Stray Thoughts - RISP-y Business
On stats I hate, Schneider, Hoffman, injuries, Bieber, Vlad, All-Star stuff, minor moves, Ronald Koeman, Dub Gleed, bad hats, good advice, upper-deckers, Scherzer, Gausman, Springer, and more!
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Did somebody say runners in scoring position discourse?
Woof!
There are few things in this line of work that I dislike more than having to talk about RISP stuff. For one thing, if that’s where we’re it, you can best be sure that things are not going well for the Blue Jays. People are almost certainly miserable. Irrational. Exhausted. Fed up.
And, frankly, it’s not remotely difficult to understand why. Watching your team continually fail to score in big moments that could change the course of a game is incredibly frustrating.
But, at the risk of being too obvious here, I think it’s worth trying to keep in mind that this is an especially visible form of failure. It’s failure that comes with a punch to the gut. You notice it. You feel it. You remember it. Your brain builds narratives—tries to make sense of the world—with it. It’s not quite the same as the death-by-1,000-paper-cuts kinds of failure that we see all the time in baseball, but don’t register as nearly as consequential. Missed locations, bad routes, balls to the backstop, bad ABS challenges, failing to take an extra base, throwing to the wrong bag, etc., etc., etc.
Both will ultimately kill you, but only one has an outsized impact on your mood.
I remember a thing years ago that caused great anger among a lot of Jays fans was how bad Gregg Zaun was at controlling the running game when Roy Halladay was pitching, and I always liken this sort of stuff to that. Well, in a roundabout sort of way, at least.
It was absolutely true that Zaun struggled to control the running game.
In terms of innings caught with Doc on the hill, Zaun (526) ranks higher than anybody but Halladay’s Phillies teammate Carlos Ruiz (538). But whereas Ruiz allowed just 39 stolen bases, and would-be base-stealers were only successful 76.4% of the time with him behind the plate and Doc on the hill, Zaun allowed 50 stolen bases and caught just 11 would-be ones, giving runners a success rate of 82.0%. Of the 13 catchers to have caught Halladay for more than 40 innings, only Tom Wilson was worse.
But it always seemed to me that fans pulling out their hair over this were missing the forest for the trees. Halladay had a 3.23 ERA when pitching to Zaun. His ERA across the five seasons (2004-08) when he and Zaun were teammates here, regardless of who was catching him? 3.23.
The barrage of stolen bases were obvious, enraging. And yet, despite appearances, ultimately pretty inconsequential.
The Jays recent failures with RISP are, of course, extremely consequential. But I think framing anything that’s wrong with this offence as being about RISP stuff is just a little too zoomed in—just like the fans mad at Zaun were.
This has to do with the other main reason I hate talking about this stuff, which is that RISP stats are just not as meaningful as they appear.
I mean, OK, obviously they’re meaningful in the sense that they do an excellent job of describing the things that they literally set out to describe. But they’re like RBIs in this way. They tell us what happened, they don’t tell us anything about a player’s talent or skill for making such things happen, and do a poor job—or, at least, certainly a poorer job than other stats we could use—of saying anything about the likelihood of a player (or a member of a given team) succeeding the next time he’s in that situation. There is just too much variance, luck, situational context, and all that good stuff in there for them to reliably do that. Especially across a sample of just three months.
We can use those numbers to say that Jays hitters have been bad in those situations. We can’t use them to say that they are bad in those situations.
This, of course, was one of the major lessons of 2023.
In terms of hitting with RISP, the Jays finished that year with a .260 batting average (12th) and a 101 wRC+ (16th). Yet anyone who tuned out on that season midway through would probably have been astonished by that number, as the team woke up on August 1st with just .239 average (25th) and an 87 wRC+ (27th) in the split.
Unfortunately for this year’s version of the Blue Jays, “progression” to the mean isn’t always going to work out quite so cleanly by season’s end. They’ve already banked a bunch of bad RISP performances, and it’s a hole that will difficult for them to dig out of. The thing is, nobody should care about the particulars of those numbers. They’re just a significantly noisier version of the kinds of numbers we should actually care about—i.e. the overall numbers.
If players can hit, they can hit with RISP. If they can’t hit, they can’t hit with RISP. It’s really just that simple, even if there may be room for a marginal amount of nuance on that if we look at it on a player-by-player basis.
And so what this means is that bringing up RISP numbers is essentially just a way for someone to add oomph to their declaration that they’ve noticed something bad happening (and must therefore be very smart for having done so). It’s for those who want validation for their anger about the team but recognize their 20th-ranked wRC+ or their 23rd-ranked runs-per-game aren’t quite abysmal enough to go after with the kind of anger they want to bring.
Pointing out that the Jays’ 81 wRC+ with RISP is fucking atrocious and that it’s reprehensible that they sit in last place in MLB—four whole points below the next-worst team—connects a whole lot harder! That is some satisfying shit if your only goal is to be negative about the 2026 Toronto Blue Jays. Congratulations, I guess.
Can’t deny that those are horrific numbers. Can’t say it hasn’t been a slog to watch this team try to score runs so far!
But, if you’ll forgive me being a tinge absurd here for a second, to me that’s not a whole lot more meaningful than getting apoplectic about how they’ve fared in day games after night games, or on weekday afternoons, or in just about any split not involving the platoon advantage.
No, but seriously.
I mean, if instead of RISP we were looking at the Jays’ numbers in high leverage situations, we’d actually see that they’ve got a perfectly reasonable 98 wRC+ (16th) and are tied for 11th in baseball with 80 runs scored from such situations. And if the numbers were flipped, wouldn’t we be talking about high leverage instead? Because, really, that’s the point, isn’t it? To find the best way to suggest that these are a bunch of unclutch bums who are clearly broken and not worth any further emotional investment?
I don’t know, maybe it’s not.
I just think there are plenty of things wrong with the Blue Jays offence to point to—the .315 on-base (23rd), the .388 SLG (20th), .138 ISO (26th), the 7.7% walk rate (27th) that if it persists would mark the first time the Jays finished with a mark below 8.0% since 2012, the fucking George and the Vlad of it all—to get worked up too much about fake-ass stats and be making mental notes about it next time they fail to cash a runner from third.
Deeply frustrating to watch, yes. But we know that. The problem isn’t how much worse they’ve been according to a subset of somewhat goofy numbers that are high-variance by their nature, it’s that that they simply haven’t been good enough overall.
HOW ABOUT SOME GODDAMN DINGERS PLEASE, VLADDY? MAYBE JUST A SINGLE GOOD SWING DECISION, AS A TREAT?
Quickly…
• I don’t know if I quite succeeded in trying to make the point I was going to make in the section above. But I know that I definitely succeeded in my goal writing enough about RISP stuff so as to not have time to add a whole other section about the weirdos full-on convinced that John Schneider isn’t a big league manager.
• Not talking about Schneider, or Caballero, or any of that mess also means, I suppose, that I don’t have to talk about Jeff Hoffman. Which, even though he was actually good, still counts as a win.
• Don’t get me wrong, I don’t like bunting. I just like hammering a guy for a decision that was probably closer to 50/50 than 60/40 much, much less. (Didn’t like it!)
• With a base open I probably wouldn’t have pitched to Rice there either, if we’re relitigating things. Oh, and speaking of open bases…
• Interesting note on the RISP stuff is that I had sort of wanted say something like “the likelihood of a guy getting an RISP hit is much closer to his overall numbers than his w/RISP ones,” but then it turns out that isn’t quite true. The numbers for this season aren’t quite as clean-looking yet, but in ‘24 and ‘25 there were some remarkable similarities between league-wide numbers both with RISP (.252/.330/.412 and .255/.333/.412 respectively) and without (.243/.312/.399 and .245/.315/.404). Quite a bump with RISP!
• OK, but why do hitters become more successful with runners in scoring position? I’m seeing two main reasons for it: walks go up (by about two percentage points in this case) and BABIP goes up (by about half a percentage point (.005) here).
• And why does that happen? My assumption is that most non-RISP plate appearances happen with the bases empty, which means that defenders can position themselves better than when they’re having to be concerned about runners (leading to higher BABIP). Meanwhile, pitchers with RISP will often have a base still open, and will be more inclined to use that and issue a walk if they fall behind, rather than risk throwing a meatball trying to get one over (leading to high walk rates—and certainly more intentional walks).
• OK, let’s move on to some more pressing things for a minute, including this pretty decent injury update from Boston here on Tuesday by way of the Athletic’s Mitch Bannon…
• The pitching stuff is great to hear, and a healthy Bieber will really be a nice addition to the Jays’ rotation once it finally happens. Unfortunately, I don’t think it’s going to be a really game-changing thing. Partially that’s because Bieber simply isn’t likely to be the guy he once was, but partially it’s also because the Jays have really abandoned their defensive identity this year. Partly that’s just because they’re so desperate for offence that they’ve had to play bad defenders way more than in recent years, and partly it’s because guys like Varsho and Clement (at least for a while) seem to have taken a step back defensively, but this simply is not your slightly-older brother’s Toronto Blue Jays’ defence. Just because they’ll have a very strong rotation on paper, I don’t think it’s going to mean they’ll be the kind of team to go and grind out a bunch of low-scoring wins. Need that offence to find some juice!
• One way that might happen, of course, is with the addition of Barger. Finally hearing an update on him—and a positive one at that!—is tremendous. It’s still not going to mean much if Vlad doesn’t get it turned around, though!
• Seriously, though…
• ICYMI, I talked about a bunch of this stuff on the most recent episode of Tall Can Audio, which I wrote about here!
• Hey, the Jays are getting a bunch of All-Star votes. That’s nice! (Not actually a thing I care about at this point in my life, but definitely funny to watch fans of other teams cry about it.)
• Hey, the Jays made a transaction yesterday. That seems like something I should have in here. So let’s just say that a certain Connor Seabold is on his way to Kansas City for a certain a lottery ticket named Denis Samudio. An older international free agent signee, Samudio was a 20-year-old in the DSL last year. “He throws strikes and touches 95 with some of the best vertical break in the system,” according to Brendan Gawlowski of FanGraphs, who listed Samudio among the Royals’ “other prospects of note” on his top 36 KC prospects list back in April.
• Speaking of Kansas City, that’s where the Dutch national team is based during the World Cup, and if you think I’m always way too easy on managers because of my refusal to join the incoherent mob braying for the head of John Schneider I’ve got just two words for you: Ronald Koeman.
• OK, though they’re unrelated, here are two more words: Dub Gleed.
• The Toronto Blue Jays of Canada could simply not participate in getting geared-up for the 250th anniversary of the country that keeps threatening to annex them, in my humble opinion. And if they, in fact, by some MLB covenant, cannot simply not participate in that, I think the question needs to be asked: why the fuck not? (I don’t actually really care about this, but ykwim)
• According to the Toronto Sun, Josh Donaldson has some expert advice for the struggling Vladimir Guerrero Jr.: “Try to hit a homer.”
• Weirder than that, the Sun piece points out that Donaldson said this on his new podcast, Get It Done League, which he does with Russell Martin (!) and… Arash Madani??!?
• Some say the podcast went to Canada. Others say Toronto.
• Hey, and if we’re doing Simpsons things, I liked Ian Hunter’s piece for Blue Jays Nation about Kazuma Okamoto joining the fifth deck home run club at Rogers Centre over the weekend, but—I’m slightly ashamed to admit—I really liked my riff on it.
• Max Scherzer suggested that MLB starting pitchers should be required to throw 100 pitches every start, and the jokes? Folks, the jokes… they wrote themselves.
• HELL YES KEVIN GAUSMAN.
• Great piece from Mike Petriello of MLB.com on Tyler Rogers and just how the hell the Jays’ greatest free agent signing of all time is able to be so good despite only throwing 82.
• And, lastly, with apologies to the man who—unlike Vladdy—is at least showing some signs that he might actually be about to turn things around… you know… like… yeah, I see it….
• OK, AND THAT’S IT! THE SCOTTISH FANS ARE GONE SO NO SYMPATHY FOR FENWAY. LET’S FUCK UP THESE WHITE-HAIRED, FAT-HEADED, JOWLY, RED NOSED, SHIT-FACE-ANNIHILATED, TED KENNEDY, MASSACHUSETTS FUCKS AND GET SOME WINS ON THE GODDAMN BOARD AM I RIGHT??!?!?
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That "USA 250" Jays cap hurts my soul.
I love that you always have rational takes.
Yes, that is a Gawd Awful hat and is destined to be a worst-seller.
And thanks for posting with enough time to read before opening pitch.🙂