Stray Thoughts... - St. Louis Whatever-the-Opposite-of-Blues-Is
On optimism, Kirk's big night, Jonatan Clase, comeback wins, rotation rocks, what to do with Francis, Spencer Turnbull, Max Scherzer, Adam Macko, unsung heroes, early deadline thoughts, and more!
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The Blue Jays have kept on rolling into the River City, taking the first of three against the St. Louis Cardinals on Monday night in yet another thrill ride of a game. They’re now 6-2 to start the month of June, after having finished May by winning five of six.
Mind you, this level of success with this particular iteration of the roster doesn’t feel especially sustainable. But that’s a problem to be dealt with down the line—ideally at some point when Max Scherzer, Anthony Santander, and Daulton Varsho are back healthy, or at the very least close. In the meantime, racking up wins continues to be a very, very good thing for very, very obvious reasons.
The Jays are currently tied with the Rays atop the AL Wild Card standings, a half game ahead of the Twins—who they took a series from in Minnesota over the weekend—and trail the Yankees by just four games in an AL East race that is maybe not quite as sewn up yet as fans of the Evil Empire would like to think.
Am I getting ahead of myself there with that last bit? Of course! But, I mean, we’re seeing emotions from the fan base for the first time in long time lately that aren’t either incoherent rage or straight-up apathy. Incredible stuff. Pinch me.
In other words, it’s a bit of an inspiring time—or, at least, a hopeful one—to be a Blue Jays fan, sad as that may sound to somebody whose team is a little more used to recent success.
I mean, we’re out here talking big time deadline deals and we’re not even halfway through June.
And this run has inspired me to continue trying, as I said back in Saturday’s Stray Thoughts…, to get it out of my head that every post around here needs to be some 8,000 word mammoth.
So let’s go back to that well, shall we? Here’s yet another batch of stray thoughts—once again, “Quickly…”-style!
Quickly…
• The Blue Jays wished their fans a good morning here on Tuesday by pointing out that the club are an MLB-best 20-10 since May 8th—punctuating their tweet with “Power Rank THAT.”
I guess they’ve felt a little disrespected by the various power rankings that editors love to use to make busywork for their writers?
Can’t blame them, I suppose. But I also can’t blame anyone for not ranking them especially high prior to this nifty little 30-game run. Or, you know, the last two weeks.
• A bit of an early tangent here, but in the aforementioned tweet we see two clips. The first is of Jonatan Clase hitting his game-tying ninth inning home run off of Cards’ closer Ryan Helsley on the slowest (97.8 mph) fastball he threw all night—a pitch that proooooobably wasn’t quite located as well as he would have liked…
The second clip is of Andrés Giménez putting the Home Run Jacket on Clase, in which we can see that said garment is emblazoned with the logo for something called La Gente Del Barrio Foundation.
Not a ton comes up when you Google that phrase, one exception being a Blog TO post about a charity event with José Berríos last September. The other exceptions are several links to documents required for La Gente Del Barrio Foundation to be registered as a non-profit organization, which it is in Florida, with the registrant listed as Jays interpreter Hector Lebron. Edwin Encarnación is also among those involved. And there’s an Instagram account for the organization, with its most recent post being from May 25th, showing a picture of Lebron and Edwin captioned “Coming Soon!”
Seeing as there’s a logo on the home run jacket, I should think so.
Anyway, just thought that was mildly interesting. Perhaps it would have been better suited as a footnote, but here we are. OK, back to the game…
• Danny Jansen was traded to the Boston Red Sox last August, ending the years of tandem schemes and shoehorning guys in at other positions by finally making Alejandro Kirk the Blue Jays’ undisputed number one catcher. Since then, Kirk has merely slashed an outstanding .303/.355/.419 (122 wRC+) over 397 plate appearances in 109 games, including a 145 wRC+ for the month of May, and a 222 mark so far here in June.
The latter number there has been powered by a number of impressive—and clutch—performances, none of which was more impressive than Monday in St. Louis, at least for my money. Kirk went 4-for-5 and made each of his hits count: a two-out single in the first to keep alive a rally that would eventually lead to a run, a double in the third, a home run that should have put the game on ice in the top of the eighth to make it 3-0, and an RBI double in the tenth to cash what would hold up as the winning run. You absolutely love to see our little man eat.
• Especially with two strikes!
And in big spots in general!
Remarkable stuff. Holy!
• Sticking with Kirk, the graph below gets a bit messier if we go back farther than this, but since the start of last season his hard hit rate tracks strikingly well with his wOBA.
Kirk is hardly unique in this regard, but in the most general way possible, if he’s hitting the ball hard, he’s producing.
And clearly that’s been the case of late—to an extreme degree…
• Jonatan Clase is never going to be confused for some kind of a monstrous slugger, but we shouldn’t sleep on his pop either. Back in 2023, in the Mariners’ system, he belted 20 home runs in 129 games/595 PA. He’s only got two so far as a big leaguer, including Monday’s game-winner, but clearly power is still in there.
Impressively, when he hit 20 as a minor leaguer he was doing so while striking out 28% of the time—and playing at Double-A and below. This year he’s striking out just 23% of the time against major leaguers.
“He’s just dripping with potential,” said manager John Schneider when asked about Clase by reporters, including the Athletic’s Mitch Bannon, following Monday’s win. “And, you know, it’s taking a little bit of time for him to kind of get his feet grounded a little bit. But that was, I think, his best game by far.”
• Nods aggressively…
• Ooh, they mad.
• Of course, none of this good stuff would be happening for the team if not for Chris Bassitt, Kevin Gausman, and José Berríos being absolute rocks in an otherwise muddy rotation picture. Berríos took his ERA down to 3.38 on Monday, after throwing 6 2/3 scoreless innings despite not having his best strikeout stuff.
Though he fanned just one, generated just five swings-and-misses, and only now ranks 39th in ERA among qualified starters—and 52nd by fWAR, though 29th according to the Baseball Reference version—when he’s going like this he’s a guy you absolutely love having in your rotation. It’s not ace stuff, but he manages to get outs, plays great defence and with great awareness of the situation, and soaks up a ton of innings. On Monday his ability to do so helped what was once again a tired Blue Jays bullpen, and pushed Berríos into the MLB top 10 in innings pitched this season overall. Vital stuff.
• One of the main reasons that Berríos has been so important, of course, is that the Jays have been getting so little out of the non-Berríos/Bassitt/Gausman spots in their rotation. And, more specifically, getting nothing out of Bowden Francis.
As everyone by now knows, the darling of late last season simply hasn’t had it this year. Out of 94 pitchers with at least 60 innings so far, Francis is dead last in fWAR at -1.0, with the second-worst pitcher on the list coming in at a relatively respectable-by-comparison -0.2.
His 2.83 home runs allowed per nine innings are also last on that list by a significant margin.
I’ll do my best to spare us more gory details, but obviously it’s been bad. And the issue may still be as simple as the one I pointed to, via a tweet from Jonah Birenbaum of theScore, in Saturday’s piece. Specifically, this one:
To give you an update on these numbers after Sunday’s loss in Minnesota, Francis has now thrown 75 of the harder four-seamers, and 414 of the ones in the slower bucket. For the game that means he was throwing the harder ones 30% of the time—a good rate compared to just 14% in prior outings. In fact, his velocity was up across the board. He averaged 0.6 mph more on his four-seamer, 1.2 mph on his splitter, 1.9 mph on his curve, and 0.6 mph on his slider.
That feels like a step in the right direction, and yet the outcome certainly didn’t look anything like it. And, in fact, his xBA and xSLG on those harder four-seamers went up to .254 and .383.
That’s still better than when he’s not producing the same velocity—his xBA and xSLG on four-seamers in the slower bucket also went up, sitting now at .285 and .536 respectively—but none of this is good enough. Obviously.
• Sticking with the Francis issue, according to the legendary Buck Martinez, it’s time for the Jays to go a different way. Buck spoke to the Sun’s Rob Longley this week, and among other things said that “they can’t start Bowden Francis another start.”
Hard to disagree, but that aspect of the decision is the easy bit. Choosing who would take Bowden’s place is considerably more difficult, at least for the moment.
Spencer Turnbull is up with the club and, according to John Schneider, is likely to factor in Wednesday afternoon’s game in a multi-inning role, with Eric Lauer also likely involved. But Turnbull’s eye-popping 2.65 ERA in 54 1/3 innings with the Pirates Phillies last season can only do so much to hide the fact that he was brutal with the Tigers in 2023, didn’t pitch in 2022 because of Tommy John, has not seen his velocity rebound to previous levels, and has been pretty unimpressive—at least according to the numbers—as he’s made his way up to join the Jays. Over five minor league starts since signing with the club in early May, Turnbull logged just 17 2/3 innings, producing a 7.13 ERA—5.56 in Low-A, 9.95 in two Triple-A starts—while walking nine and striking out just 14.
I will grant him that Statcast actually did like some of the things he was doing in 2024…
…and that even a performance more in line with his FIP (3.85) or xFIP (3.80) would do this rotation a world of good. But colour me not very inspired on this front.
Quickly quickly…
• Hey, maybe José Ureña, who was just D’d FA by the Dodgers, could be reacquired and become a factor again.
• I’m mostly joking there, but things are looking like they’ll be at least a little bit… dodgy for this Jays rotation for the next short while. Max Scherzer is, according to Sportsnet’s Ben Nicholson-Smith, slated for a bullpen session either today or tomorrow, with a target of beginning a rehab assignment with Buffalo—who are playing home games at Sahlen Field this weekend (!!!)—starting on Friday. The hope, Ben relays, is to get him to 60-65 pitches, and that he’ll need two or more rehab starts before he could rejoin the Jays. That is all, of course, barring any setbacks.
• Some sort of a factor, potentially—theoretically—in any decision to be made with Bowden Francis is perhaps the fact that he’s currently got just one option year remaining. If the Jays do send him down, and he’s there for at least 20 days, he’ll be out of options next spring and they could end up losing him on waivers for nothing. Not that any of that feels like it matters very much right now.
• Interestingly, back on Sunday, prospect Adam Macko made his season debut for Buffalo, having missed the start of the year with yet another injury (this time a meniscus tear in his left knee that required surgery). Sunday was, of course, Francis’s day to pitch. And I can’t say I think it's a coincidence that the Jays lined things up that way. (Macko, for what it’s worth, didn’t allow a hit over four innings of work, striking out four and walking three.)
• I would be remiss if I got through this post without also lauding the performance of the Jays’ bullpen during this recent hot streak. Jeff Hoffman has wobbled occasionally, and too often given up bombs—his 24% HR/FB rate is insane!—but he bested former Jays closer Jordan Romano back in the Phillies series last week, and he’s been absolutely nails when called upon in extra innings, as he was again on Monday night.
• It’s hardly only been Hoffman, of course. Brendon Little has been great as well—to the point where he was the subject of a recent (and fascinating) FanGraphs profile that dives deep into a ton of newfangled measures. Read that one—you’ll definitely learn something.
• And, even though he almost blew it in the bottom of the eighth last night, Yariel Rodríguez has been magnificent back there, too—including getting back out there in the ninth and pitching once again like an absolute boss to send the game to extras.
• Speaking of credit where it’s due, Myles Straw has continued to look far more useful than I, or just about anybody else (but definitely I!), ever believed was possible when the Jays dumbly took on his contract in exchange for some extra international pool money while making a futile run at Roki Sasaki. I’m not going to feel bad for a guy making $6.4 million this year, but the heat he took was definitely not his fault, and he’s genuinely been a nice story.
• And how about Tyler Heineman? A 203 wRC+, a top 10 defensive catcher per Statcast, +5 DRS, 1.5 WAR, and all in just 59 PA. Why don't we do WAR600 anymore, my man would be on a 15-win pace!
• Just behind Berríos on that innings pitched leaderboard that I mentioned earlier is Diamondbacks right-hander Merrill Kelly. And speaking of Kelly, he was included among some key trade candidates looked at by MLB.com’s Mark Feinsand in a piece here on Tuesday. I love Kelly, who couldn’t possibly love Kelly?
• As many great Jays-related tidbits do, that one came across my screen by way of the great @Josh_theJaysFan, who noted that Feinsand also suggested Arizona may end up looking to move third baseman Eugenio Suárez. Both would certainly be interesting targets for the Jays.
• Josh also passes along that the Athletic’s Jim Bowden also suggests Kelly as a major target for the Jays, so maybe we should just scratch that one altogether. Clearly something about it must not make sense.
• Old fiend alert: 2021 Cy Young winner Robbie Ray, and presumably his pants, is healthy again and back shoving with authority out in San Francisco—albeit in a slightly different way that he was lo those many years ago. MLB.com’s Jared Greenspan wrote about him recently.
• And I think that’s it! Enjoy the game tonight, don’t forget that tomorrow’s is an afternoon affair, and let’s hope to hell they don’t go into that one needing a win to take the series—or at least that Turnbull can join Lauer in defying the odds, and my skepticism. Go Jays!
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For what it's worth, Stray Thoughts is my preferred type of post.
Max Scherzer is pissing me off!