Howard.

• No, I saw him there, but Marlins era Giancarlo rocked. Yeah, I said it.

• Speaking of all-time greats, uh… wow…

• Back to that tweet from Travis Sawchik from earlier about Ross’s “10 wins” comment last winter, because I had to see what I said about it at the time, and I have to admit I was mildly tickled when I looked.

Riffing on some Buster Olney quotes from a radio hit, including him telling Jays fans not to fall into the same trap with the Juan Soto chase as they did with the Shohei Ohtani one, and mentioning that an executive had told him at the GM meetings that the Jays reeked of desperation (but that he thought they were actually going to do some “big stuff”), I wrote…

First of all, yes we all followed the rumours, but Jays fans tried incredibly hard last winter to avoid actually believing that the Shohei thing was going to happen. I reject the premise of the Lucy holding the football analogy, because it wasn’t until two members of the BBWAA said that the deal was done/he was on the plane that anybody started to think that it genuinely might be happening. Olney’s far from the… er… only person to depict it this way, but it wasn’t a silly, delusional, worked-up Jays fans thing, it was an abject failure by your colleagues to do their fucking jobs thing. Let’s be clear about that.

Secondly, I absolutely buy the bit about the Jays reeking of desperation. I’m less sure about the doing big stuff bit—but certainly not because I think they don’t want to. Ross Atkins may publicly say things like “you could make the case that we have 10 wins within our roster right now to close (the gap)” followed by 45 seconds of consultant-speak word salad and donkey noises, but there’s no earthly way that he isn’t thinking to himself “but obviously we need a hell of a lot more than that” followed by 45 seconds of consultant-speak word salad and donkey noises.

And look at us now, baby!

• Sawchik took the comment from Ross a bit more seriously than I did at the time, and actually found the 10 wins suggestion fairly credible.

• One of the guys mentioned in Sawchiks piece, who had been projected for more WAR in 2025 than he’d provided in 2024, was Davis Schneider. It took him a while to get there, especially after having spent the bulk of his year so far down in Buffalo, but as of Canada Day, Schneider had matched his WAR total of 0.3 last year. Then, on Wednesday night, he doubled it and now sits at 0.6.

• The sample is still small, of course, but we’re seeing some noticeable changes in Davis’s bat tracking data as compared to previous years. He’s intercepting the ball farther out in front of the plate by over 2.5 inches on average so far, and standing a little less far back in the box, and a little farther off the plate. He’s increased his attack angle, too. And is attacking to the pull side more.

Pull that ball in the air, baby!

But what really jumps out for me here is—you guessed it—his bat speed. Not just the overall number, which has jumped from being in the 18th to 20th percentile to now something like the 40th, but the distribution.

That green 2025 blob looks, to me, a whole lot more like what you’d want to see.

And if we look at a map of Schneider’s results in the zone by wOBA, we can see—as we do in the hastily made GIF below—that since being recalled at the start of June, he’s doing more damage on pitches at the heart of the plate, and doing a much better job of covering the outer half than last season.

You’d like to see less blue on the in 2025 image, of course. And the top of the zone still looks to be a problem. But keep in mind that the samples are wildly different here: 1,963 pitches in 2024, but just 208 in our sample from 2025.

Still, what we can see is that crushing stuff out over the heart of the plate wasn’t what he was doing last year. If he can keep doing damage there, and having more success on the outer half, that could be a pretty good foundation for him. Fingers crossed!

• Hard not to root for a guy who would say a thing like this, too!

• Let’s go back to more Statcast stuff here for a second, because they’ve just introduced a bunch of new data on catcher stances, which shows that—horror of horrors—the knee-down catching style has taken over the league at warp speed.

Why has this happened? Mike Petriello dives straight into it in his outstanding explainer of all the new data at MLB.com.

“It makes it easier to frame pitches, which is quite valuable. It doesn’t come with the cost of making it more difficult to block, contrary to popular opinion,” he explains. And “it might have secondary effects about wear-and-tear.”

That last bit is, I think, especially important. And Mike gets into it with some great evidence that catchers are playing more since this trend has taken over—and backs it up, albeit anecdotally, with comments from former catchers who have moved into the manager’s chair and are fully on board.

“They're not going to take the pounding and the wear and tear in their knees and his and back like a lot of the traditional catchers did,” explains Guardians manager Stephen Vogt.

• “Alejandro Kirk was going knee-down before it was cool,” quips theScore’s Jonah Birenbaum.

• I’d mention here that prospect Gage Stanifer had another outstanding night on the mound for Vancouver on Wednesday, but if I wrote about it every time a Blue Jays pitching prospect absolutely shoved this season these posts would have little room for anything else. Good things happening on the farm!

• Speaking of, Baseball America has updated their top 100 prospects list as we cross into the (real) second half of the season, and the Jays have three of them: Arjun Nimmala (42), Trey Yesavage (70), and Ricky Tiedemann (99).

• That Yesavage ranking is lowwwwwwwwww.

• It actually got a touch dicey for Yariel when he came back out for his second inning of work on Wednesday, but I fired this one off anyway. A) Because he’s been awesome. And, B) Because shouts to Otto López. (And, C) Nice that the Jays are playing well enough that only the worst kind of pedant would be complaining about losing López at this point.)

• HOUSEKEEPING: I’m thinking about doing some kind of a live chat thing on day one of the draft—kind of a trial run for something similar I aim to do on trade deadline day. Substack has a bunch of tools and bells and/or whistles that I don’t make much use of. But maybe I should? If there’s something you’ve seen another Substacker do that you think would make sense of either of those days, or even just in general, feel free to send me a note or let me know in the comments!

• MORE HOUSEKEEPING: You probably already saw this, but just in case you didn’t, I published a new Atkins Speaks post not long before the first pitch on Wednesday night. Perhaps you got a bit distracted by the whole insane game of baseball thing that began happening immediately, but be sure to still check it out.

• Superman has folded up his cape, as former Jays centre fielder Kevin Pillar has decided to call it a career after 13 years in the bigs. There were certainly some ugly moments along the way—his 2014 demotion after he reacted badly to being pinch-hit for by then-manager John Gibbons, and the use of a homophobic slur on the field in 2017 that got him suspended for pair of games—but Pillar’s penchant for making otherworldly catches is what he’ll certainly be best remembered for by a Jays fan base that still thinks of him as their own regardless of his departure six years ago. What I’ll remember even more than that, though, is the way he transformed himself, through work and dedication, from a bat-first 32nd-round pick who ultimately would never have hit enough to hold down a corner outfield spot in the big leagues, into one of the truly elite defensive players in the sport. Kudos to a great career, Kevin.

• A lot of great tributes to Hall of Famer Dave Parker on his passing over the weekend, but maybe my favourite was from Todd Stottlemyre, a teammate of Parker’s for his 13-game cameo with the Jays at the tail end of his career. “Dave was so hard to get out and he hit some of the longest homeruns off of me,” Stottlemyre wrote. “We were teammates for 30 days and I got 10 years worth of laughs. He will be dearly missed. RIP my brother.” RIP, Cobra.

• And lastly, speaking of old-timey Blue Jays baseball, I haven’t posted any stray thoughts since it was announced that Buck Martinez has suffered a “little health setback” that has scuppered his scheduled return to the booth, and I would be remiss if I didn’t mention it here and wish him well.

The Sun’s Rob Longley reported some of the details more fully back on Monday, adding that Martinez “has every intention of returning to the airwaves as soon as he can.”

That’s great news.

Buck’s old school ideas don’t always jibe with my own way of looking at the sport, but he is deservedly one of the most respected, iconic, important people to have ever been associated with this baseball club in any capacity. He is literally the only plausible answer to the question, “Who would you consider to be ‘Mr. Blue Jay.’” And his name needs to go onto the Level of Excellence.

• Alright, that’s it for this one! Now let’s do one more number on these stupid Yankees tonight—and maybe make it a little bit cleaner this time. GO JAYS!!!

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